He tried to imagine what it would be like to actually believe this stuff. To feel invisible danger all around. To not know if the next person you met was human or something else entirely that was out to get you, one way or another. When they’d studied the superstitions of early cultures it had never occurred to him just how stressful it would be, just how paranoid it must make you feel. [loc. 942]
Rab lives in Stack 367-74, Delta Grid, Northwest Europasia. It's far in the future, after the Catastrophe Ages -- the Nadir, the Flood and the Bulge, the latter an immense population explosion which led to the Alexander Decision and antaphrodisiacs in the drinking water. Rab wants to be an archaeologist, and his mother is keen for him to move ahead, move out: she buys him a Retro-Dimensional Time Wender with Full Cloaking Capability, a wearable time-machine which will transport Rab to a different time while keeping him in the same geographical location. He makes a quick trip to 1850, anchoring his trip to the massive storm that exposed a Neolithic village buried under the sands -- but disaster strikes and he finds himself, injured and amnesiac, in Skara Brae just before it was abandoned.
Rab was seen falling from the sky (his journey began high up in a Stack) by a young woman named Cait, who's also an outsider, an Offlander. Cait is apprentice to the village wise woman, Voy, who's taken custody of Rab's 'silver skin', believing him to be a selkie. Perhaps because of something she's seen in a vision, Voy is more than happy to let Rab and Cait spend time together, and Rab learns a great deal from Cait about Neolithic society and religion, about life close to nature, and about love. But he also knows the settlement is doomed -- and with his suit, and his implanted AI, damaged, he's afraid that he will share the villagers' fate.
I enjoyed this novel, with its framing Victorian narrative which describes the uncovering of Skara Brae in 1850 through the perspective of a young woman woken by the storm. There were a couple of elements I wasn't entirely convinced by (for instance, the word 'seal' -- meaning both the closure of Rab's suit and the aquatic mammal -- being a word recognisable by Neolithic Orcadians when Rab says it) and I felt the ending was rather abrupt. But I'd recently been reading about Skara Brae (see Shadowlands) and it was fascinating to see it brought to life, with great attention to detail and respect for the archaeology done at the site.
This is a YA novel and Rab and Cait come across as quite young, though there are some fairly adult themes hinted at throughout the story. Joan Lennon seems to write mostly for younger age groups, but I do hope she writes more YA.
No comments:
Post a Comment