Review: Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng
The moment I heard the premise of Jeannette Ng’s debut novel, I knew that I wanted it. Victorian missionaries in Fairyland? Dark Gothic alt-history inspired by the works of the Bronte sisters ? This sounded like the book of my dreams. And indeed, Ng’s novel is a dream that does not disappoint. It’s a rich, strange, increasingly nightmarish phantasmagoria of both horror and beauty. It’s impressively erudite and sly. It draws the reader expertly in, builds steady tension, then lays shocking plot twist after plot twist. It’s a novel that opens into landscapes of wonder, and becomes a moving, even rapturous, journey. In the alternate-history world of this novel, the Faelands (also known as Arcadia) were discovered on the fourth voyage of Captain James Cook, when “the greatest navigational mind became impossibly lost and thus impossibly discovered a different realm.” As with all other lands discovered by the English, the English of this novel decide that the Faelands m...