Spiggot's Quest (Book One of The Knights of Liöfwende)

Spiggot is a boggart, or fairy blacksmith, and his quest does not officially begin until the penultimate chapter of this book, which is clearly intended to inaugurate yet another multi-volume saga about the deeds of mortals, fairies and animals in some parallel world both like and unlike our own. The market for this genre is surely getting overcrowded. Newcomers need to be exceptional, and Spiggot’s Quest is not. It is lively, entertaining and readable, but nothing more than a run-of-the-mill account of stirring deeds in Liöfwende, where comic heroism is the order of the day.

Liöfwende exists in parallel to our Mortaland, and the book’s two most engaging characters, an amorous modern teenager called Jack and a world-weary rat called Kling, have evidently been dispatched there after meeting a sad fate in Mortaland, caused respectively by a motorbike accident and a rat-trap. Whether they will ever return remains to be seen. Meanwhile their fate is to accompany Spiggot on his mission to deliver a new suit of golden armour to the fairy King Cimberlin. As comedy the book is quite rewarding, thanks to these two. As chivalrous adventure, however, it is just a string of disconnected episodes. Like the book itself, most of them do not end so much as fizzle out.