Review: The Secret of Safe Passage

The Secret of Safe Passage by Martin Baynton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm finding this a tricky one to rate.

I've read quite a few books lately where the emotional throughline, the story, is handled effectively, but there are significant mechanical issues (the things a copy editor looks after; mostly punctuation, but also things like grammar and tense) and underdeveloped worldbuilding. This is one of those, except that instead of the worldbuilding being undeveloped there are a large number of small errors of continuity and fact. The overall feel, then, is of a story lacking a lot of polish, so much so that I hesitate to add it even to the bottom tier of my recommendation list.

Now, I did get a pre-release version via Netgalley. It's possible - though, honestly, not highly likely - that a skilled copy editor will go through it between the version I saw and the version that's published in about two weeks from now, and fix the two it's/its errors, the many comma splices, the many places where a comma is missing before a term of address, the many places where a question is missing a question mark, the carelessly dropped quotation marks, and the small words from sentences that are missing or substituted for different words. They may even fix up the bits of dialog where the response doesn't match the previous line, like the glaring one where person A describes someone as a "zombie" with no indication of gender, and person B says "Woman?" as if that word had been used in the preceding sentence.

If they're extraordinarily good, they may even fix up the subtle errors, like describing "charm" as a subatomic particle (it's a flavour of quark, which isn't quite the same thing), or claiming that "faster" should be corrected to "more quickly" when both are acceptable, or Ali saying that she was a blood donor several years before, even though she's 15 and the minimum age for blood donation in the UK is 17.

What all of that wouldn't fix was the big swallow at the start - in the prologue, in fact - where we get a major revision to well-known history. In reality, Alice Pleasance Liddell was one of three sisters to whom Charles Lutwedge Dodgson, who transformed his first two names to the pseudonym Lewis Carroll via Latin, told the original Alice in Wonderland story, using her name for the protagonist. Alice was, at the time, 10 years old; she lived to the age of 80, marrying and having three children. Dodgson wrote several other works, none of which are as good (especially Sylvie and Bruno, which is awful) or as well known, but which are certainly in a similar style. In this version, Alice Carroll Grey, exact age unspecified, wrote both Alice books herself, filling them with secret messages about a real otherworld, and then disappeared into it after handing them over to Dodgson to be published as being written by him. She had to flee there because the White Rose, a sinister organization, was hunting her in order to get the secret of access to Wonderland (and safe return, which is harder, hence this novel's title). This organization has survived for 170 years since then without apparently achieving very much at all; the operatives are called Knaves and the head of it is Mrs King (i.e., obviously, the White Queen). The original Alice's great-niece (there are probably several more greats, but even if there are there seem to be too few generations mentioned to account for the 170-year gap), also named Alice but going by Ali, discovers and begins decoding the secret when she's manipulated into getting suspended from school and sent to relatives she's never previously heard of at an old country house that's been in the Grey family since her Great-Aunt Alice's time.

Ali is not a nice person. Her mother died on a humanitarian mission when Ali was quite young, her father is away a lot for work (he's a scientist studying gravity waves, which involves being incommunicado in a Faraday cage down a mine in Wales for days at a time), and she's now an angry, stubborn teenager, given to striking out in rage, actual tantrums, and, even when not specifically angry, weaponizing her intelligence to make cruel remarks. Her elderly relatives, who are lovely, do manage to tame her down a bit, and she eventually grows as a person and realizes how awful she's been, but she's still a piece of work. Still, her character and her arc of growth are the best thing about the book, which from my particular perspective is damning it with faint praise, because I prefer, as a matter of taste, to read about people who are actually well-intentioned from the start and not awful. The storytelling and the handling of Alice's character show the skill that is notably lacking in the mechanics, the background, the continuity, and the incidental facts.

So: a very rough piece of work with a main character that I didn't care for. I hovered between three and four stars, and finally landed on three, because I don't recommend it. That isn't to say that someone with different tastes, who doesn't notice the same kinds of issues that distracted me so frequently, won't enjoy it.

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