Tag Archives: novel

Reviews: Exit Party

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Exit Party,
Emily St John Mandel,
Picador
Hardback, 320 Pages
ISBN: 9781035081288

Toronto Book Award and Arthur C Clarke Award winner, Emily St John Mandel returns, following her excellent Sea of Tranquillity (reviewed here), with a new novel Exit Party. As with Tranquillity, this narrative takes in different places and times, with different characters who are connected. Indeed the times, places and people are more connected than they can know at the start.

It’s the very near-future, and Ari has just been released from a long prison sentence, sharing an apartment in LA with her friend, Gloria. A civil war has just finished, and the US no longer really exists, having broken up into a series of competing regions, states and even city-states, with warring militias everywhere. Ari and Gloria are celebrating the end of the curfew and the removal of the last peacekeeper troops from the streets of the Californian Republic.

It’s at a party hosted by Kareem, a friend of Gloria’s, that Ari first starts to notice strange things – she’s always had a knack, an intuition of sorts for when something is about to happen or something peculiar is about, even when others don’t notice at first. In this case she observes a beautiful woman in a gorgeous dress, then later the same woman, now dressed down. At first she assumes she changed – perhaps she spilled something on her dress? But then she sees both women at the same time, something unusual happens to Gloria, and then Kareem vanishes. She sees him, goes to talk to him, but he’s gone from the room he entered, and she can’t see how he could have exited without her seeing him.

What begins as a gentle tug at her senses that something peculiar happened starts to build slowly, bit by bit, over the narrative. Ari’s intuition tells her when to move to another location to escape possible danger, and in this fragmented former US, danger is everywhere. She meets Nico in another city, who was also at that party, except she knew this woman under another name, but yes, this is the same person. Or is it? They talk warily and eventually Nico confesses she too saw odd things at the party, and confirms Kareem has never been seen since, and she confirms the double sightings of others, almost like there were two, slightly different versions of the same people. In fact Nico calls Ari “Ibari” when she first meets her, not a version of her name that Ari goes by, so she is puzzled how Nico would even know it.

As with Tranquillity, we move through different character perspectives, including “Ibari”, who is a federal officer, a kind of not so secret police officer in a US that didn’t disintegrate like Ari’s, but which is now a totalitarian regime, where children inform on their own parents (but hey, crime is low and the trains run on time!), a total opposite from Ari’s fractured, disintegrating US. We move through the characters and through the years, and as with her previous book, Mandel rather deftly takes all of these pieces of the puzzle, and arranged them, facet by facet, until we have the whole jewel, bringing all the connections together, each illuminating the other strands.

I don’t want to go into it any further because of possible spoilers, but suffice to say that as with Sea of Tranquillity, I found this not only an interesting narrative, but a beautiful bit of writing craft, to float various characters and spaces and times, then slowly bring them together; as with that previous book I found this highly satisfying.

Exit Party is published in Hardback by Picador/Macmillan on the 17th of September; this review was originally penned for The Shoreline of Infinity

If you are able, please support your local independent bookshop for purchases – if you don’t have one nearby, you can buy through Bookshop.org , and nominate a local bookshop, which will get a cut of the sale (to hell with Spamazon!)

Reviews: The Red Sacrament

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The Red Sacrament,
Sara Hinkley,
Titan Books,
Paperback,
ISBN: 9781835410820

It’s Paris, 1869, an era when this most famous of cities is claiming its title as “the city of light”; the new Haussmann boulevards, enormous department stores like the famous Au Printemps dazzle with size, light and sheer range of goods, the pavement cafes bustle, the opera and theatres are busy, the many new squares and garden spaces are lined with flaneurs, and the new gas lighting illuminates everything.

This is not entirely to the taste of our main protagonist, Arnault, who runs the small Théâtre Saint-Siméon , tucked away from these elegant, wide, new streets. It is an unusual venue, where one cannot purchase a ticket – instead black tickets are distributed out among certain sections of society, free of charge, and many are keen to obtain one. How does the theatre sustains itself with no box office, you may ask? It transpires the cast has, shall we say, other methods of obtaining an income, and that income is only secondary to something else they require more urgently: blood.

Yes, this is a theatre of vampiric actors and singers and jugglers; some have only been undead a few years, others performed their stage trade at the open-air fairs of the old Paris, centuries before. Arnault himself is the oldest; a monk and scribe once upon a time, chosen by a pale nobleman to become his painter apprentice. Despite his centuries of existence, he maintains the low, careful profile for himself and his troupe, and truth be told, he takes little interest in the events of the outside world, which tend to surprise him when he notices, giving him a slightly grumpy old man aura, despite his youthful appearance, as he mutters about everything changing around him, as the Modern Era really starts to show.

(Portrait of Clémentine, Mrs Alphones, by Henri Lehmann, in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the original artwork the book cover design is based on)

Into this fairly static existence – select pieces to perform, rehearse, put on a season on the stage, arrange the usual bribes and covering charges, putting aside takings from their victims into a pool that accrues interest for these immortals over the years – disruption is about to arrive, partly in the form of something unusual. Not just two new vampires from another country (from the New World, the islands of the Caribbean!), but a brother and sister, both vampires, both beautiful, elegant, happy in this new world of artificial lights, masked balls, operas and department stores where they can buy whatever they desire.

The other disruption bearing down on them, almost unnoticed at first – such is Arnault’s disinterest in the wider world – is history itself. As anyone familiar with European history will be aware, this is the era of the Franco-Prussian War, which the French assumed they would win easily, but in fact lead to a humiliating defeat, a long siege of Paris itself (the infamous one where the restaurants butchered the zoo animals and served them in fine sauces as food became scarcer), the surrender of territory and the establishment of what would become a united Germany (laying the groundwork for all the alliances and grievances which would lead to disaster in 1914). How do the citizens deal with the cold and hunger or a months-long siege? And how do vampires sustain themselves when their prey is harder to find at night, and what they find is mostly weak and starving?

(The Siege of Paris, 1870, by Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier)

There are obvious nods to the queen of vampire fiction, Anne Rice – her sequel to the now iconic Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, also boasted an exclusive theatre in Paris run by vampires, and both are clearly paying homage to the famous, or infamous, real Théâtre de Grand Guignol, which was a fixture in the city’s demi-monde for many decades. And while Rice fans (myself included) will find some familiar material here, this is, I am happy to report, its own beast, albeit one Rice fans will enjoy, I think. Sumptuous descriptions of the new, improved Paris, and especially of the styles of the period (Hinkley herself is a costume designer for film and stage) are rich, and it all comes with a nice sense of the Gothic.

Add in a witch from a backward, rural part of France (not even touched by “the iron rail”, as Arnault refers to the trains), this young, new vampire brother and sister who they know next to nothing about (exciting new friends? It has been decades since they last saw a new vampire visit the city. Or are they a threat to their comfortably carved out existence?), a potential queer romance as Arnault finds himself, despite his normal reticence to anything new, towards Victor, the visiting male vampire, who in turns seems quite taken with Arnault (unlike his sister who seems to disdain the entire group), and then the historical siege, and you have a rich, Gothic, romantic, bloody stew to enjoy, which also makes gentle commentaries on ageing, on the nature of change and moving on.

The Red Sacrament was published by Titan in July; this review was originally penned for The Shoreline of Infinity

If you are able, please support your local independent bookshop for purchases – if you don’t have one nearby, you can buy through Bookshop.org , and nominate a local bookshop, which will get a cut of the sale (to hell with Spamazon!)

Reviews: Beyond the Hallowed Sky

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Beyond the Hallowed Sky,
Ken MacLeod,
Orbit Books

I’m always happy when there is a new Ken MacLeod book to be read; for my money he is one of the UK’s most consistently impressive and thought-provoking SF writers. In Beyond the Hallowed Sky we have not only a new book, but the start of a trilogy – the Lightspeed series. As that would suggest, this is a story in which the development of FTL (Faster Than Light) travel is fairly prominent. In the summer of 2067, Lakshmi Nayak receives an old-fashioned, physical letter, containing detailed mathematical proofs, which would seem to indicate that FTL travel is in fact possible. It seems to echo some thoughts she has already had but not fully formulated, but who was thinking not only on the same lines but ahead of her, and knows of her interest to contact her? Examining the letter the seemingly impossible explanation is that she sent it to herself – from the future…

After finally publishing the work, Lakshmi’s reputation is ruined by many of her peers; she eventually decides to take an offer to defect to the Union bloc and travels to Scotland, a member state, where after some Le Carre-esque spycraft in the middle of Edinburgh, the Union’s AI guides her around the spies of rival powers and to a job interview on the west coast. The job offer is genuine, but the AI has other reasons, not least the development of her FTL ideas into a workable engine for a starship.

This brings us to the Clyde Coast and John Grant, a “responsible” (a person who was seriously active and important in a previous revolution in the Union) and his comrades who run an engineering co-operative making ships on the Clyde. The AI guides them together to start a collaboration which could create the first FTL ship – rather pleasingly, Clyde-built, like the great ships of the previous two centuries of tradition on that great river.

But there’s more going on here – out for a coastal stroll John sees a submarine leaving the Faslane naval base – in this decade Scotland is no longer part of the UK, but an independent member of the Union. However, Westminster held onto the vital nuclear submarine base of Faslane as part of the deal, and shares it with their US allies. When John sees a submarine leave the base and sail out into open water it’s nothing unusual – until it seems to hover above the waves for a moment before vanishing in a shimmering haze. Most don’t believe him, the all-seeing AI carefully wipes his photographic evidence from his devices. Is it possible that FTL is not only possible, but other power blocs already have it?

MacLeod proceeds to gives us an expanding universe with three main arcs: our future Scotland and the small team trying to engineer their FTL ship (without the rival power blocs knowing), a Union science team on a floating base in the violent atmosphere of Venus, paying host to a visiting android who is also a spy for British Intelligence (which they are aware of, all sides are playing a version of The Great Game here), and a distant world around another star, reached by FTL, and the science teams operating there. Crossing all of this is a discovery that ties all three worlds together in a way that isn’t clear yet.

The multiple, overlapping story arcs work nicely to build up a three dimensional picture of this future society, dominated by three rival power blocs; as with a number of his previous works, MacLeod conjures up a believable socio-political structure, giving it just enough details that we can grasp the situation but not bogging it down with too much exposition, so the narrative flows at a good rate of knots. Along the way we get to consider various weighty topics, from the notions of political ideology and patriotism to the use and limits of AI in the human sphere, and the exploration/exploitation of other worlds. Looking forward to the second volume.

This review was originally penned for Shoreline of Infinity, Scotland’s leading journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Reviews: Sea of Tranquility

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Sea of Tranquillity,
Emily St, John Mandel,
Picador

Mandel, who won huge acclaim and the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award for Station Eleven (recently adapted into a TV series), returns with a fascinating take on the time travel tale. Taking us from the vast forests of British Columbia in 1912, where a young aristocrat, Edwin St. Andrew, has a strange, momentary audio-visual experience involving a glimpse of a building and violin music, a famous author, Olive Llewellyn, two centuries later, leaving her Lunar colony home for a book tour on Earth, with a new novel that includes a scene with a violin player in a huge airship terminal, but momentarily seeing huge trees, and further into the future, the unusually named Gaspery-Jacques Roberts (named by his mother for a character in Llewellyn’s novel), in an era where time travel exists but is understandably tightly controlled. Gaspery-Jacques is tasked with investigating a potential anomaly in different time periods, an anomaly involving violin music…

Mandel takes us chronologically through these different lives in different periods, introducing us to the different characters, giving us a glimpse of their lives, their worlds, and then deftly drawing them together, through the anomaly. Is it just a weird coincidence linking these disparate lives and time periods, or is there an actual fault in time itself – and if so, is it naturally occurring or the result of human interference? Or… could it be something else again? Gasper-Jacques’s sister, a physicist with the Time Institute has an interest in Simulation Theory, the idea that what we assume is the real universe around us is in fact an advanced computer simulation, that we are, in effect, all living in the Matrix. And perhaps this anomaly is a glitch in the Matrix?

The narrative manages to be both chronological yet circular, exploring the nature of this potential anomaly; I really am wary of saying too much because I don’t want to spoil it, and with all three segments being so interrelated it’s impossible to talk about certain events without massive spoilers. Suffice to say I found Mandel handled this rotation through the timelines and the various people in a very satisfying manner. The book also raises a lot of interesting questions – for instance, the few licensed to go back in time have a strict non-interference policy, like the temporal Prime Directive in Star Trek. Very sensible you may well think, protect the integrity of the timeline – after all, we can’t know what even minor alterations could have on the unfolding centuries of events that follow.

But, as Gaspery-Jacques is told in his training, when they visit a period, they know everything about most of the people they will encounter, their entire biographies. He could meet people at a party, for example, and know that one woman he is chatting to so amiably is destined to die soon, and not in an unavoidable way such as a fatal disease, but by a simple accident. Despite knowing this he absolutely could not tell her to avoid driving on that particular road next week. As his sister tells him, you effectively have to shut down your empathic, human side and remain totally detached; easier said than done. The issues raised by the possibility of Simulation Theory are likewise fascinating in their philosophical ramifications (I was reminded of the compelling documentary A Glitch in the Matrix which came out last year and explored this in some depth), both to the Big Questions of Life, The Universe And Everything, and the smaller, personal, individual elements (what would this mean for our lives, the lives of those we love?).

I can see this being a cracking read to do for my long-running book group, there’s a lot of questions and moral quandaries raised here that would be perfect for book group discussion material! Thought-provoking and very satisfying reading, I raced through this and couldn’t stop.

Sea of Tranquility is published late April 2022 by Picador

This review was originally penned for Shoreline of Infinity, Scotland’s leading journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy.