BOOK REVIEW: THE FOLDED LAND BY TIM LEBBON

​After however many years of watching movies or television or all the books I’ve read, it’s encouraging to me that I can still pick up a book and find something that feels totally unique and different from anything that I’ve seen before it. That while there may be common elements and plot devices and so forth, it all manages to be woven together in a way that is fresh and exciting.

My sole experience with Tim Lebbon was with the Alien novel he wrote, several years ago. It was a book I definitely enjoyed it and I took note of the name as one I would need to pay more attention to. I clearly didn’t do a very good job holding to that promise so when I saw this book on the list of possibilities to review, I jumped on it.

The Folded Land is a sequel to Lebbon’s book, Relics. And while the story for the most part functions on its own, I would strongly suggest giving the first book a read as well as it lays much of the emotional groundwork that this novel stands on.

Essentially, in Relics, Lebbon established a character who is abruptly pulled into an underground society of mythological creatures leading a secret existence. These creatures are hunted by collectors, who are after various body parts as a morbid sort of collectible. After being sucked into a complicated conflict where allies become enemies and then back to being allies, we are left with them on a precipice, having to flee their lives and everything in it.

As Folded Land picks up, a war is now brewing between society and the creatures who are no longer content to merely exist in the shadows. The main character, Angela, has the horror of seeing her niece kidnapped, drawn into this situation as a possible playing piece, although for what reason, Angela has no way of understanding.

What I found most striking about Relics and what I was happy to see carried into the second book is the level of imagination present in this universe. It’s so difficult to make a world that weaves in and out of magic and fantasy and make it credible and believable. What I loved was how Lebbon managed to go off on flights of visual and creative explosions, not unlike someone like Neal Gaiman, but unlike the books of his that I have read, Lebbon manages to take the fantastic and still reel it into a narrative that feels tight and controlled. It’s one thing to blow my imagination away but leave me scratching my head and wondering what’s going on. What Lebbon has done is put down the same mind-blowing content but still leaving me feeling grounded in the story, not stuck on the ground as the narrative floats away from me on the wind.

The Folded Land succeeds in my opinion because it takes a sequel and steers it down various paths that may be more challenging but for the reader definitely pays off. This isn’t a typical sequel where we just get more action featuring the same characters. What we have is a book that expands and adds onto the scope of the first book.

This isn’t just about giving us more of the same, it’s about giving us more stuff that’s different and just as great. I also appreciated the notion of a sequel in which we find out that things don’t always necessarily end up going well for our heroes, just because the credits roll and the music swells up around us.

The main characters from Relics are already on the run because of their involvement in an incident involving numerous high-profile murders. And now, with a threat to a niece, they are pulled in yet another direction, running from the authorities that are seeking them out as well as hunting down the enemy which has threatened someone close to them.
 
Lebbon writes some seriously exciting material and the second chapter specifically was possibly one of the more gripping sequences I’ve read in some time. As a parent, it was heart-breaking and as a reader, it put the hooks of the story firmly planted in my gut.

The book is a multi-layered sequence of pursuits and reveals. And while it isn’t really clear until the latter parts of the book what’s going on, at no point did I lose faith that eventually things would be sorted in good form. The action is deftly executed, and the pacing is superb. And for as grand of a scale as the book took when compared to the first, it all built up to an ending point that managed somehow to gain even more scope and an even larger scale. If this is a trilogy in the making, as I assume it is, this book did exactly what the second part should, namely it amped me up and had me already clamoring for the third.

I don’t always look for deeper meaning to the books I read but I was fascinated by the phenomenon of “deniers” in this book, which are essentially characters that are actually mythological creatures but have forgotten that fact. They are, in fact, completely convinced that they are human.

I am not suggesting that Lebbon would be making such a roundabout political point with this. Let’s just say that as I’m reading it, steeped within one of the worst, most contentious period of time that I have lived through, it was an aspect that I reacted to. The notion of an entire group of people, walking around with a complete unawareness of their true nature. I know I’m grabbing at tiny straws with that, but it was a point that spoke to me in particular, that so many people in the world log in to social media, go about the sharing and the outrage because that’s what we’re supposed to do but maybe the one thing we’re losing more than anything else is ourselves. Are the deniers in this book who are reintroduced to their true natures being helped? Or are they being unfairly changed and taken away from lives they were already leading? I’m not sure. All I know is that our society is suffering a serious identity crisis, with people acting more like homogenized “product” than individuals and reading this book made me feel that more acutely than ever.
​
Regardless of the legitimacy of that specific point, this is a fantastic book that I found to be top rate entertainment and that made me think, one of the stronger titles I have read this year. Give it a spin and see how you feel about it.