Telos Publishing Kitsune

Author	John Paul Catton
Published	2004
ISBN	1-903889-41-3 (paperback) 1-903889-42-1 (deluxe hardback)
Featuring	Honore Lechasseur and Emily Blandish

• A Review by Finn Clark

A Review by Finn Clark 3/7/05

Kitsune isn't a masterpiece to illuminate the ages, but I read it happily. If you have £7.99 to spare, it's an agreeable way to pass a hundred pages. I liked its depiction of Japan. I'm happy with its characterisation, both of the regulars and the original characters. It doesn't have the world's most complex plot, but that's the nature of the beast... and for the most part it manages to include far more character, colour and style than the new BBC 9DAs.

Arguably the main character is Japan. There are also more conventionally human characters, but the author paints such a vivid picture of the country that it becomes the book's dominant feature. Admittedly I had a personal reason to be interested, but even without that I'm sure I'd have enjoyed this. The local colour feels authentic. There are even snippets of Japanese dialogue, albeit sometimes slightly surprisingly romanised. All that's far more flavoursome than, say, a McIntee oriental Past Doctor book... which is an important point since a vividly realised setting was one of the most striking features of Daniel O'Mahony's The Cabinet of Light and I've enjoyed seeing that continued as a minor trait of the subsequent Time Hunter novellas.

(However more meaningful than Japanese dialogue to most readers is the Engrish! Anyone can buy an English-Japanese dictionary, but it's a subtler point to write Mochizuka's off-centre English that's genuinely characteristic of Japanese language learners. That was fun too.)

Kitsune isn't one of those Telos novellas which require a Literature PhD to appreciate it, though this may not be entirely a good thing. It's a nice change of pace and certainly better than The Tunnel at the End of the Light, but I don't buy these novellas just for a good story. Even the much-maligned (usually by me) BBC Books have a head-start on Telos in that department, by simple virtue of word count. The Time Hunter book which really got me stoked was The Clockwork Woman. Some novellas can be elusively unsatisfying... "Oh, that's it? Shame. Ah well."

Nevertheless Kitsune is quality work that covers all the bases and does absolutely nothing wrong. You could do much, much worse.