The Call

How much background information do you need to set up a fantasy world? The Call takes place in a present-day Ireland cut off from the rest of the world, where any teenage child can disappear, without warning, for three minutes and four seconds. Three minutes and four seconds that last for twenty four hours in the Grey Land, the realm of the Sidhé, the mythical creatures banished from Ireland by humans centuries before. And all the Sidhé want now is to exact their revenge on those humans by snatching their children, hunting them and subjecting them to hideous physical punishment when they catch them.

I think. 

Peadar O'Guillin has a massive talent for describing the many Sidhé encounters that dot the book. They’re vivid, bloody and genuinely frightening. The Grey Land, with its slicegrass, spider trees and foul, stinking air is only sketched in, but it leaps off the page. It’s a hellish landscape, one right out of a nightmare you really wish you hadn’t had. And it sticks in your mind long after the last page.

But if the sketching in works for the Grey Land, it left me confused back in the ‘real world’ and longing for more detail. When was Ireland shut off? Who are the Sidhé? (For more confusion, look them up on Wikipedia and you’re directed to Aos Sí, the Irish name for the creatures. Further down in the entry you’ll read that Sidhé is the name for the hills that dot the Irish landscape.) Why have they started now? Has the rest of the world even tried to help?

You could argue that the story’s told from the point of view of its characters. They already know what’s going on – the way you and I know instantly all about the lives we’ve led and the world we live in – and don’t need pages of exposition to explain it. If that’s the case, then the lack of a set-up leaves the reader as disoriented and unsettled as the teenagers - who come and go so quickly it’s hard to keep track of them all - living with the threat of bloody oblivion.

I wonder, though. Maybe I’m old-fashioned – or just old - but I like exposition. I like a few pages that say, Here’s the situation, and this is the world it’s going to happen in. Now the story’s about to begin. Are you ready? Good. Then off we go.

I wonder if a few pages of that near the beginning wouldn’t have made The Call even more memorable.