This is an odd, circular little story, a chapbook rather than a novel. (Some authors would probably have spun out the story to novel-length. Tuttle doesn't waste words.)
The narrator (I'm not sure she is ever named) is a widow, a writer who wasn't written a word since the sudden death of her husband. After a visit to an art gallery, she's taken with the idea of writing the biography of Helen Ralston -- Muse to renowned Scottish artist Willy Logan, and an artist and writer in her own right. The narrator of the tale admits strong influence from Ralston's books, especially In Troy, and is intrigued by the account of what happened to Logan and Ralston on a small island just off the coast, where Logan was struck blind. And now it turns out that Helen Ralston is still alive ...
The story's an unsettling blend of horrific and mundane. Something magical does happen: Logan's blindness is explained. But the gaps in Helen Ralston's narrative, and the connections between the two women, have a logic that is simple and compelling, never mind the happy ending. (That last para sits oddly for me, too.)
Sunday, April 30, 2006
#39: The Courage Consort -- Michael Faber
This is a quick read but a lasting one. The Courage Consort is a five-piece vocal ensemble, specialising in avant-garde music: Roger Courage, the founder, his wife Catherine, mezzo Dagmar (German, twenty-something, will illegitimate baby), Ben Lamb (bass), and Julian (tenor, waspish). They're being given two weeks in a Belgian chateau to rehearse their next performance, the fiendishly difficult Partitum Mutante, by slimy Euro-composer Fugazza.
Roger and Catherine's marriage is not a happy one, though the lack of happiness is not to blame for Catherine's depression. Catherine, who forgets to pack her anti-depressants, who drifts off to sleep contemplating -- no, idly wondering about the practicalities of -- suicide; who hears voices, cries, in the forest that no one else can hear. Roger scarcely hears her. Beside the others, Catherine seems colourless and silent, but the focus of the novella remains on her throughout. I doubt it's coincidence that she carries the long, high final note in Partitum Mutante.
Something happens to, or within, Catherine in the forest one night, something that's never described or even alluded to. Something's changed, and there is only the slightest hint of it before a choice she might have made is permanently denied. But Catherine is changed.
The more I think about The Courage Consort, the more I suspect it's a study of the ensemble and how they work together: not only in the obvious sense of making music, or the secondary layer of rubbing each other the wrong way, but in how they cope with intrusions (the cleaning lady, Fugazza, etc) and, eventually, with crisis.
Roger and Catherine's marriage is not a happy one, though the lack of happiness is not to blame for Catherine's depression. Catherine, who forgets to pack her anti-depressants, who drifts off to sleep contemplating -- no, idly wondering about the practicalities of -- suicide; who hears voices, cries, in the forest that no one else can hear. Roger scarcely hears her. Beside the others, Catherine seems colourless and silent, but the focus of the novella remains on her throughout. I doubt it's coincidence that she carries the long, high final note in Partitum Mutante.
Something happens to, or within, Catherine in the forest one night, something that's never described or even alluded to. Something's changed, and there is only the slightest hint of it before a choice she might have made is permanently denied. But Catherine is changed.
The more I think about The Courage Consort, the more I suspect it's a study of the ensemble and how they work together: not only in the obvious sense of making music, or the secondary layer of rubbing each other the wrong way, but in how they cope with intrusions (the cleaning lady, Fugazza, etc) and, eventually, with crisis.
#38: Vellum -- Hal Duncan
There is so much in Vellum that it's hard to consider the book as a whole: doesn't help that the sequel, Ink, won't appear until 2007. Time, in this novel, is three-dimensional, which makes causality a whole new ballgame. Characters slip in and out of summer 1970; relics from a lost civilisation come to light in 1921; the hands of the clock run backwards; "It's August 4th, 2017. Sort of."
Space, though, is flat -- or at least looks that way, a world without end depicted on the map that Guy Reynard Carter steals from a university library. (This first scene starts off horribly like my vague impression of The Da Vinci Code , though unarguably better-written.)
It's not space, as such. It's the Vellum. a limitless landscape of possibility that can be traversed by those in the know. When Guy first opens the book, he finds a map of the city (Glasgow, more or less) that's subtly different from the world he knows. Turning the page, the scale increases, the map zooms out. And out. And out. "A world where Greenland was an island in a river's mouth ... Asia and the Americas were mere promontories ...". The world Guy knows is a fleck in the middle of the Vellum (for the map, like a crypto-GPS, centres itself on the observer): and, knowing this, he can flee the suddenly-empty city, can run and keep running after meaning.
Spoilers from here on in.
There are a lot of narratives in Vellum, though sometimes they're iterations of the same basic story. There's the tale of Phreedom (hippie parents) and her brother Thomas, who discover they're unkin, more than human. There's a war in heaven, or for heaven, and the angels of the Covenant (the good guys, allegedly: they want an end to chaos and change) come calling, demanding that the two 'hatchlings' choose a side. Metatron, the voice of God, the author of the Book of All Hours, is black as shadow, and the 'book' he carries, with details of every unkin and the ways in which their lifelines cross, is a PDA.
Phreedom's story echoes Inanna's, a tale from Sumerian myth of a goddess who goes to the underworld to bring her betrayed lover back. Seamus Finnan, friend to Phreedom and Thomas (looks about 20, acts a hundred years older) has a role in that myth too, and in other stories. No one in this novel -- except, perhaps, Guy -- is singular: everyone is bound to everyone else by love, betrayal, death. Jack Carter is a university friend of Guy's; an angel of fire; a terrorist (Jack Flash) in a steampunk Empire; a body on the beach; a wild man encountered by Guy and Puck (green-haired and horned; but 'Puck' is Thomas's nickname, sometimes) on a post-apocalyptic veldt; a student reading his eponymous grandfather's account of a lost city in Anatolia; a man who mutilates himself after his lover (Puck again) is murdered ... and possibly Phreedom's son.
There's familiar and fictionalised accounts of Scottish socialism, war in the Middle East, the murder of Matthew Shepard; there are nanotech bitmites created by the Covenant but beguiled by an old-new Prometheus; there are richly baroque landscapes (a couple reminded me, for no good reason, of early Banks), and exotic vehicles in which to travel over them; there are some truly savage scenes that would be horrific even if they weren't firmly rooted in the real.
Hal Duncan's prose is, on the whole, magnificent (there were a couple of passages where polemic or exuberance overwhelmed, and a couple more when I was thrown by what was probably a proofreader's oversight). He switches narrative voices with ease and assurance. (But should insist that, if different fonts are being used to distinguish between threads -- a largely unnecessary technique here, I'd say -- they're sufficiently different that the reader doesn't get distracted by examining the hooks of y's, the slant of hyphens.) His knack for showing past and present in the same scene makes me grind my teeth with envy. Vivid images are still fermenting in my head, and probably will be even when Ink appears. I can't wait to see how all the threads come together: the road north, the skin-books, the gravings, the Republic of Heaven.
Or, you know, whatever new comes in instead.
I liked this book so much that I'm not going to complain about 'off of'. <g>
Space, though, is flat -- or at least looks that way, a world without end depicted on the map that Guy Reynard Carter steals from a university library. (This first scene starts off horribly like my vague impression of The Da Vinci Code , though unarguably better-written.)
It's not space, as such. It's the Vellum. a limitless landscape of possibility that can be traversed by those in the know. When Guy first opens the book, he finds a map of the city (Glasgow, more or less) that's subtly different from the world he knows. Turning the page, the scale increases, the map zooms out. And out. And out. "A world where Greenland was an island in a river's mouth ... Asia and the Americas were mere promontories ...". The world Guy knows is a fleck in the middle of the Vellum (for the map, like a crypto-GPS, centres itself on the observer): and, knowing this, he can flee the suddenly-empty city, can run and keep running after meaning.
Spoilers from here on in.
There are a lot of narratives in Vellum, though sometimes they're iterations of the same basic story. There's the tale of Phreedom (hippie parents) and her brother Thomas, who discover they're unkin, more than human. There's a war in heaven, or for heaven, and the angels of the Covenant (the good guys, allegedly: they want an end to chaos and change) come calling, demanding that the two 'hatchlings' choose a side. Metatron, the voice of God, the author of the Book of All Hours, is black as shadow, and the 'book' he carries, with details of every unkin and the ways in which their lifelines cross, is a PDA.
Phreedom's story echoes Inanna's, a tale from Sumerian myth of a goddess who goes to the underworld to bring her betrayed lover back. Seamus Finnan, friend to Phreedom and Thomas (looks about 20, acts a hundred years older) has a role in that myth too, and in other stories. No one in this novel -- except, perhaps, Guy -- is singular: everyone is bound to everyone else by love, betrayal, death. Jack Carter is a university friend of Guy's; an angel of fire; a terrorist (Jack Flash) in a steampunk Empire; a body on the beach; a wild man encountered by Guy and Puck (green-haired and horned; but 'Puck' is Thomas's nickname, sometimes) on a post-apocalyptic veldt; a student reading his eponymous grandfather's account of a lost city in Anatolia; a man who mutilates himself after his lover (Puck again) is murdered ... and possibly Phreedom's son.
There's familiar and fictionalised accounts of Scottish socialism, war in the Middle East, the murder of Matthew Shepard; there are nanotech bitmites created by the Covenant but beguiled by an old-new Prometheus; there are richly baroque landscapes (a couple reminded me, for no good reason, of early Banks), and exotic vehicles in which to travel over them; there are some truly savage scenes that would be horrific even if they weren't firmly rooted in the real.
Hal Duncan's prose is, on the whole, magnificent (there were a couple of passages where polemic or exuberance overwhelmed, and a couple more when I was thrown by what was probably a proofreader's oversight). He switches narrative voices with ease and assurance. (But should insist that, if different fonts are being used to distinguish between threads -- a largely unnecessary technique here, I'd say -- they're sufficiently different that the reader doesn't get distracted by examining the hooks of y's, the slant of hyphens.) His knack for showing past and present in the same scene makes me grind my teeth with envy. Vivid images are still fermenting in my head, and probably will be even when Ink appears. I can't wait to see how all the threads come together: the road north, the skin-books, the gravings, the Republic of Heaven.
Or, you know, whatever new comes in instead.
I liked this book so much that I'm not going to complain about 'off of'. <g>
Monday, April 24, 2006
#37: The Tourmaline -- Paul Park
The Tourmaline follows A Princess of Roumania (reviewed for Vector here), and will make no sense to anyone who hasn't read the previous instalment. Even those who have read Princess may flounder: this is the second half of a book intended as a single volume, split at what initially seems an awkward point. The end of Princess has great dramatic impact, but the logical division seems to be about 100 pages into The Tourmaline.
I'll be reviewing this for Vector, too, so I'll restrict myself to subjective reactions here. Things I won't necessarily say in a formal review, such as the irritation I feel when Park tells us that a character speaks for a long time, but doesn't tell us what he said. Ten out of ten for obfuscation and po-mo narrative devices: nil points for seamlessness. Or the indulgent thrill I feel when Park layers his cosmologies: not only is this a pre-Copernican universe with the Earth at its centre (or so I deduce from the first volume) but those aren't planets, whirling 'round the alternate Earth. (Or perhaps they are. Trust no one in this novel.)
Park's prose still has that crystalline quality, but now I'm thinking of distorting lenses and ghost images. I like his scientific magic, with its discredited key texts. I like his villainess. I revel in not especially liking Miranda, or Peter. I guessed the twist on the penultimate page. I'm looking forward to Andromeda, Abyssinia, the false son and the true. I can't begin to imagine how Park will tie up the story, or how many more books are to come.
I'll be reviewing this for Vector, too, so I'll restrict myself to subjective reactions here. Things I won't necessarily say in a formal review, such as the irritation I feel when Park tells us that a character speaks for a long time, but doesn't tell us what he said. Ten out of ten for obfuscation and po-mo narrative devices: nil points for seamlessness. Or the indulgent thrill I feel when Park layers his cosmologies: not only is this a pre-Copernican universe with the Earth at its centre (or so I deduce from the first volume) but those aren't planets, whirling 'round the alternate Earth. (Or perhaps they are. Trust no one in this novel.)
Park's prose still has that crystalline quality, but now I'm thinking of distorting lenses and ghost images. I like his scientific magic, with its discredited key texts. I like his villainess. I revel in not especially liking Miranda, or Peter. I guessed the twist on the penultimate page. I'm looking forward to Andromeda, Abyssinia, the false son and the true. I can't begin to imagine how Park will tie up the story, or how many more books are to come.
#36: The Five People You Meet in Heaven -- Mitch Albom
I bought this book just after my father died, and am relieved that I didn't read it then: Eddie, Albom's protagonist, is an oily-handed maintenance man like my dad was, and he's just a little older, it being his 83rd birthday that's his last.
Eddie is the maintenance man at Ruby Pier, a faded seaside fairground somewhere on the east coast of America. He's still working, still enjoying his work, though he's crippled by arthritis and a war wound. He's a lonely old man who takes pleasure in doing his job well, and -- never having had a child of his own -- in entertaining the children who come to the pier.
On his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies. And the rest of the novel is what it says on the front: The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Heaven, at least to start with, looks a lot like Ruby Pier, and Albom's concise, lucid, unselfconscious prose is strong on evocative sensory description. Each of Eddie's five people is waiting to teach, or remind, or explain to him a simple truth, and while these are suitably life-affirming and positive, Albom doesn't over-sugar the narrative. Some things can't be fixed. Some events scar for life.
There are some suitably philosophical one-liners ("No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.") and some heart-wrenching exchanges (your mileage may vary), but the novel is not nearly as mawkish or sentimental as I'd feared. Neither is it overtly religious. Although there are references to God, this is a heaven without angels -- at least, without angels of the traditional sort.
Interwoven with the five people and their five heavens -- including a heaven made of marriages, and one that makes sense of the soundtrack to Eddie's dreams -- are snapshots of Eddie on various birthdays, and those, as much as the post-mortem explanations and understanding, comprise a portrait of a quiet yet meaningful life.
Perhaps it only seems so to me because I'm still grieving, but this is a very calm novel, very thought-provoking and reflective ... not only in itself but in the sense of reflecting whatever's on the reader's mind.
Once she'd gone, he let the days go stale. He put his heart to sleep.
Eddie is the maintenance man at Ruby Pier, a faded seaside fairground somewhere on the east coast of America. He's still working, still enjoying his work, though he's crippled by arthritis and a war wound. He's a lonely old man who takes pleasure in doing his job well, and -- never having had a child of his own -- in entertaining the children who come to the pier.
On his 83rd birthday, Eddie dies. And the rest of the novel is what it says on the front: The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Heaven, at least to start with, looks a lot like Ruby Pier, and Albom's concise, lucid, unselfconscious prose is strong on evocative sensory description. Each of Eddie's five people is waiting to teach, or remind, or explain to him a simple truth, and while these are suitably life-affirming and positive, Albom doesn't over-sugar the narrative. Some things can't be fixed. Some events scar for life.
There are some suitably philosophical one-liners ("No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.") and some heart-wrenching exchanges (your mileage may vary), but the novel is not nearly as mawkish or sentimental as I'd feared. Neither is it overtly religious. Although there are references to God, this is a heaven without angels -- at least, without angels of the traditional sort.
Interwoven with the five people and their five heavens -- including a heaven made of marriages, and one that makes sense of the soundtrack to Eddie's dreams -- are snapshots of Eddie on various birthdays, and those, as much as the post-mortem explanations and understanding, comprise a portrait of a quiet yet meaningful life.
Perhaps it only seems so to me because I'm still grieving, but this is a very calm novel, very thought-provoking and reflective ... not only in itself but in the sense of reflecting whatever's on the reader's mind.
Once she'd gone, he let the days go stale. He put his heart to sleep.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Review for Vector: A Princess of Roumania, by Paul Park
This review appeared in Vector, the critical journal of the BSFA, #243 (November / December 2005).
"I used to love those stories where the girl feels she doesn't belong, and she's having some kind of problems, and she wakes up in a different country -- just like this. ... This isn't that kind of story."
"I used to love those stories where the girl feels she doesn't belong, and she's having some kind of problems, and she wakes up in a different country -- just like this. ... This isn't that kind of story."
This isn't that kind of story: but at first you might think that it is. A Princess of Roumania introduces Miranda, a teenage girl living in small-town Massachussetts, who's haunted by memories of her early childhood. She has been told that she was adopted from an orphanage in Romania at the age of three, after her parents disappeared during the uprising against Ceausescu. She remembers playing on a beach, and travelling on a train, and a cottage in a forest; and these vividly visual memories, together with a bundle of keepsakes (a bracelet, some antique coins, a book -- The Essential History -- in a language she can't read), are all that she has of her parents and her origins.
These mementos, these symbolic quest-objects, draw the reader's attention. It's simple to construct a plot around them: a tale of a princess snatched from her home to be reared by common folk until she is adult enough to claim her inheritance, right wrongs, overthrow the oppressor and free her country. It's easy to think that we're reading that story, and Park knows it, is complicit in it.
But the tale is not entirely Miranda's. The Baroness Nicola Ceausescu sits in a tall house in Bucharest, in (we are told) 'a different time'. She has sent her servants, spirit-children under her magical control, after Miranda. She sits reading the other copy -- there are only two in all of time and space -- of The Essential History, and marvelling at the convoluted history (Hitler, Stalin, Communism) of the world it describes. "Such a tangle of invention, and for what?" This is not her world. The Baroness's world is at the centre of a pre-Copernican universe, the planets turning around it in concentric spheres. In her world England was destroyed by a tidal wave in the 17th century: some of the survivors fled to the Continent. (Newton was made welcome in Berlin.) In her world, Massachussetts is a wilderness.
Opposing the Baroness is the Princess Aegypta Schenk von Schenk, author of The Essential History: nobility reduced to poverty by the machinations of the Empress Valeria and her party. Aegypta is Miranda's aunt, and it is she who arranged for the infant Miranda to be hidden in a place of safety. The Baroness, though, has discovered that safe place, and Miranda is being drawn back to her homeland.
Miranda does not come willingly, or alone. She is accompanied by Peter Gross, a one-armed boy to whom she's drawn despite her thoughtless rejection of anyone who isn't clever and popular, and by her best friend Andromeda, who is smart and tough and feisty. But when they pass from this world to that other, Andromeda and Peter are dramatically, physically changed. And Miranda changes too, though it's not so obvious. She loses her certainty, her understanding, her confidence: and the reader flounders with her.
The story's told from a number of viewpoints (Miranda, Peter, the Baroness, the Elector of Ratisbon) yet never immerses the reader fully in any one character's perceptions. For example, during Miranda's narrative, we recognise her adoptive father's flash of joy when she quotes his own advice back at him. Scattered throughout the novel are observations and remarks that at first glance seem transparent. The metaphor that springs to mind is panning out: the author drawing back to show the reader some context.
Yet the context that's revealed is not necessarily the obvious one. There are subtleties of tone and shading, and of narrative pace, that steer the reader towards one understanding, and then another. This blurring of reality, this lack of definition, mirrors Miranda's own confusion. It bestows unexpected, and not necessarily reliable, insights into the characters' motivations, beliefs, and identities.
Park's achievement lies in the clarity of his prose, and in his careful, precise rendition of character. Many young heroines behave like grown women, but Miranda is credibly teenaged, utterly rooted in the world she's grown up in (transported to the North American wilderness, she still thinks of Albany as 'forty-five minutes' drive away') and not always very likeable. Peter is perhaps less believable an American teenager, but there are hints that he is, at heart, neither American nor teenaged. And the Baroness Ceaucescu, whose villainy is made explicit at her first appearance, has depth and dimension to such an extent that by the end of the book -- the first, damn, of a series, though it's not clear how many volumes this will comprise -- I began to wonder if this was her story, and not Miranda's at all.
This book will be compared to Pullman's His Dark Materials, and to the works of Jonathan Carroll and Gene Wolfe (and, inevitably, to the Harry Potter series, with which the sole consonance seems to be the fact that Miranda and her friends are teenagers). All these comparisons are in some sense valid, yet all fall short. Interestingly, too, every review I've seen seems to find a different interpretation of the events, the setting and the characters. A Princess of Roumania is like nothing except itself: bittersweet, clear and cold and
complex.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Review for Strange Horizons: Living Next-Door to the God of Love (Justina Robson)
Originally published here: http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2006/04/living_ne.shtml. Some remarks by the author (and others) at Eastercon make me wonder if I have missed a vital aspect of Plot at the end of the novel!
My original review here: http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2006/02/10-living-next-door-to-god-of-love.html
My original review here: http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2006/02/10-living-next-door-to-god-of-love.html
In Natural History, Justina Robson gave us a tale of alien contact with a happy ending: a brave new world where the lost and rootless, the restless and adventurous, were offered the opportunity to become one with a benevolent consciousness, Unity, that offered them a kind of transcendence. Living Next-Door to the God of Love opens some thirty years later. It deals with what happens after that happy ending, with the dark lining of that silver cloud. It's about what people—humans, Forged, and others—choose to do, and what is forced upon them.
In order to explore the ramification of humanity's interactions with Unity, Robson has assembled a cast of characters as compelling as any she's created before. The protagonist of the novel—its hero—is far from human, however. When we first encounter Jalaeka, he's perched on a ledge high above a wind-swept alternate Manhattan: a twelve-foot night-black frictionless hermaphrodite, holding very still so that Unity's agents, currently sliding invisibly through the same space that he's occupying, won't notice him.
This is the Sidebar universe called Metropolis, a four-dimensional enclave where a fifth of the population are comic-book superheroes. Many of the other inhabitants of Metropolis are not human at all, but are made of Stuff. Stuff is, well, the stuff of dreams—a substance that is part of Unity, that is sentient and compassionate, that welcomes humanity to advance and to become. Not everyone wants to subsume their self in Unity, though. Jalaeka's dead set against the idea.
Fleeing Unity and the darkness that's encroaching upon Metropolis, Jalaeka becomes something quite other: he washes up in Sankhara, a "high-interaction" Sidebar, and makes himself at home. Chance, apparently, brings him (or her: the hermaphrodite body's gone, but Jalaeka, as Cadenza Fortitude, makes an unnaturally convincing woman in drag) to the dressing room that Francine, a teenaged runaway from Leeds, is scrubbing clean.
Francine is a Genie, a genetically engineered human, designed by her mother to be attractive, socially adjusted, and very, very bright. Having had her fill of the kind of teenage rebellion that involves behaving like an adult (stealing, drinking too much, and sleeping around) she flees her safe suburban home and her evil stepfather, stows away in an unmanned taxi, and ends up in Sankhara. She falls, somehow, into dull-but-safe company, handing out leaflets for the Love Foundation ("Do you ever wonder what the point of life is now that you can be young, beautiful, wealthy, educated and long-lived?") and befriending Greg Saxton, lecturer in Unity Studies at the University, who's studying Sankhara and the stories and myths that are encoded within it.
Jalaeka and Francine fall in love, immediately and irrevocably, like something out of a fairy tale. Their romance is a key strand of the novel: in a sense it's what the novel's about. Jalaeka is made (and written) to be loved. It's not only Francine who adores him. Greg finds himself drawn to Jalaeka too, not least because of the puzzle he represents: he's not human, and he's not Stuff. And Unity is out to get him.
Unity is not quite omnipotent nor omniscient, but close enough that many humans think of it as a god. It's surely no coincidence that its ambassador to humanity is named Theodore, the "gift of God." Theo is simultaneously drawn to humanity, to bodies—how vile to be nauseated by one's appetites—and repelled by the whole notion of living a physical incarnation, separate from Unity. And yet the power, the freedom and the sheer sensation of his new role are seductive. Gradually he becomes more physical, more human, like an angel falling very slowly from Heaven. Gradually, he and his minion Rita (a creature made of Stuff, but humanly aware and resentful of Theo's control) draw closer to Sankhara, and their prey.
Jalaeka being what he is, he's vulnerable not in himself but through those he loves. Francine becomes Theo's prey: so does Greg. Both of them have their choices taken away from them in ways that, though different, are equally brutal. There's something very primitive about Theo's attack on Francine, something that foreshadows (or echoes) events from Jalaeka's history. But the trap he lays for Greg frames the two of them—the student of Unity and Unity's human agent—as mirror images of one another. Theo rejects humanity, yet he wants to know and live and understand it in a way that Unity's vast store of information, experience, and memory can never grant him. Greg fears and resists Unity, the focus of his studies, but he's forced into intimacy with it; the ultimate in participant observation. The gods begin to talk to him in the regular noises of his environment: the creak of the door, the clatter of balls on a pool table.
Luckily there's another god with whom Greg's on pretty good terms, by now.
Jalaeka's tale is a simple one, at least the way he tells it. He was brought into being on a pre-industrial world as a Champion opposing Unity; embarked upon a series of picturesque (and picaresque) adventures, from piracy to studying physics and biology at MIT in the mid 1990s—half a millennium before Voyager Lonestar Isol's encounter with Stuff and with Unity, but then Jalaeka's experience of time is not quite like anyone else's—and finally came to Sankhara, where he and Francine were brought together as surely as magnets.
That's his version. Greg spends a great deal of the novel working towards an understanding of Jalaeka's true nature. Jalaeka, according to Unity, is a Splinter of Unity itself—perhaps one that became separate as a result of Unity's initial encounter with humanity. He's a self-aware fragment that has all the power of the original, plus a determination not to lose itself—himself—in some immersive golden void. He lives in a fantastical reproduction of the Winter Palace, deep within a snow-covered forest hidden inside a pocket universe at the heart of Sankhara—a universe that came into being on the day that he arrived. He's beautiful and generous, gracefully bisexual (or more likely omnisexual), utterly devoted to Francine, and able to bestow something called darshan, the grace of god, upon those he deems worthy. To all intents and purposes, he's a god, as powerful as Theo and Unity but in opposition to them. As Greg undergoes his own transformation, he begins to understand just what that entails.
Every god must have worshippers. Francine has become Jalaeka's high priestess without realising the responsibilities that come with the position. If that were the sole force shaping their relationship, there'd be little space for Francine (or Jalaeka) to grow and change. It's the romantic cliché of love at first sight, but the process of falling in love, of discovering one another, is more gradual and, ultimately, much richer and more meaningful. It is Francine who learns, at last, about some of the brutally primitive events that shaped and created Jalaeka; Francine who realises that not even a god is necessarily free to choose.
Jalaeka's nature allows him to experience time in a decidedly non-linear manner. If, as is implied, he sprang fully formed from Unity when Corvax and Isol and Zephyr first became Translated, he's packed a great deal of living into a scant thirty years. But then, there's no evidence that he ever had a childhood. That's not to say that he hasn't changed. More than most people, Jalaeka has been continually shaped and guided and transformed by those around him; by lovers, by kings and queens hungry for power, by his friends, by his foes. There's a hint of legend about him, a sense that he is constantly remade according to the prevailing myths and memes of the time. He is the archetypal hero, the fairy tale prince.
Living Next-Door to the God of Love doesn't rely on symbolism, imagery and cultural reference for effect, but there's plenty to be found. Wolves howl in the vast, expanding forest that surrounds the Winter Palace; an oak tree grows in the attic; there are stills from Apocalypse Now on the walls; and the view from the window is of Wuthering Heights, as recreated by the Yorkshire Tourist Board. If Jalaeka seems strangely powerless in his current incarnation, there's a stained-glass window at the Cathedral—a girl like Francine all in white, cradling the body of Cadenza Fortitude—to remind him of his potential.
The drawback of a setting with all this richness and complexity—of protean Stuff that can assume any form, and massively powerful entities that can control how the universe is perceived—is that anything might be a metaphor. The Engine that controls Sankhara is experienced by Greg as exactly that: a mighty engine, vast wheels turning, steam and smoke and cacophony. Its security agents manifest as grotesque vampires that are paid off in blood. It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing is what it seems in this novel: yet the reader must continually be aware that reality is in the eye of the observer.
Robson's supreme strength as a writer of science fiction has always been her ability to create characters whose point of view offers a new perspective on the world in which they exist and act. In Living Next-Door to the God of Love, she handles her characters' voices with confidence and wit, weaving together multiple stories to produce an elaborate whole that's somehow, finally, compacted into a simple seed, a timeless myth of death and resurrection.
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