Susan Cooper’s strangely beautiful fantasy, Seaward, is a masterpiece of vivid storytelling. The essence of all good storytelling, but especially vital in fantasy, is the ability to do three things: to create an inherently dramatic and exciting situation; to guide the reader or listener to a satisfying resolution of that situation; and to describe the action so vividly that the reader/listener is transported into the world of the story for the duration. It sounds so obvious to say it, but the truth is that anyone who tries to create a story is attempting to succeed at all three of these basic elements.

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Filled with beautiful, florid prose and some magnificent passages of writing. However, as with many Rushdie books, when you step back and consider the whole piece, it is sprawling, chaotic and largely incoherent. I found myself pretty uncaring as to the fate of the main characters: for all their detail, they are still caricatures to me – cartoon characters drawn with fine pen strokes. But I have to admit, there are some really magical moments, like the story of Rosa Diamond, and the first segment centring on Mahound, that make this well worth a read.

Sometimes I get the feeling that there are so many crazy, whacked out, brilliant ideas running around in Tim Powers’ head that perhaps his greatest challenge when writing a novel is to keep in control of the outflow. Let the tap out too fast and everything would spill out onto the page willy nilly, and the task of tying all these threads together would be impossible. The multitude of plot strands in Expiration Date, each of which entails at least one weird and funky idea of its own, must have made this a particularly difficult project to keep the lid on.

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