The Silver Wind by Nina Allan

I would like to thank Julia from Titan for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Titan

Published – Out Now

Price - £7.99 paperback

A powerful tale of time travel, time lost, time regained, and time disrupted. In this remarkable narrative, watches and clocks become time machines, vehicles to explore alternate realities, the unreliability of memory and roads not taken

Martin and Dora Newland – sometimes siblings, sometimes lovers and sometimes friends, both subject to the tricks and turns of time and fate. Owen Andrews – watchmaker, time traveller, government agent. Their stories interlock and interweave like the perfectly honed cogs of a watch mechanism to reveal an unsettling world of missed opportunities, broken connections and personal losses.

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the mirror on my mum’s dresser; it was comprised of three mirrors and if you tilted the sides a certain way, I was suddenly endlessly refracted in all of them. All these other versions of me in infinity wondering what lives each of us were living. That was the strong memory I got while I read Nina Allan’s entrancing tale of time travel and alternate worlds in this new edition of The Silver Wind from Titan.

This is a very unusual blend of novel and mix of short tales. The main story comprises five tales which feature multiple versions of the same characters in different circumstances and forms. The stories are in many ways separate but at the same time carry similar incidents and motifs or locations. Imagine parallel universes all overlaid/adjacent to one another and the whispers of one flow to the next. It reads like musical variations where you hear the same tune played; then evolving and echoing on what you’ve read before making it an eerie immersive experience.

The first tale The Hurricane focuses on Owen Andrews a man who is desperate to become a great watchmaker – rebelling against his family and leaving his best friend Martin and his sister Dora (that Owen loved behind). It starts a seemingly old-fashioned way of a young man becoming a London apprentice but then moves into a darker thriller-style tale when a predatory customer enters his master’s world. This sets up the certain watches as a mechanism for changing time or entering new aspects of it but it is a glorious read as our expectations of the type of tale this is and where it is change rapidly that you have to rewind your reading just to check what you’ve been reading. Beautifully performed.

Then we move to ‘Time’s Chariot’ not immediately linked to the prior tale where Martin and Dora in a different guise and world are celebrating Martin’s birthday. We explore their relationship with each other, but the story moves through their lives into loss and death. This becomes a tale of grief. Mirroring this we then have a story from a different Dora’s viewpoint in ‘My Brother’s Keeper’. What I loved about both as that each creates its own intriguing family of relationships, secrets and hidden emotions and we watch how each character deals with the changes or revelations to come either in anger or a desire to move on. And in the latter a version of Owen that brings something of the weird and magical into Dora’s life that is just at once lovely, weird and unsettling

The titular ‘The Silver Wind’ written many years ago I feel scarily seems now ever more prescient. We follow Martin in a UK where elections of hung parliaments and various economic events lead to an ever-harsher racist government and economic collapse. Wow what the chances eh?? This feels the most science fictional of the tales as we hear tales of secret time experiments, mutants in the woods and resistance fighters but the story changes into Martin exploring a very different world. Possibly the most hopeful tale of the set reminding us that better worlds are possible.

Then in ‘Rewind’ in another world we meet a further version of Martin middle aged and grieving the loss of his sister; but possibly finding love again as he investigates memories of childhood and the mysterious Owen Andrews that seems to have secret connections with him. This feel the most appropriate ending to the stories explaining vaguely what we readers have been sensing is going on but again is very much a contained tale with the same cast in different guises and the focus is much more in these characters learning to live their lives than the fate of the world. I love the viewpoint of a character called Miranda who finally decides to take some long held back decisions on how she wants to live. Then finally we have in Timelines an Afterward a different version of a tale with a new character remembering her childhood and becoming herself an author of tales where time travel becomes relevant.

This was a delightful and fascinating reading experience. If you are expecting an epic Time War and huge revelations on the laws of time you would be disappointed but for me it’s the exploration of character and setting combined with the themes merging and influencing once another that is the spectacle but all done subtly. The writing is intricate and beautifully balanced like a wonderful piece of music and I think readers of science fiction that enjoy tales where the boundaries of the strange crossing into our world would really appreciate it. I very much hope to catch up on Allan’s work this year.