Once a Monster – Robert Dinsdale

Published By: Macmillan
Pages: 512
Released On: 21/09/2023

London, 1861: Ten-year-old Nell belongs to a crew of mudlarks who work a stretch of the Thames along the Ratcliffe Highway. An orphan since her mother died four years past, leaving Nell with only broken dreams and a pair of satin slippers in her possession, she spends her days dredging up coals, copper and pieces of iron spilled by the river barges – searching for treasure in the mud in order to appease her master, Benjamin Murdstone.

But one day, Nell discovers a body on the shore. It’s not the first corpse she’s encountered, but by far the strangest. Nearly seven feet tall, the creature has matted hair covering his legs, and on his head are the suggestion of horns. Nell’s fellow mudlarks urge her to steal his boots and rifle his pockets, but as she ventures closer the figure draws breath and Nell is forced to make a decision which will change her life forever . . .

*****

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.

The Toymakers by Robert Dinsdale is one of my favourite books and I try to read it regularly, although I do admit it’s been a while, so maybe a reread is due.

Generally I don’t do long books and I don’t do mythological retellings. With this book, Robert has given me both. And boy has he delivered. It was beautiful.

Author Essie Fox describes it as “a labyrinthine delight of a novel where a world of Dickensian darkness is infused with ancient myth”. Everyone that knows me knows I love Dickens and collect many of his books, and so this instantly grabbed my attention.

I had never really fallen in love with mythological retellings. For some reason, most of the ones I have tried have felt a bit superfluous, like they were never needed. But this blows them all out of the water and shows me how, when one is this good, it is definitely required.

Every word, sentence, passage, chapter reads so perfectly seamless. It’s hard to imagine he would have to wrestle with subpar drafts, and not just put down perfection straight away. His writing is gorgeous and has a hold over me that very few authors do. All I want is for Robert to teach me how to write, is that too much to ask?

For me, this fits somewhere between mythological, historical, dream and reality.

There is a tenderness I wasn’t necessarily expecting from a story about a mythological – historically bad – character. I love this take on the minotaur. We’ve all been told stories of course, that the minotaur is a creature to be feared, and not one to be loved or respected.

There are characters a plenty, and whilst Nell is our main protagonist, my favourite has to be Mr Murdstone. He is perfectly evil. Not over the top, more like a Fagin character (going back to Dickens), and whilst he may not have been the nicest character, he was definitely the best to read. You could really get your teeth into him.

I’ve said it before, I rarely like books that are 500+ pages in length because they very rarely warrant being that long. But this one. Oh this one. I would have read double the page length if I could. There’s never too much Dinsdale.

It’s going to take a lot to knock The Toymakers off its perch, but this book just reiterates why Dinsdale is one of my favourite authors. I have put his others on my book wishlist. There’s something very pure and heartfelt about his writing.

The most surprising thing of all is how moving I found it. At several moments, and particularly the end (no spoilers here) I found myself fighting back tears. Not always for sad reasons. There’s just a lot of emotion in this book, a lot of stories and morals and lessons, and I thank Dinsdale for giving it to us. I will gladly read it again and again.

I know books are subjective and we all have our likes and dislikes, and I know some people will think less favourably about this, but I struggle to see how anyone couldn’t see the magic weaved into these words.

Yes, it’s a story about a minotaur, man vs beast, of a girl’s friendship with a minotaur, but there’s so much more. There’s so much more. There’s sadness and poverty, wishes, hopes and dreams, there’s dancing and running, promises and lies, danger and death, love and madness, beauty and ugliness, heroes, villains and cowards. It is so layered – like a labyrinth itself – and you get sucked into these layers, deeper and deeper, but never really wanting to escape.