The Gnomes of Lychford

It has been a while. To be honest, I didn’t think we were going to get any new Lychford novellas. The last one seemed pretty final. But life goes on, even for imaginary people. For the good people of Lychford, there are always going to be more supernatural threats.

The last book, Last Stand in Lychford, was heavy on the emotion, what with the death of a beloved character and a rather apocalyptic plot. The new one, The Gnomes of Lychford, is much lighter. It is about gnomes, after all, and gnomes appear to be inherently funny, even without the inevitable David Bowie and Smurfs references.

Anyway, there are many groups of supernatural beings that live in or near Lychford, and now that they have become visible (at least to the inhabitants of the town) there are bound to be issues. The gnomes, it transpires, are upset. And why wouldn’t they be? Half of the houses in the town have at least one shameful mockery of gnome-kind decorating their gardens. Reverend Lizzie has three at the Vicarage, and they are dressed in Star Trek uniforms! How insulting can you get?

And that, it transpires, is not the half of it. There are other things that certain townsfolk have done that have upset the gnomes even more.

Unfortunately the gnomish complaints do not go down well with many of the townsfolk. In particular there is Jim, one of the members of the town council, who would probably be a member of Reform if the UK libel laws were not such a boon to the litigious wealthy amongst us. Jim doesn’t hold with all this magic nonsense. Indeed, he is Against It. And the gnomes too. Another councilor, who is a Liberal Democrat, will not stand for such speciesist nonsense. And so the stage is set for conflict.

If that wasn’t enough, word of the strange goings on in Lychford have reached the wider world. Enter Robin Daniels, host of the hit BBC podcast, Unworldly. He is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, or at least bag a new episode of his highly sensationalist show at the expense of innocent townsfolk.

It will of course fall to Lizzie and her friends, Amber and Zoya, to put things right, but they have issues of their own. Amber is freshly married to Luke and getting used to her change in circumstances. Zoya, as a refugee from Ukraine, is constantly worried for her country and the people she has left behind. And Lizzie has discovered something about herself that she finds deeply disturbing.

All of this packed into a novella-sized package. Well, Paul Cornell is very comfortable with the Lychford setting now, so it is not surprising that he is able to deliver an excellent piece of fiction that is both pleasantly cosy and very much about the problems facing Britain today. There might have been a large protest by far-right bigots in London recently, but there was one in Lychford first. Cornell has his finger on the pulse of the country.

Title: The Gnomes of Lychford
By: Paul Cornell
Publisher: Tor.com
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