Tyger by SF Said

(David Fickling Books, 2023)

Reviewed by Kevan Manwaring

This is the fourth collaboration between SF Said and the multi-talented artist, Dave McKean (preceded by Varjak Paw, The Outlaw Varjak Paw, and Phoenix), and the integration of text and illustration is a pleasure to experience. Along with the stunning cover, endpapers, and other paratext, it is a total aesthetic experience that restores a bibliophilic delight to the reading experience. Although ostensibly in the ‘YA’ category, Tyger, like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust, has a genuine crossover appeal that would connect with adult audiences as well as with younger readers. In a similar way to how Pullman draws upon John Milton in his series, Said here draws heavily upon William Blake—not only in the titular ‘Tyger’ of the title (an anthropomorphic and archetypal presence that looms large in the story and in the textual plane—akin to how the armoured polar bear, Iorek Byrnison does in Pullman’s universe), but in other intertextual allusions to the Lambeth-based artist and poet. The main antagonist is Urizen, Blake’s god of reason—and the Tyger is almost an embodiment of Los: his blazing deity of the imagination. Yet beneath this Manichaean conflict there are several allusions to Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience: Said draws upon the poet’s iconography (the lamb; the chimneysweep; shepherds) and cosmology. For Tyger is set in a parallel contemporary London—one of many in Said’s quantum multiverse—in which the British Empire still exists, slavery has not been abolished, and the sprawl of the city has been checked by an authoritarian, xenophobic regime. This ‘other England’ evokes the alternative London of ‘The Crystal Cabinet’, a poem featured in The Pickering Manuscript:

Another England there I saw
Another London with its Tower,
Another Thames and other hills,
And another pleasant Surrey bower.

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Review from BSFA Review 20 - Download your copy here.