Felix J. Palma is a Spaniard with a few (contemporary) novels and many novellas behind his belt. Based on an interview, his previous books fall in the "magical realism" category, with emphasis on realism.. The Map of Time is his first novel set in an historical setting and the first in which the genre fiction elements play a major role. This novel is already a huge best-seller and prize winner in Europe and is set for release at the end of June in English.

London, 1896.

Having escaped poverty and a dreaded future in the cloth industry (not thanks to his mom), young Bertie, better known in the City as Herbert George Wells - is doing his best to enjoy a slightly too quiet marital life and the massive popularity brought him by his novel The Time Machine, that spread like a fever over the Empire's metropolis a passion for time travel that should make the envy of his rival Jules Verne (as well he should, with his crackpot notions that one day people will send pictures through the telephone lines and what not. Silly Frenchmen!). Luckily for him, he can escape the boredom of his routine through his imagination – but are imaginary adventures really enough to fill a young man's life?

For the last eight years Andrew Harrington, son of an industrial magnate/"nouveau riche", has been but a shadow of his former self. He never recovered after the fateful night he'd arrived too late to Whitechapel to find his lover Mary Jane Kelly had become the fifth victim of Jack the Ripper, arrested not long after.

Claire Haggerty, 21, is desperately longing for a world in which women wouldn't have to take music lessons, trap themselves in corsets, carry around a stupid umbrella she's certain she'll lose one of these days, and worst of all, to be forced to pick a husband among a string of equally boring suitors when what is marriage but a legalized form of prostitution?

Enter on the scene the new Murray Time Travel Agency, where entrepreneur Gillian Murray has managed to make a reality out of the speculative fiction of H.G. Wells and now offers to the daring gentlemen and ladies of Victorian London the thrill of a lifetime for the price of a hundred pounds: an expedition though holes in the fabric of time to the weird landscapes of the fourth dimension and exit again in London on an overcast day of the year 2000, at the very moment the fate of humanity is about to be decided. Even Queen Victoria can't resist.

For the excitable Lucy, a visit to the future is just another afternoon escapade from her parents and the tedium of a too conventional life, but her friend Claire she drags along might have other plans – and many surprises ahead of her. For Charles, this may be the only chance to give back to his cousin Andrew a reason to carry on with his life, if he could go back to stop the murder of Mary - but at what price for the fabric of Time? As for H.G. Wells, he may already be regretting to have written The Time Machine, and it's not his fellow writers Bram Stoker and Henry James that will disagree.

Those starting points are about all that can decently be revealed of the hard to summarize plot of this novel, which is a steam-powered train of plot twists, surprises and even a few rug pullings.

With three stories told consecutively, each with its own beginning, middle and end, but that intersect constantly in surprising ways to form a larger tale, The Map of Time is a novel that refuses to be pigeon-holed. Palma plays masterfully with the tropes of so many genres, from early science-fiction to historical Fantasy or alternate History, Victorian mystery and Victorian romance novels, old fashioned adventure serials, completed with doses of parody, absurd humour and even elements of satire that may recall Swift on occasions, with several dashes of steampunk aesthetics and even bits of metafiction.

Steam powered fighting robots, a Scotland Yard detective hunting a murderer through time, East End thugs, fourth dimension monsters, an immortal golden retrievers and some mysterious african tribe, it has it all… in small doses, including quite a few "Have you spotted the reference to a famous novel" moments.. And don't forget it's the London of Dickens, Darwin and Doyle (a setting for the most part fairly well evoked by Palma, but others have done it better), and so many others who make actual appearances and are thus best left as surprises.

A kind of loving homage to the books of Wells and Verne, written in beautiful prose and in a rhythm that evoke a lot their 19th century works (More Verne's than Wells' in the French translation, though I'd expect the English one with give it this little final British touch the French version did not perfectly carried at times), the book doesn't hesitate to jump back and forth on the timeline (incl. for long backstories), placing the reader himself in the time machine.

This could have turned into an inextricable maze, but fear not - Palma provides an unidentified ominiscient and strong-willed narrator who ties everything up, tells the story as he wishes in the third person, with very theatre-like asides in the first person to address the reader directly, usually after warning him that for a few minutes the characters will do nothing of interest (bathroom break?), or something he doesn't want the reader to see just yet. Again inspired by 19th century storytelling (Dumas notably used this quite a bit), the narrative voice is however unmistakingly modern in execution, witty, quirky and ironic, occasionally departing from the Victorian tone or sensibilities (for e.g. after a mock-Austen long and detailed description of someone's appearance that seemed to annoy him, the narrator comments that if after all of this the reader doesn't feel he knows enough, all there's left to say is that the character brushed his teeth this way and is also not well endowed and usually bears to the right…) - and I suspect most readers will split between those who think this complicity with the narrator is the real stroke of genius and the most fun aspect of the novel (that's my case), and those the narrator will annoy horribly from page one to whenever they decide to abandon the novel..

The brew of genres, risky, is both the strength and the weakness of the novel. Strength, because it defies many expectations, and weakness because in the eyes of many readers it won't meet so many of them either. Palma never loses control of his well-crafted and cleverly built tale, his characters, especially H.G. Wells, are are well-drawn with just the right dose of clichés to be fun, but his very meandering and frequently disgressing storytelling, the very slow (19th century style) pacing where the writer takes a great deal of time to set things in motion (at one point the narrator even comments "yes I know it's page X and there's still no sign of the Time Travel you've been promised. It will come... but not yet." and the shifts back and forth between genres as the story progresses can make its charm to readers willing to follow the tale anywhere it leads, but might seriously irritate readers who come to it expecting genre conventions would have been respected far more (50 pages of mildly erotic love letters... I want my fighting robots back!!). The book also falls short on action scenes which are few and very far between (and some will not forgive the author for choosing to narrate some of what they'd call "the good stuff" in letters characters exchange, in the vein of Stoker's Dracula, of course). Definitely don't read it for some Hiro-style adventures of Wells or others through time, you'll be massively disappointed.

Genre readers should also know tha though the mainstream reviewers or the blurb emphasized a lot the originality, weirdness and brilliant ideas of the writer (going as far as claiming he approaches time travel from a wholly new angle.. Genre fans will definitely not agree), there is a lot in this of a "Suzanna Clarke" effect in this I think, meaning unlike the writer, the mainstream reviewers's knowledge of genre tropes seem too limited and made them see as "deeply original" elements the writer actually meant to be referential. To genre readers, it's the cocktail and the tone of the novel that will feel fresh, not the originality of his SF concepts, let alone the basic steampunk stuff.

For all these small reservations, I've had a fabulous time reading through the thick tome (circa 600 pages), which is apparently the first of a trilogy (though you'd never guess that at the end of the novel – I suspect the books may be stand-alones connected in the vein of the Bas-Lag series, or the narrator of the first book will carry on with another story, or eventually be identified – we'll see). I was surprised often, slightly annoyed on a few occasions, with frequent bursts of hilarity - and in the end I was thoroughly entertained. As for the promised interesting reflections on Time and free will… well, I've met the very same notions in many books before (and the real life theories behind this are well-known), so I just call this misrepresentation from reviewers and/or publishers, though the mainstream and not scientifically minded readers might well find the ideas more fascinating (not that they aren't, but just not new to me, and most people around here I suspect).

I'm not familiar enough with either to tell, but a few reviewers have mentionned the book should please fans of Discworld or early Douglas Adams. The humour (if not much else) reminded me a bit of the tone of China Miéville's Un Lun Dun too.