The Sign of the Raven

Pippa Dunn impresses with her debut, The Sign of the Raven, an intricate and well-structured fantasy novel mixing other-world Victorian London with time-shifting dream scenes. Teenager Ashlyn Threadneedle lives in a version of nineteenth century London in which she works as a courier delivering urgent messages for the government by bicycle and scenes in Hampton Court, Spitalfields and of course the Houses of Parliament are vivid and well described. Following the assassination of Queen Victoria some years earlier, Britain is a republic under the leadership of one President Whittaker. With elections approaching however, those in power are cracking down on anything deemed ‘subversive’ and increasing numbers of citizens are being arrested and imprisoned. Meanwhile, Ashlyn, who has always experienced particularly vivid dreams, discovers that she is one of a band of similarly gifted dreamers, called the Corvi Signum. As the government begins to use the dream world to repress and influence the population, for example, seeding the belief that ‘treason needs no trial’, Ashlyn and her friend, handsome young trainee journalist Dmitri realise the importance of stopping them. For Ashlyn, this becomes urgent when her friends are imprisoned but also because tied up in their efforts is a chance to find and free her mother who has been trapped in the dream world for a decade, and dead in the real world. Dunn manages the complexities of the plot well, including those of the dream world in which time isn’t an arrow but ‘more like a tapestry, so tightly woven that we can’t see the stitches, just the pictures that they make.’ Ashlyn, Dmitri and other characters including the flamboyant Vesta of the dream world (based on Vesta Tilley), are strong enough to support the plot and hold readers’ attention. The book opens with a quote from the notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and an occasional poetry to the prose is an additional reward for readers. Its socialist themes and the gentle romance feel refreshing too amongst much contemporary fantasy.