Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

We mistake the perception of Time travel to believe that is us that is being placed in a different era, whether our own or of future’s past and present, we believe that the unlikely happening is for our benefit and not for what is taking place. Time travel exists, it is though like evolution, we cannot fathom it properly because we insist that we cannot witness it happening, we cannot see it with our own eyes.

To see Time travel in action we only have to think of the city or town we may live in and remember the stories that we have heard, the people that once walked their way to work as we sauntered our hours away in our favourite pub, recollect the buildings, the shops, the spaces that once were evident, and see how they have changed, which have gone, that is Time travel in action, and in Liverpool that sense of transtemporal alteration is all around, nothing remains the same, except for the city itself. It is a subject that is deep within the heart of Kit Derrick’s novel, The Raven Sound.

To be plucked out of your time and transported back thirty years with a warning ringing in your ears may sound as if it is the staple of any television series of film that is involved in the genre, The Raven Sound though finds its way to be different, it is the starkness and fear that starts to grow as the author’s protagonist finds himself looking back at a city that has altered its face in many regards in the last three decades, but that when your look closely the same features can be seen beneath the smile and the scowl. Unlike London, Birmingham or Manchester, Liverpool’s heart remains, and as Jack begins to understand, so those feelings of passing through time re-emerge.

Whilst Liverpool itself is the hero, and in some cases the villain, of the piece, it is in Kit Derrick’s writing that it comes alive, its underbelly, the off the beaten track approach of places, old names and memories are all on show to see and bare witness to. The style is evocative of noir, the grainy clues gathering place and the sense of Time being breached and upheld, the long dramatic narrative monologue, all capture a moment to which the author has sealed his soul to the tale.

Kit Derrick has found an empty chair at the table of Liverpool writers and firmly placed his hand upon it, not allowing anyone else to wrestle it from him, and in The Raven Sound he has been able to sit and converse with the ghosts of Liverpool’s past and give them a future to speak out in.

Ian D. Hall