Product Description

We have all been lied to. A great and sinister conspiracy exists to keep us from uncovering the truth about our past. Have you ever wondered how Victorians dreamed up all that fantastic futuristic fiction? Did it ever occur to you that it might just have been based upon fact? That THE WAR OF THE WORLDS was a true account of real events? That Captain Nemo' s Nautilus even now lies rusting at the bottom of the North Sea? That there really was an invisible man? And what about the other stuff? Did you know that Queen Victoria had a sexual relationship with Dr Watson? Or that the elephant man was a product of an E.T./human hybridisation programme? Or that Jack the Ripper was a terminator robot sent from the future? Read on: and learn how a cabal of Victorian Witches from the Chiswick Townswomen's Guild, working with advanced Babbage super-computers, rewrote 19th Century history, and how a 23rd Century boy called Will Starling uncovered the truth about everything.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29951 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Robert Rankin's fondness for demented conspiracy theories is complicated by time travel in The Witches of Chiswick--which demonstrates again that everything you know is wrong, that Brentford is the true centre of the multiverse, and that nobody is quite as weird as Robert Rankin.

Will Starling lives in a dystopian 23rd century where Brentford Utility Conurbation is crammed with 303-storey tower blocks and synthetic food has made everyone vastly obese. Except for Will, who's mocked for morbid slimness and eccentric tastes--art, for example. When he notices the digital watch in a well-known Victorian painting, a murderous cover-up begins. The sinister Witches of Chiswick are determined to erase all traces of the other past.

Time-travelling Terminator-style automata keep arriving, not from the future but from that lost Victorian age of Babbage supercomputers, flying cabs running on beamed power from Tesla transmitters and the imminent launch of Her Majesty's Moonship Victoria. Thanks to the convenient time machine of a Mr Wells, Will finds himself in that other 19th century, complicating the stories of his own ancestors.

There he's tutored by the flamboyant guru or conman Hugo Rune. He stands in for Sherlock Holmes--called away to a Dartmoor case--and investigates the Jack-the-Ripper murders. As tends to happen in the Rankin universe, he acquires a Holy Guardian Sprout called Barry. Will even meets himself, another Will from a very different future. Even aided by his best friend Tim, by the Brentford Snail Boy (raised like Tarzan by wild animals, not apes but snails), and by the deadly martial art Dimac, can Will hope to foil a witchy plan to reprogram time and send high-tech Britain back to gaslight as midnight strikes on December 31, 1899?

Other walk-ons include Queen Victoria, the Elephant Man, William McGonagall (Poet Laureate), Doctor Watson, the Invisible Man, Oscar Wilde (a notorious womaniser), Wells' Martians, and--in unfamiliar guise--Satan. It's all suitably dotty, larded with running gags and bursts of disarming frankness:

... Perhaps both futures always existed. I don't know. This is very complicated, Tim, and I don't understand it. I'm just making it up as I go along. Like the author," said Tim.

But rather than wrap-up this novel with any of a dozen deus ex machina possibilities, Rankin leaves his hero with a very tough decision indeed. The insane, goonish humour made more effective by a touch of grimness. --David Langford

About the Author
Robert Rankin is an unrepentant Luddite who writes his bestselling novels by hand in exercise books. He is the author of THE HOLLOW CHOCLATE BUNNIES OF THE APOCALYPSE, THE WITCHES OF CHISWICK, The Brentford Trilogy (5 books), The Armageddon Quartet (3 books) and many more.

Customer Reviews

a return to form.
i am an avid robert rankin fan. i own all his books and eagerly await every new book. however recently, well lets just say i have had a crisis of faith. the two books previous to this one (fandom of the operator and hollow chocolate bunnies of the apocalypse) were a departure from mr rankins usually acerbic wit and quite frankly bizarre sense of houmour! in the witches.. we see a welcome return to form. the books basic premise is history as we know it is not what really happened, war of the world really happened and HG wells wrote all those stories from personal experience. young will starling the only thin person in a fat persons world stumbles upon this one day and begins to unravel the conspiray without falling foul of the dreaded witches. the novel is written in rankins fantastic mind bogglingly confusing but very very funny way and gives brief nods to characters and locations from previous novels. some of the situations are hilarious such as the police force having a "token woman" and multiple will starlings all being killed by a terminator from the past. if your new to rankin this is a good place to start it is one of his best novels and dosent require any knowledge of previous novels to be read and enjoyed.

Return of the king (or at least Barry)
Although I am an avid reader, I find few authors as compelling or funny as Robert Rankin. I have managed to read about 95% of his books. Yet I must agree with some of the other reviewers that I had been a bit disappointed with some of his latest books. (Although, Chocolate Bunnies was quite good.) I am about 3/4s through Witches and I am loving it. I would be surprised if many first-time Rankin readers would get all the characters or jokes, but it is a scorcher. But I think he has hit his stride again. I would rank it among the books in the Apocalypse and Brentford series.

The Master returns.
After the last book, I'd decided to give up Rankin. I'm glad I changed my mind. This is his best book, possibly ever, certainly since the first trilogies. It's also his most utterly ludicrous.

I don't know any other author who could get away with the casting, the dreadful puns, the awful lies but Robert Rankin does, and you are glad of it. Professor Slocombe's real identity (as if it were ever in doubt) is also finally confirmed for the swift of eye. Which is worth the price of admission by itself.

Buy it, or get it from the library on your way to the bookies, it will make you laugh. Guaranteed.