The Watermark by Sam Mills review – a time-travelling romp

However, because this is a romp, Jaime and Rachel are gradually able to wake up within Fate’s world. They begin to hear the narrator saying things like, “And so Thomas kissed Rachel and they burnt with a fiery, illicit passion.” Here is where the novel is really clever – because it forces us to read extremely attentively. Each anachronism, everything that fits our world but not Victorian times, is a sign of Jaime’s genuine self struggling to break through. Eventually, with the crashing arrival of a helicopter in the middle of a church service, we get the full world-splitting effect. Fate is thwarted, temporarily at least, and Jaime and Rachel are able to flee into another book – this time set in a poorly imagined 2010s Manchester. Poorly imagined, because its author is their friend and adviser from within the first story, Mr James Gwent, apparently a man of the 1860s but actually an earlier abductee of Fate’s.