Sarah Dunn: 2013: sarahfdunn.

com Joseph Edward Ryan's The Factory World reads like what would happen if The Wonderful Wizard of Oz crashed into Cormac McCarthy's The Road at high speed. The novel maintains an eerie feeling of recently-expended energy, like something enormous exploded right before the first chapter began. The story begins when English boy Simon wakes up dressed in a lion suit, lying in a metal pipe which protrudes from underneath a monstrous factory. He is pulled from the pipe by a Clint Eastwood-style cowboy whom he nicknames the Tin Man, and together the pair stumble towards safety through the wreckage of a ruined world. Ryan's world resembles a computer game in many ways, full of sudden dangers and challenges. Falling purple asteroids have knocked deep sinkholes across the landscape which make walking hazardous, and faceless mannequins covered in black rubber are dotted around cities and towns as if frozen in everyday tasks. Machines, factories and vintage-style utilities lend a touch of steampunk to The Factory World. The computer game analogy is strengthened by the puzzles his protagonists come across- a machine that predicts the probability of future events by rearranging metal knobs on a wall, numbered metal pills extracted from Simon and the Tin Man's stomachs, cylinders that each produce a seemingly random effect on the world around them. Every now and again an exotic traveller will appear to attack or aid the Cowardly Lion and Tin Man. During their journey to the centre of the continent, the pair are shot at and then helped by a man dressed in a red cape, threatened by a silver vampire woman who wants to farm Simon for blood, tricked by a woman with an invisibility suit who steals their tram-car transport and appealed to by a little lost girl all on her own. In keeping with the speculative fiction tradition inspired by writers like Tolkein and C.S. Lewis, Ryan's is a world where adult women are either alien and menacing, or irrelevant. You weren't even scared of that witch woman, says Simon to the Tin Man. You told her to go to hell. And even after she almost killed you, you still told her to go to hell. You aren't scared of nothing. I've just never given in to women is all. Not when I'm trying to make a point, anyway, he replies. Simon thinks fondly of his grandmother who taught him to play the piano, but realistic female characters exist only as distorted, Wild West-style memories inside the Tin Man's head. Neither the Tin Man or Simon is particularly talkative, but they bond over food and practicalities. The man has an old-fashioned sense of humour, laconically telling puns and tall stories to draw out the tightly-wound little boy by his side. Simon is justifiably tense throughout the narrative but ultimately proves heroic, again inviting comparison to Lewis' Pevensie children or the son of McCarthy's unnamed progatonist. Although his dialogue is a little rough around the edges, Ryan is an efficient creator of ambiance. He doesn't waste words, pulling together an impression of an utterly exotic world through terse, short sentences strung together by bursts of action. This novel will appeal to readers who liked McCarthy's The Road, China Mieville's The City and Ytic Eht and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.