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EUROPE IN AUTUMN
Dave Hutchinson
Solaris pb, 294pp, £7.99
Barbara Melville
Europe in Autumn is a noir thriller shaped by a chilling alternate history. A devastating pandemic has fractured Europe into smaller and smaller regions, and as paranoia spreads, more micronations appear. As they increase, so do the number of borders, but that’s no problem for the sinister Les Coureurs des Bois, a sort of espionage courier service. Rudi, an Estonian chef-turned-spy, is their latest recruit. His training begins with innocent-enough smuggling, but then he finds a fellow coureur’s severed head in a locker, leading him into a web of surreal and convoluted conspiracy. This is a plot-driven story. The craft is second to none – it all holds together, and it twists in devious and fascinating ways. And yet I still hated it more than I loved it. I’d describe it with the following three Bs – it’s brave, it’s brilliant, and it’s so boring I nearly wept.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt so torn about a book, especially as my usual bugbears were nowhere to be seen. The writing is accessible and sophisticated all at once. The themes are strong and compelling. The characters, Rudi in particular, are sufficiently complex, and there isn’t an info dump in sight. The dialogue is note perfect – it’s all believable and it all shows character. There aren’t even any spy clichés, and believe me, I was looking for them. So how can such a masterpiece be as dull as dish water? Because, sadly, its greatest strengths are also its weaknesses. In order to explore this properly, I’m going to examine two sides to the plot – how it ties with the world, and its direction in general. For me, these are the elements that work and fail spectacularly.
The fractured Europe premise is intriguing, but for the first half of the book, it’s pretty much all we have. There are a number of scenes that build the world well, painting a rich and horrifying picture not too unlike the present day. But action fans beware – that’s predominantly all those scenes do. There are pages and pages where very little happens, and although this makes some sense later on, you can’t know this unless you muddle through. That’s not all – much of the description is hyper-realistic. People battle with their circumstances in a believable, low-key way, just getting on with their lives, and never dramatically pausing to examine the big picture. On one hand this is great, as we know there’s no risk of wandering into soap opera territory. Sadly, it just isn’t interesting, and I imagine a lot of readers won’t wait it out.
Having said Europe in Autumn is realistic, I now risk contradicting myself by talking about how surreal it is. Exciting reality-bending occurs later on in the book, but sadly isn’t enough to balance out the earlier drudgery. The back cover either boasted or warned I was in for a Kafka-esque experience. Where there is Kafka, there are turbulent, bizarre and hard-to-follow plots. Again, this isn’t all bad – the plot echoes the confusion and difficulties faced by Rudi. It’s also as though the book itself is experimentally challenging the borders of storytelling – a clever touch. But again, I was already bored stiff by this point, and Kafka is a dangerous sensibility to give a reader who’s sitting tapping their foot. I did enjoy the weirdness, but for the most part I thought: what are you doing? Is this book worth my time?
The answer, for me, is mostly no. However, I do applaud this story. It’s rich, it’s mature and it has a wonderful sense of purpose. The boredom was just too much of a deal breaker. It made for the equivalent of a beautiful statue – eloquently crafted, but lifeless. It was as though the author went out of his way to avoid hackneyed techniques – crappy exposition, pointless dialogue and a myriad of noir clichés. And he succeeds, but perhaps he went too far. Inventiveness and believability do matter, but I need to be able to escape, to let the real world disappear. I also need stories to come to life in my mind, making my neurons dance with delight, despair, or any other emotion other than frustration. By the time Europe in Autumn had blood in its veins, I was twiddling my thumbs to do anything other than carry on reading it. That’s the last thing a book should do to you.
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SON OF THE MORNING
Mark Alder
Gollancz pb, 779pp, £16.99
Lawrence Osborn
My initial reaction when it arrived was trepidation: this is a very big book by an unknown author. In my experience, fantasies that can double as doorstops often sacrifice quality on the altar of quantity. On the other hand, the book has been enthusiastically endorsed by Robert Adams who is not known for his tolerance of bad writing.
Son of the Morning is a historical fantasy set at the beginning of the Hundred Years War. Alder has set himself the challenging task of telling “an accurate historical epic” and superimposing upon it a mythology in which he reworks medieval Christian cosmology. In his take on the war, heaven and hell have entered the fray. France is defended not only by a large human army but also by several angels. Edward III is determined not to bow to Philip VI but he is reluctant to engage in direct conflict because the English angels have been notable by their absence since his father’s death. However, a possible alliance with the devils could tip the balance in England’s favour.
This is where Alder’s reworking of Christian theology becomes particularly interesting. He makes a distinction between devils and demons. The latter are powerful spiritual beings who have been supplanted by God. This divine usurper has imprisoned his rivals in hell, and the devils are God’s gaolers. With the demons safely out of the way, God has been able to exercise an iron rule over earth through the agency of his other servants, the angels.
However, the demons are fighting back. Led by Lucifer (who in this mythology is equated with Christ), they have carved out a free enclave within hell. Now they are seeking to regain a foothold on earth. For some time they have had human supporters but now their agent, Antichrist, has been born. The son of a human king and a fallen angel, he has the potential to transform this conflict into a cosmic confrontation.
The publishers would have us compare this with the works of Bernard Cornwell and George R.R. Martin. For me the obvious comparisons are Sarah Douglass’s Crucible trilogy, which operates from the remarkably similar premise of angels and demons interfering in the Hundred Years War, and Maurice Druon’s series Les Rois Maudits, which is a remarkable dramatisation of events in France preceding the Hundred Years War.
Alder’s characterisation is very impressive. The dramatis personae are all lovingly-crafted individuals with distinctive voices. Not surprisingly, the dialogue is utterly convincing. As a result of this care, I found myself sympathising with each character in turn, even with some who might simply be presented as one-dimensional villains in a less nuanced novel. This also has the effect of turning the novel into a complex network of interweaving stories as we follow each of the main characters in turn.
Equally compelling is the descriptive dimension of the novel. Alder brings the period to life in a way that is rarely the case with historical fantasy. If anything, his handling of the supernatural elements of the story is even more striking. I particularly liked his approach to the angels, which are portrayed as surreal, otherworldly, but recognisably humanoid beings. His devils come straight out of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.
In summary, the quality of writing is remarkably (even suspiciously) assured for an unknown novelist. The reason for this became apparent as I was browsing the publisher’s website some time after finishing the novel. It appears that Mark Alder is a new pseudonym rather than a new writer. This is, in fact, the work of M.D. Lachlan of Wolfsangel fame (which I reviewed enthusiastically four years ago).
I must confess I am less enthusiastic about Son of the Morning than I was about Wolfsangel, and as I worked my way through the latter half of the novel I became increasingly ambivalent: I wanted to luxuriate in the characterisation and description but I became impatient to get to the end. This problem was compounded by the sheer expansiveness of the storyline: it takes place over the best part of a decade; it is
composed as already mentioned of multiple storylines woven together to tell the larger story; and the parts don’t always hang together as well as they might.
I was left feeling that somehow the whole was less than the sum of the parts. Nevertheless, the whole is still a remarkably good read and a promising start to a new fantasy series. I look forward to the next volume.
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FAMADIHANA ON FOMALHAUT IV
Eric Brown
PS Publishing hb, 80pp, £12/£25 signed
WE THREE KIDS
Margo Lanagan
PS Publishing hb, 41pp, £8
Peter Tennant
Eric Brown’s Famadihana on Fomalhaut IV is the first book in the Telemass Quartet, set in a universe where humanity has colonised numerous planets and transportation between them is instantaneous. Matt Hendrick arrives on Fomalhaut IV, where humans live in harmony with a lemur like indigenous species, in pursuit of ex-wife Maatje, who has abducted their daughter. Throwing in his lot with Tiana Tandra, whose girlfriend Lalla has disappeared, Hendrick finds himself involved with an alien religion that promises to bring the dead back to life and pitted against humans who wish to use it for their own ends.
This novella reminded me very much of Martin’s story ‘A Song for Lya’, with its alien religion that appeals to humans, but while he grounds the work conceptually, Brown’s emphasis is more on adventure than philosophical implications, with plenty of plot twists along the way to an anticipated denouement. Hendrick is an engaging character, interacting well with the irrepressible Tiana, whose devotion to Lalla doesn’t exclude sex with other people. The two are feeling each other out, and we see evidence that Tiana has an agenda of her own, this angle adding a little extra frisson to the story, so that we can’t really be sure which way the character will jump. There are plenty of other plot complications courtesy of the Church of the Ultimate Redemption and a corrupt police force, while the Avoel are wonderfully realised, alien beings with an identity of their own embracing a distinct social and spiritual perspective. Underlying the fast paced and eventful story is Brown’s sense of wonder, with some vivid descriptions of the setting and an awareness of the rich potential in this universe of many races and planets that can be reached in a matter of seconds thanks to Telemass technology. While there is little here that seasoned readers won’t have seen before, Famadihana is an entertaining and agreeably exotic hybrid of adventure story and science fiction tale, with each factor playing well into the other, and I look forward to seeing where Brown will take the Telemass Quartet next.
Described as “a dance along the border between faith and fantasy”, Margo Lanagan’s novelette We Three Kids is told through the eyes of two characters, the girl Leah and carpenter Yoseph. Leah’s sister Shoshana finds three “star-children” on the Bethlehem rubbish tip and brings them back to the family home, where the children start to grow at an unprecedented rate, scaring the family when they begin to transform themselves and their surroundings. Meanwhile in a nearby stable, Yoseph waits for his wife Mariam to give birth to a son for whom angels have predicted great things, and in the wake of this event strangers arrive to pay homage.
Reading like an elegant, sophisticated fusion of the Nativity story, The Midwich Cuckoos and the tale of ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’, this is a narrative where only the reader is able to see the full picture, the link between star-children and visiting shepherds and kings, though at the end we too are as unsure as Yoseph and Leah about the resolution, with either of the two options available presenting us with fascinating possibilities. Lanagan’s strength lies in her portrayal of the characters, seen particularly in the interaction between the various members of Leah’s family and her depiction of the tension between Yoseph and his pregnant wife, gradually segueing into feelings of awe at what has happened in their lives. She is also superb at showing the nature of the intrusion of the star-children, stepping into the place where magic and advanced technology are indistinguishable. The end result is a compelling story, one that makes a virtue out of what it doesn’t tell us, the things the reader is left to infer, and which ultimately hinge on our own beliefs.
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FUTURE INTERRUPTED
JONATHAN McCALMONT
7. La Politique des Editeurs
Humans are said to be social creatures because they spend the bulk of their time in worlds that are born of social interaction. Other species live their lives manacled to things and places but humans live amongst words, principles and stories. These social worlds are so exhaustively complete that it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that the entire universe operates on a human level: Histories are filled with great people, religions turn the universe into a machine built to produce either salvation or enlightenment, and conspiracy theories take the world’s oceanic complexity and reduce it down to teacups filled with simple emotions such as fear, greed or hatred. Science fiction has a glorious track record of confronting our species’ egocentrism.
Arguably the most famous example of this type of story is Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations’ where a shuttle pilot is forced to chuck a stowaway out the airlock because the laws of physics are indifferent to human suffering. While an unsettling number of Hard SF stories are similarly questionable attempts to blame the laws of physics for behaving like a right-wing sociopath, more progressive works use a similar technique to edge us towards less harrowing political programmes. Back in 1986, David Brin and Gregory Benford collaborated on a frankly demented novel entitled The Heart of the Comet. Set inside Halley’s Comet, the book tells of an archetypal competent man who battles to save his fellow spacers from an alien infection before realising that the human body itself is nothing more than a succession of bacterial colonies co-existing in a symbiotic relationship. Thus, rather than seeking to defend the human against the inhuman, the book’s protagonist recognises the inhuman in all of us and so focuses on a way to allow the spacers to live in harmony with their environment. Similarly bizarre is Adam Roberts’s New Model Army in which a cybernetic mercenary company becomes so heavily networked that the company itself becomes self-aware and emerges as an entirely new form of life with its own desires and personality. Equally effective in making us refocus on a different class of entity is Bernard Beckett’s overlooked novel Genesis, which includes an attempt to reconstruct evolutionary biology with the meme rather than the gene as the primary focus. According to this theory, humans are little more than a means for ideas to spread and reproduce themselves. Having reached the point where the planet is struggling to sustain six billion idea-wombs, the memes most likely to survive are the ones that encourage the creation of new and more effective host mediums such as television, the Internet and artificial intelligence. However, while science fiction is full of books that compel us to blink and refocus our eyes on a universe not built on a human scale, science fiction itself is still prone to talking about itself in strictly human terms.
One of the most influential blinks in the history of Western culture came when a group of writers operating in and around the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma decided to begin talking about film in an entirely new way. Up until that moment, film critics had tended to talk about films in terms of their script, their cast, their genre and whether or not they were faithful to their source material. Disgusted by the ‘respectful’ literary adaptations that were dominating French cinema at the time, the Cahiers mob began to agitate on behalf of films that displayed cinema’s potential as an art form in its own right. This new way of looking at film demanded a new way of writing about film, one modelled on traditional literary criticism in which directors would assume the role of authors with the power to both find their own voice and make those voices heard in every film they made. Despite having had an enormous influence on the way that people talk about film, the so-called “politique des auteurs” (or ‘policy of authors’) has always been hamstrung by the fact that filmmaking is an inherently collaborative process in which the director is only a single voice in a ch
orus that grows along with the film’s budget. Many of today’s film critics shy away from that overly humanistic perspective, preferring instead to treat films as complex phenomena hewn from an assortment of social, political, cultural, economic and environmental forces. Science fiction is also a complex phenomenon and yet people seem reluctant to adopt a policy of editing.
When the shortlist for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award was found to contain nothing but books by male authors, the understandable first reaction was to accuse the jury of sexism. After all, the jurors had received a number of books by women but had chosen to perpetuate the gender inequalities in the field by choosing to look past them. However, as the author Liz Williams pointed out in an article written for the Guardian: The jury’s choices were not made in a vacuum but in a time and place where few science fiction novels by women were getting published. The market for science fiction was shrinking anyway and any woman intent upon chancing her arm in that particular market was forced to contend with the publishing industry’s self-fulfilling superstition that science fiction novels by women simply will not sell. In other words, the best way to understand the state of British science fiction in 2012 was not to look at books or the people who wrote them, but at the economics of genre publishing and the institutional sexism of the publishing industry as a whole. Some problems (including diversity) require you to blink and refocus.
As with film criticism, the groundwork for science fiction criticism was done by fans that loved individual books and got excited about particular authors. This humanistic approach to genre criticism explains why histories of science fiction tend to focus upon great authors breaking new ground rather than institutional factors such as economic and demographic changes in the marketplace. An excellent example of this overly humanistic approach is in the way that the history of the New Weird has come to rest on the figure of China Miéville inspiring a new generation of writers to ignore traditional genre boundaries. What they do not talk about is the fact that while Miéville’s work may or may not have inspired a new generation of writers, it definitely changed economic realities by proving that novels could sell to large audiences without fitting into a particular marketing category. The ongoing dissolution of genre boundaries owes less to individual vision and creativity than it does to economic reality: Fantasy outsells science fiction by an order of magnitude and allowing fantasy to stray into the realm of science fiction means that more books can be sold to a much larger audience. When one talks about the exhaustion and death of science fiction, what one is actually talking about are the collapse of a particular market and a means of selling books. Just as contemporary marketers are more likely to appeal to the audience’s desire to be individuals than they are to their desire to appear respectable, the publishing industry finds it easier to sell escapist adventures than stories filled with scientific wisdom and philosophical curiosity.
Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014 Page 14
