by Courttia Newland

Canongate, out now

A River Called Time follows Markriss, a young man from the Outer City who finds himself invited into the Inner City.

Unlike London, the Inner City is somewhere people dream of being.

Why is this? Because A River Called Time is a world where Europe never dominated the rest of the planet either culturally or economically and everything is different as a result.

Newland’s style feels dreamy, the prose floating and fuzzy. This works to build a world in which it’s never quite clear how things came to be like they are either in the characters themselves or the society around them. This worked for me most of the time but I can see it being a hard structure to access for others.

However, Newland’s style is really a function of the novel’s great ambition. I think to have developed a clear, more precise sense of the world as the reader finds it would have been a failure. I believe this because Newland is writing a post-colonial novel. I think he wanted to deliver a decolonialised novel but it doesn’t quite reach that goal, at least for me. That’s only partly a criticism; trying to write a decolonised novel is like trying to imagine the world without trees – in other words, staggeringly difficult and it’s a testament to Newland’s ambition that A River Called Time achieves as much as it does.

In Newland’s world Christianity is little more than an unexplored tributary of history – with most people living in his reimagined London (Dinium) adhering to Kemetian theology which is a modern faith based on ancient ideas originating in Egypt. Newland portrays the dominant religious impulse as inclusive, polytheistic and effectively universalist even if the practical outworking of this is highly particularised in the lives of the characters. This portrayal is a step beyond the normal fare found in fantasy novels where we have gods of evil and gods of good in some kind of childish crypto-Christian interpretation. Newland has excised Christianity entirely from his world and to a large extent this introduces an alien feel for a Western reader not present even in the most outlandish fantasy epic.

Newland also presents us with a non-linear structure – which I suggest is his most effective piece of colonial deconstruction. By breaking down the idea of the protagonist starting the novel and journeying from point A to B via what we’re familiar with as the hero’s quest, we experience a quite disorienting tale. At times it’s frustrating and at other times it’s really interesting to engage with and it was only at the half-way point I realised this was as strong a piece of decolonisation as anything the characters themselves were doing.

As much as this works there are a couple of areas which were more problematic for me.

In Newland’s world the Jewish people are missing. Unlike Christianity which is relegated to historical curio, they are erased and I find that hard to accept in an alternative history – especially where Christianity is still present. If all traces of the people of the book had been excised then fine but here it’s only the Jewish faith.

Capitalism appears to still be the guiding economic principle for Newland’s world. There’s no reason for capitalism not to be present except it was a European innovation driven by the conflicts between Catholic and Protestant colonialisms. That it is here in such force feels like an opportunity missed – what other economic systems could have developed without the grit of Puritanism and Reformation in the cultural landscape? Indian mathematicians probably developed the idea of zero, Arabic scholars developed several other key components of mathematics yet none of them felt the need to commoditise the world. The economist in me left this book yearning to see what other ways of organising the world could have been discovered.

Finally, women in this book are not really present with any sense of depth. They are nearly all adjuncts of the main character – loving him in some form in every incarnation and often not really doing much more than enabling him on his journey.

The work of decolonisation, or reimagining a world without colonialization, is not a politically neutral one. Not least because as we see in this alternate history, someone is always colonising someone else. If it’s not the Europeans it’s their neighbours. We see this touched on a very little but it’s not cast as the outcome of colonisation but as the rude result of an (as presented) acolonial capitalism. This is a shame because majority populations expand over their neighbours regardless of creed and colour. For me, to truly understand decolonising, one must recognise that the powerful frequently try to impress their view of the world on those around them and this view nearly always includes the idea/lie that they are somehow worthy of their power in the way the powerless are not.

Verdict: This is a work which, for me, is a heroic failure. By this I mean it is an exciting attempt to create something new, to examine a world without western colonialism and it builds several successful components in that project. However, it doesn’t quite get there. It doesn’t quite deliver on its clearly held vision. Having said that I’d be keen to see where Newland goes next. 5/10

Stewart Hotston

Click here to read our interview with Courttia Newland about A River Called Time