Tunnels Redux: This Time I've Read the Book

I’ve literally just finished reading Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams’s Tunnels and, far from proclaiming this the new Harry Potter, I find myself rather frustrated by the experience.

That’s not to say it’s a bad novel; it’s not. Oh, there are some clanky moments, such as the following image of an underground cavern:

It dwarfed any of the Colony’s caverns with its scale, and brought to Will’s mind the image of a gargantuan heart, its chambers criss-crossed by huge, heartstring-like columns. (352)

This isn’t great writing; though it’s not necessarily representative of the book as a whole, I wasn’t convinced by the fairly awkward combination of the metaphor and simile (and perhaps another metaphorical term: is “chambers” referring to the chambers of the heart or literally to the chambers within an underground cavern?). Nor is this the only instance where the prose clanked a little for me.

Nevertheless, I can see small boys responding eagerly to the book, the sequel that it seems to be leading towards, and the movie that is apparently slated for release in 2010.

But that’s part of my problem; the book is intensely . . . boy-focused, for want of a better term.

I’ve heard the arguments that young girls will read books with male protagonists, but that young boys won’t read books about girls.

I don’t buy it for a minute.

Oh, certainly I imagine that the number of young men who bought and read Meg Cabot’s rather funny—in the early stages, anyway—series The Princess Diaries would be significantly outweighed by their female counterparts: those books were clearly marketed for a prepubescent female readership, whoever else read them.

But I don’t believe that Garth Nix’s lovely Abhorsen series, or Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, or many of Terry Pratchett’s recent books, including the Tiffany Aching series, weren’t read by boys because they had girl protagonists—or, going further back, that the same fate met fully half of Diana Wynne Jones’s oeuvre, or C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which Lucy Pevensie is the stand-out character.

So I don’t accept that as a reason.

It may be that Gordon and Williams deliberately aimed this at a specifically male readership, as I’ve suggested that Cabot did with young girls. There’s nothing wrong with that approach.

But the focus is unmistakeable.

The novel has three significant female characters: there are other women—two of whom are given names but are entirely ineffectual from a plot perspective and another who is named but never actually present in the text—but the three primary ones are the only ones given any significant space within the text.

Of these, one is psychopathic. Literally.

Another is drugged into a stupor by an addiction to television that is maintained by two constantly active video recorders: although she nominally occupies the positions of wife and mother, she abandons these with no argument and no justification. When she does break away from the television stupor, it is only to enter an alternative stupor created by pharmaceuticals.

The third does rise to a moment of pathos but is also stupefied; in her case, it’s a combination of cigarettes, cheap vodka, and council housing. I can certainly believe that the conditions of council-housing life in a rough suburb of London would generate a desire to slide into forgetfulness, but I’m less sympathetic towards this character when she’s part of a pattern of ineffectual female characters.

But, just in case this seems nothing more than the futile protestations of a feminist reader, it’s not the only concern that the book raised.

In Tunnels, there are two worlds: one above ground and one below. I’m not giving much away with this information: a cursory glance at the cover and the blurb in conjunction will tell you that.

The above-ground world is ours, not an alternative Earth, so little needs to be said about that.

My other concern, then, is with the evocation of the below-ground world, which seems uneven.

I should perhaps state here that, as a reader, I’m rapidly turned off by a book if the world-building is inconsistent, implausible, or just plain silly.

None of those are the case here, but it is the case that the world-building is uneven.

We are given, for example, a great deal of information about the day-to-day life of the underground world, but no information at all on how it can operate as an economy, how such an authoritarian social structure can maintain itself—about, essentially, how this community can possibly be self-sustaining. In fact, we get hints that it’s not self-sustaining, which only add to the confusion.

The book also drops hints about how this community came about: once again, none of these points are addressed in the text, so the reader is left to wonder if the 260-year time frame we’re given is sufficient to create what we see.

I’m sure that some of these questions will be answered if the book runs to a sequel, or more than one sequel.

But they’re not presented in such a way in the text as to invite further thoughts about what the sequels might reveal. The questions that Tunnels raises are closed off; the reader simply isn’t encouraged to speculate, when the information presented is so scanty.

Since this novel has been talked about as “the new Harry Potter“, I feel justified in making the following point: even when Rowling withheld information, she made it quite clear that information was being withheld.

Whatever can be said about the quality of Rowling’s writing at the sentence level or about the tautness of her narratives—and I’m saying nothing about either point—she cleverly managed the blocking of future plot points, whether it was by the Agatha Christie method of “Hey, look what my other hand’s doing!” or by having a powerful character simply stop potential enquiries.

Tunnels doesn’t have the same feel of through-plotted development. It feels, rather, as though the authors themselves are slowly working their way forward.

It may be that the putative sequels, should they emerge, will make me rethink this position.

But for now, I’m sticking with my original point: this, ultimately, is a rather frustrating book.