Taylor’s Book Unholy Mess

The Reverend Graham Taylor grabbed the spotlight like a Quidditch seeker seizing the Golden Snitch last week, when the news service Reuters reported that Taylor, a bestselling British fantasy novelist, had been kicked out of a grade school after allegedly calling Harry Potter “gay.”

But last Thursday, Reuters issued an embarrassing correction, titled: “The story headlined ‘J.K. Rowling rival labels Harry Potter “gay” is wrong and is withdrawn.” Turns out that Taylor had been kicked out of a school after giving a talk to 12 year-olds, but he was punished for using vulgar words such as “crap, poo, fart and bogey.”

Taylor reportedly said that Potter is “not the only gay in the village”—a phrase stolen from the popular comedy “Little Britain.” He later said that he was joking and that he did not mean to question Potter’s sexuality.

This is just one more piece of evidence to show that Taylor can’t string together a coherent sentence.

Despite Taylor’s plodding prose, his publicists have billed his novel, “Shadowmancer,” as another Harry Potter. Indeed, once readers break through the choppy surface of Taylor’s writing, the resonance with Rowling is hard to miss.

Set along the Yorkshire coast in the 1700s, the novel depicts an evil cleric’s quest for world domination and the efforts of its three teen heroes to stop him. Taylor’s wicked paralysis-inducing beasts, called Varrigals, come at Taylor’s boy hero like the Death Eaters that attack Potter from Azkaban. And the underground caves, which set the scene for many of the battles, are reminiscent of the tunnels beneath Hogwarts, Potter’s boarding school. But though Taylor rolls out a host of fantastic and terrifying enemies, his inability to ground the reader with any sense of who the main characters—Thomas, Kate, and Raphah—were before they set out to save the world leaves us wondering, like Kate, “Why did we get involved in all of this?”

Unlike Rowling, who makes sure we understand the stakes of the Potter-Voldemort battle, methodically creating a new world that draws upon long literary traditions of horrible families and utopian British boarding schools, Taylor begins “Shadowmancer” as the nefarious Obadiah Demurral is on the verge of perfecting his power. Already in possession of one magical talisman—a Keruvim—Demurral only needs the other to complete his goal. But the lives of Kate and Thomas are so bad—destitute, with infirm or alcoholic parents—that it is hard to see why they care.

To be fair, Reuben and Isabella, who briefly play host to Kate and Thomas, seem to live a fairly functional, happy life. But that’s all we get. Taylor, a former Anglican preacher who self-published the first edition of “Shadowmancer” by selling his motorcycle, seems to trust that the evident evil of Demurral will provide an adequate motive for Kate and Thomas to kill the villain. Rather than creating main characters with any depth, Taylor deploys Christian imagery, seemingly hoping that the Holy Spirit will carry the plot forward.

Whenever Kate and Thomas seem to be at loose ends, a strangely Jesus-like figure, known as the King, appears—direction, reassurance, and food in hand. To convince Thomas to commit himself to the mission, the King appears in a dream, and Taylor writes, “Thomas looked into his eyes, and he realized they were the eyes of the cross, deep blue, warm, all-seeing, all-knowing. He felt naked before him, as if this man knew all about his life. Every secret, every lie, every ugly thought was on display.”

From that moment forward, Thomas “believes,” thus endowing himself with the magical power to call on the King at a moment’s notice and defeat the giant birds, dragons, and other beasts Demurral places in his path. That this mixture of the sacred and the occult is unsatisfying should come as no surprise. It returns the novel to that familiar, faith-testing question: if the King can defeat everything, how have his enemies gained such strength? (“His ways are not your ways, his thoughts are not your thoughts,” we are told. “Sometimes we can never understand why he is or what he does… All I can say is that he is in control no matter how dark or hard life may become.”)

Nor do Taylor’s efforts to add his own mark to what is otherwise an amalgam of Rowling and Bible have the desired effect. Raphah, the guardian of the Keruvim, sets the plot in motion when he arrives in Yorkshire from Africa to return the talisman to its rightful owner. Taylor has said in interviews that Raphah was meant to atone for the paucity of black heroes in children’s literature. An admirable goal, but in the novel, anyway, Taylor fails to address the implications of his hero’s origins—even when Demurral takes the step of branding him. The appearance of an African on the coast of Yorkshire elicits relatively mild surprise from the local inhabitants. Indeed, Raphah’s skin color and its evocation of the mysterious African continent appear to be little more than a gratuitous reminder of the ancient and mystical powers at work.

I can only conclude that the novel’s success—several weeks on the bestseller lists in New York and London, in addition to a £2.5 million (about $ 4 million) movie deal—is the result of Taylor’s ability to self-promote. His most recent hurdle into the headlines will only increase his inexplicable popularity. After all, if it weren’t for Taylor’s “gay” comment, would I have written this review—and would you have read it?

—Staff writer Natalie I. Sherman can be reached at nsherman@fas.harvard.edu.