I’ve just finished reading Chris Beckett’s Marcher which takes some of his best short stories (”The Welfare Man”, “The Welfare Man Resigns” and, perhaps obviously, “Marcher” amongst others) and winds them into a novel set in a shared world where the drug slip is allowing people to “shift” between alternate worlds and people are trying to deal with the consequences for themselves and the world around them.

As the book is named after the lords who controlled the Marches, the frontier lands between the “lawless” Welsh and the Norman’s newly conquered English territories, it is hardly a surprise that the major themes the novel deals with are boundaries and borders – physical, political and personal. It is at its most interesting when it presses its characters against the lines they have drawn for themselves.

There’s lots of remarkable things about Marcher – Beckett’s has a fine handle on his characters with Charles Bowen, his protagonist, and a supporting cast that includes welfare man, Cyril Burkitt, social worker, Jazamine Bright and the “dreggies” like Carl Bone and Tammy Pendant who make up the inhabitants of Beckett’s Social Inclusion Zones (the perfect name for walled areas where the unemployed and unemployable are kept segregated from the nations “decent” people) are real people with real flaws. Charles is whiny and self-obsessed, Cyril is long past caring enough about his work to actually do anything about how bad things have become and Jazamine analyses everyone else’s motives but doesn’t appear to possess any of her own. And there are some great scenes. Cyril Burkitt’s leaving party and his final fate, the killing of Slug, the fateful moment when Jaz and Charles leap – there are moments in the novel that will sit for a long time in the memory.

Marcher’s greatest strength is in Beckett’s ability to portray the apparently mundane shuffling whereby decent people within a bureaucratic system can create – almost despite the wishes or desires of anyone person or class in particular – a society which creates a group of people who serve the greater good by being excluded. And how, amongst that excluded group, the daily grind of living makes room for anything that offers escape – entertainment, drugs, violence, superstitions and new religions – is gripped tightly and squeezed for every drop of comfort it can offer. The presentation of bureaucrats at work is both clinically precise and yet, at the same time, not entirely unsympathetic while the impact their work has on the lives of those they “serve” will be excruciatingly familiar to anyone who has spent any time working in health or social services.

This realistic portrayal of social services is hardly going to make Marcher an easy novel to sell to the mass market – it’s not the sort of story that’s going to appeal to those looking for spaceships and big explosions. And finding a marketing niche is not the novel’s only problem.

The large number of typos and moments where the book seems to have lacked a really on-the-ball editor/proof-reader mar the experience of reading the novel. I wouldn’t normally mention a few mistakes and the occasional slip-up (as an editor myself I know how easily these can get by even after careful work) but in the case of Marcher the frequency and the obvious nature of the errors can’t be ignrored and as the book progressed I found myself increasingly annoyed. This is particularly regrettable as the book is good enough to deserve better treatment.

The other problems are more of Beckett’s making. There’s an imbalance at the heart of the book’s plotting – stemming, no doubt, from its roots as a fix-up. While accepting that Beckett is interested in writing something more thoughtful than your basic sci-fi knockabout, I think in setting up the threat of the Dunner gangs – world-roaming, Norse-inspired, raiders – Beckett has a duty to treat them seriously. Sadly the threat they present rather slips in and out of focus – disappearing entirely for long stretches – before reappearing in rather stodgy clumps. The threat ultimately gets “dealt with” in a way that feels too perfunctory, too neat and too quick. The result is that the plot that should be driving the book feels unevenly distributed and, in the gaps, there are dangerous slow patches. Now there is nice writing in these slower places and some good character interactions, but, truthfully, there are moments when the story seems to get lost.

All that being said, for the sf reader looking for something smart, compact and interesting to read, you could do a lot worse than pick up Beckett’s book – while you’re at it, do yourself a favour and order his short story collection The Turing Test from Elastic Press – it really is fantastic.