Eve McDonnell

Sixty-odd years separate the childhoods of Glory, an ambitious apprentice jeweller, and Needle, a river-side mud-lark. Darting between them, stitching their fates together, is the crow, Magpie. Or Fusspot, depending on whether you’re in 1864 or 1928.

'Elsetime' is a time-slip story, focused on the children’s shared imperative to help steady their families’ precarious finances, and their separate ambitions: Glory to become a master jeweller, Needle’s to find his mysteriously-vanished father. It is Needle, the diffident synaesthete able to sense the stories attached to the objects he finds, who travels from his own time to Glory’s. It is Glory, already under professional pressure by her employer, who recognises some of the names on a plaque that will be put up to commemorate the fourteen who perished in a flood – due to happen tomorrow. The stakes are very high – the children are down to a bare handful of hours to raise the alarm of the threat to the city, rescue Needle’s father and complete an order that could make or break Glory’s dreams of owning her own emporium.

What no mere summary of the plentiful action can convey is the polished richness of the book. There are a number of tropes – the orphaned children, the Dickensian sensibility of unjust adults, destitution and Winter weather – refashioned by their setting. The children both face challenges more personal than their circumstances. Glory not only has a wooden hand but a dreadful difficulty in not saying exactly what she thinks – admirably suitable for following her older sister in embracing the suffragist movement but not welcomed by her social ‘superiors’ – and a tendency to act without reflection. Needle, on the other hand, cannot speak when he needs to, and, though an exceptionally kindly person, he feels he lacks courage.

There is an unusual kind of historical sense to the story, not just because both children live in past times, but because of the way that Needle’s work is presented. He fishes objects out of the muddy banks of the great industrial river at low tide, objects lost and swept to one side of the main flow and forgotten. When he holds them, he can see part of their story. Thus, two important factors in the presentation of material history are embodied: the importance of the traces of the everyday past that are often neglected in favour of big or transformative events, and the concept of objects telling stories. The banks of the river have become a museum and Needle is their curator.

The prose is stuffed with creativity – everyone and everything, including the weather and the river, is creating, embellishing or inventing, all the time. Those who are absent are remembered through their creations and the world of material artistry lingers in the place-names and memorials of the city. There are secrets and hidden things everywhere, too, not just treasures under the mud for Needle to find, but beautiful things hiding in secret pockets and secret rooms. Even the story itself has half-covered treasures; as Conan Doyle teased Sherlock Holmes’ fans with the untold accounts of The Giant Rat of Sumatra or the Tankerville Club Scandal, now the Library of Unwritten Stories contains hints of the Buried Chalice of the Murderous Bishop, and the Mystery of the Letter in the Bottle.

To wring the last drops from the metaphor, the story is well tailored: every seam is assured, not a button is loose and every time it seems to be approaching its close, there is a last development to tidy away a thread the reader will kick themselves for having missed. This is a clever and well-plotted tale, told with verve and humour, with endearing characters (even one of the baddies has their ‘one bit of good’), in a detailed, textured setting. Happily, it is one treasure that does not need to be schmocked out of the mud… (mehr)