The Moonlight Market

Joanne Harris is, of course, a hugely well-known and respected writer of mainstream fiction. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, which is not the sort of honour that is doled out to hoi polloi of genre like us. And yet, she turns up at conventions. She was at Worldcon in Glasgow, and she’s a Guest of Honour at this year’s BristolCon. I first met her at FantasyCon the previous time it was in Chester. I interviewed her and she pointed out that almost all of her books include magic in some shape or form. She is totally one of us.

Given that she has now written books about Loki, most people probably accept that. But The Moonlight Market is somewhat different. It is a straight up fairy tale, set in London. If you are pining for the likes of Neverwhere and Stardust, this is a book for you. I see that the publishers are promoting the book on that basis, which is very perceptive of them.

The background to the story is a war between the Butterfly Queen and the Moth King, a feud which started when their son accidentally left the Kingdom of Faerie and ended up in the world of the Sightless Folks (us). The Spider Mage, whose incompetent babysitting caused this tragedy, has vowed to find the lost Prince and put an end to the war, but it has been going on for so long now that no one else cares about anything except victory.

Tom Argent is a young man who has devoted his life to photography. He manages a photography shop near King’s Cross which never seems to do much business. Tom is kept in a job by the shop’s kindly owner, the mysterious Mr. Burnett.

One day Tom meets a beautiful woman called Vanessa. He falls instantly and helplessly in love. Little does Tom know that the woman of his dreams is a powerful butterfly whose only interest in him is to feed on his life force, something the butterflies call “nectar”. Thankfully help is at hand in the form of an old homeless man who calls himself Spider, and his scruffy, sarcastic assistant, Charissa.

All would be well, except that Tom is a hopeless case, totally in thrall to the glamorous Vanessa. No matter how many times Spider and Charissa point out that his life is in danger, he insists on trying to find Vanessa again and beg her to love him in return. Slowly we begin to understand that this is not the first time this story has played out, and it always ends the same way.

Except, of course, that fairy stories have to have a happy ending. We know that, and anticipate it. The joy in reading comes from the way in which the inevitable unfolds, and how well the author illustrates the emotions of the protagonists as it does so. In the hands of a expert writer such as Harris, the predictability of the ending is not a problem, especially given the convoluted route by which she gets us there.

Title: The Moonlight Market
By: Joanne Harris
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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