Books & Poetry

There is no premise so outrageous that it cannot serve as the basis for a human story of love and anguish, even when credibility is stretched as far as it is here. Society in Whitfield’s world is almost exactly as it is in ours, save that 96 per cent of the human race change into wolf-like carnivores on nights of the full moon, and the despised ‘bareback’ minority – who never change, and who are, at the age of 18, drafted into DORLA, the Department for the Ongoing Regulation of Lycanthropic Activity – have to guard and police them during the ‘curfew’ period when lycos are supposed to lock themselves away securely. Since all this has been the case since the Middle Ages, it is not the lycanthropy that is hard to believe so much as everything else; for all the real merits here, one wishes Whitfield had studied Alternate Worlds: 1.01 before starting.

Lola, a harassed public servant, is busy acting as defence for a lyco who tore her colleague’s hand off, and trying to keep out of jail a harmless drunk who forgets to lock himself up to change and pees on people’s legs. The last thing she needs is a charming social worker boyfriend from the other side of the divide, and a crazed conspiracy of bareback haters who go around shooting her colleagues with silver bullets. One of the strengths here is a vivid sense of how and why law enforcers slip into a canteen culture of casual brutality. Lola and most of her colleagues are badly scarred physically and mentally, and try several nights a month to use nets rather than tranquilliser guns on strays that could turn and rend them apart. She has been trained in interrogation techniques that go back to the Inquisition – yet she tries to behave like a decent person within the rules her world has given her.

This is an intelligent book and a moving one – Lola’s almost certainly doomed relationship with Paul avoids most of the clichés of multi-racial romance and considers instead just how bad things can be before they are unforgivable forever. The murder story is complex and muddy – a world in which you can torture suspects is one in which they lie to make the pain stop.