The Rule of Claw

Despite an opening which tries to hook you with the promise of old-fashioned ‘orror, this novel is packed with invention and gives a thought-provoking view of genetic experimentation and Darwinian evolution in a future world gone badly wrong, with Jurassic Park -like raptors and human-evolved rodents as dominant species. Ash and her teenage companions are the genetic human survivors of the evolutionary disaster living on an island and having an adapted version of the ten commandments (where the fifth and final commandment has become, ‘Surf’s always up–Honour the best rider like Your Father and Your Mother’) and an adapted form of English which could be intriguing. The novel has the potential to become a fascinating read (and also includes a nicely ironic version of the final rescue scene of Lord of the Flies) but there’s so much else going on and an imagined audience which may not want to penetrate these intricacies. Ash, who is captured by raptors and rescued by a rodent, comes to see the complexity of the groups, where simple violence is rarely a solution (in fact it makes things much, much worse) and compassion and understanding often are. The humans, raptors and rodents have no monopoly of either good or evil and the survival of ‘good’ along with the survival of the fittest is always going to be hard, even with a writer keen to keep the worst at bay – just. Readers prepared for sci-fi excitement and lurid violence will find a great deal to keep them entertained and also much to provoke reflection.