WARP: The Reluctant Assassin

First of all, let me say that Eoin Colfer's W.A.R.P.: The Reluctant Assassin is a great read. The author shows his usual mastery of plot and character and evokes general late Victorian London in intriguing, lifelike detail.

I say "general" because he chose to assign the past part of the story an exact year -- 1898 -- a date which doesn't line up with some of the elements. This isn't a minor gaffe, like another book I read awhile back that describes people wearing the latest miracle dye color, mauve, half a decade before mauve was first synthesized.

In this book, an invention stolen from the future and prematurely introduced into the past, the "Farspeak," has more than passing significance. In real history, while the telephone wasn't common in 1898, it had been patented in 1876. Even more egregious, the Old Nichol rookery, an especially bad part of the Bethnal Green slum, is a location crucial to the plot. Bethnal Green was razed in an urban renewal project in 1891, and rebuilt to sturdier and cleaner standards over the next decade.

So why did the author insist on 1898? I suspect it was to realistically accommodate a cameo appearance by Jack the Ripper in the backstory.

Still, the book is definitely worth reading.

an annoying trend

I hope this isn't going to be a real trend; I hope it's just the luck of the draw, but three books I've read recently have had open endings. Two -- The Amanda Project: Invisible I, by Melissa Kantor and Skeleton Creek, by Patrick Carman -- are Young Adult novels, and one -- The Dreamer: The Consequence of Nathan Hale, by Lora Innes -- is a graphic novel) It's not that these books end with an ambiguous twist, which would be annoying but valid, but rather, the plots simply stop in the middle. When I put in the time to read a whole book, I want, well, a whole story. There's an unspoken expectation in a book-length text that the reader will feel some sense of closure at the end.

Yes, comics (if I may use a taboo colloquialism) often have cliffhanging endings. That's why the graphic novel format usually contains about four to six issues bound together. That way it can contain the entire story -- climax, denouement, and all.

Yes, a series may have a grand plot that spans all of its volumes, but each volume usually has a fully-resolved subplot or secondary plot. Or perhaps the ending will bring the conclusion of one story and the beginning of a new one. If two mysteries are presented, as in Invisible I, the reader expects one to be solved by the end of the book, even as the other continues through the series.

The one of these three that bothered me least was Skeleton Creek, which ends with the main characters in mortal danger. In other words, it's a classic cliffhanger. It's still a bit of a dirty trick on this scale, though. Cliffhanging chapters come to a conclusion with a flick of a few more pages. The serial movies and comics of my youth were made bearable by the fact that the next installment would come in a week, or at most, a month. But the wait for the next book to be published is awfully long.