Ali Shaw's first novel, the Costa-shortlisted The Girl with Glass Feet, was set in a magical icy northern archipelago, and featured a pair of doomed lovers one of whom was slowly turning into glass. Though it drew heavily on Hans Christian Andersen, the novel's timeless setting and lyrical descriptions made it a delight.
Shaw hasn't broken any new ground with his second book, a fable about a man who is an incarnation of the weather, and it lacks the assuredness of his debut, as well as a cohesive structure and consistent editing.
The snowbound terrain of The Girl with Glass Feet is exchanged here for humidity and sullen heat, as the heroine, Elsa Beletti, leaves New York on a whim for the fictional settlement of Thunderstown, which is near America but not of it, a place she has only glimpsed once before from a plane. Twenty-nine-year-old Elsa is in flux her beloved but estranged father recently died in a tornado. Thunderstown is broken, backward, overshadowed by mountains, dominated by a hulking cathedral, with a population riven by religious fundamentalism and ancient superstition. Elsa immediately encounters two very different men: Daniel Fossiter, a taciturn loner, the town's official animal-culler, who in her presence breaks the neck of an unearthly-looking dog; and Finn Munro, a hermit-like hairless giant living in a mountain bothy Elsa alone witnesses his tentative transformation into a cloud.
As in his previous novel, Shaw assembles a cast of characters with troubled pasts and subtle links to each other. Daniel, the best-drawn of these, is a gruff, God-fearing frontiersman. When younger he fell passionately for a woman named Betty, who craved a baby so badly that she contrived a supernatural pregnancy; Daniel assisted at the birth. "The head came first, covered in a caul of mist. He readied his hands for the body. It followed quickly so small and so cold, cottoned in cloud and sparkling like hoarfrost. His fingers tacked to it as if to an ice block. It let out a noise like wind wailing across wastelands." This is Finn, the archetypal changeling of folklore, whom the headstrong Elsa will love, and now an exiled introvert who makes origami paper birds in his mountain retreat high above Thunderstown. The town's inhabitants fear the bodily representation of Old Man Thunder, and the peculiar elemental creatures which emerge from Finn's domain: bodies containing no blood, only water and air.
Betty had left when the teenage Finn's unpredictable weather aspects began to display a dangerously unstable quality. Intrepid Elsa, propelled by her father's mantra that "lightning doesn't strike the earth and the storm make a connection", demonstrates more pluck.
The unevenness of this book is perplexing. The dialogue can border on the earnestly banal, and while the world of The Girl with Glass Feet was beautifully realised, Shaw doesn't convey any real sense of Thunderstown it is simply a place of oppressive heat and alarming clouds. A tendency to overwhelm with simile and repeatedly start sentences with adverbs makes for a discordant reading experience. And yet some passages are breathtaking, particularly the precise, unsentimental details of a goat's dismemberment and an account of a violent attack Shaw knows how to balance beauty and terror. With less naive enthusiasm his talent for storytelling should produce a third book as poised and lucid as his first.
