wot i red on my hols by alan robson (joyeux noel)

‘Tis the Season to be Jelly

Dark Eden is an utterly brilliant award-winning SF novel by Chris Beckett. Unfortunately he followed it with two rather mediocre sequels (at least by comparison), but you can’t have everything I suppose…

The novel explores the disintegration, reintegration and hopefully ultimately the salvation of a small group of highly inbred people who are the descendants of two individuals whose spaceship crashed on a planet they called Eden. The parallels with Adam and Eve are obvious and deliberate and there is more than a little touch of Lord of the Flies to the story as well. That too seems to be quite deliberate.

The novel begins about a century and a half after Angela and Tommy got themselves stranded on Eden. Their descendants have evolved into a very ritualised and extremely conservative (with a very small ‘c’) society. They tell each other a rather garbled origin myth involving Angela, Tommy and their three companions – Mehmet, Michael, and Dixon. The companions set off in a damaged spaceship to get help, leaving Angela and Tommy behind to fend for themselves. Initially the exact relationship between Angela, Tommy and the Three Companions is unclear (to the reader at least), but there does seem to have been some conflict between them, the true nature of which is only gradually revealed as the story progresses.

Angela and Tommy have children who they raise in a closed society known simply as the Family. The closure is twofold – there are so few of them (at least to begin with) that huddling together is the natural order of the day. But they are also closed in geographically. Angela and Tommy’s ship crashed in a small, isolated valley surrounded by harsh terrain which seems impossible to travel across.

Eden has no sun to orbit around and it drifts through space locked in perpetual cold and darkness. Nevertheless it has a thriving, though somewhat bizarre, ecology. Eden's animals each have two hearts, greenishly-black blood, and huge, lidless eyes, the better to gather in what little light there is. The animals also have six legs, and tentacled feelers around their mouths, because why not? Trees tap into the heat just below Eden's surface, bringing up warmth to stave off the sunless cold and providing fruit and vegetables to eat. Almost all the plant and animal life on Eden is bioluminescent, allowing the humans to see, albeit somewhat darkly (I think there might be a metaphor lurking somewhere in there) while overhead the Milky Way can be easily seen at all times, giving substance to Angela and Tommy’s stories of the space-faring civilization of Earth.

With such a small gene pool to breed from, incest is, of course, the only mechanism by which the population can grow and by the third generation small mutations such as hare lips and club feet have become common. The afflicted individuals have their own well defined place in the social hierarchy. Life in the community is centred around powerful rituals which tell and re-tell the story of the stranding. The people venerate the very few relics that still remain from the time of Angela and Tommy. They tell each other garbled myths about the Earthly paradise that Tommy and Angela left behind and they reiterate the need to stay close to Circle, which is the place where Angela and Tommy’s landing vehicle originally set down. Circle, the myth insists, is also where the rescuers that will come to take the Family back to Earth will land. Therefore nobody in the Family dares to wander very far from the Circle in case the rescuers come while they are away and they get left behind. So Eden remains largely unexplored, its flora, fauna and geography largely unknown save for that which is native to the small valley where the Family live.

The novel tells the story of John Redlantern, a teenager (a newhair, in the sometimes amusing vocabulary of the Family’s dialect) who begins to resent the conservatism of the Family. One day, out on a hunt, John kills a beast that the Family refer to as a leopard. The killing, and the reasons that lie behind the necessity for the kill, turn into an epiphany which opens John’s eyes to the Malthusian catastrophe facing the Family. It is perfectly clear to John that the Family has simply grown too big – there are far too many people consuming far too much. The tiny valley where they live simply does not have the resources necessary to continue supporting their ever increasing numbers. John urges the Family to spread out and explore. Naturally the Family view his urgings as heresy and he finds little support for his ideas among the Family’s elders (and betters?).

John increasingly engages in a series of iconoclastic acts of vandalism which eventually lead to his expulsion from the Family. Followed by a small band of like minded individuals John sets off to explore his environment in an attempt to find out just what it is that Eden has to offer...

Chris Beckett has done a magnificent job of portraying the strange little society that Angela and Tommy have brought into being. Their religious rituals can be seen as a natural outgrowth of their origin story. The distortion of that story over time, together with the almost jesuitical casuistry that they use to justify their dogma, is very persuasive.

A convincing linguistic drift has given the people of Eden a unique vocabulary – "veekle" rather than "vehicle", "rayed yoh" rather than "radio" (the Family have no real feeling for what those things might be but the words are used in their origin myths so they must be important). The Family also have a highly inventive and amusing curse "Jesus Juice" instead of "Jesus and the Jews" together with a rather twisted view of what the phrase might actually mean.

The qualifier "very" has vanished from the language, and has been replaced by a repetition of the qualified word – thus "bad bad" instead of "very bad" and "cold cold" instead of "very cold". The Family’s vocabulary and linguistic structure is, in many ways, rather childish, mainly because they have no experience of anything at all outside of their "constrained constrained"(!) habitat. But although they lack the ability to describe accurately much of what they see and experience they nevertheless do manage to define its essence. Thus we have, for example, the superbly evocative "Cold Dark" as their attempt to describe the high, dark mountains wreathed in glaciers that surround their small valley.

Initially at least, this linguistic drift and over-simplification makes it a bit difficult for the reader to grasp fully the subtleties of the Family’s daily life. But it is worth persevering because the rewards are immense. As John’s explorations gradually open up the world and more and more wonders are revealed, the way things all work begins to make complete sense.

Once John shatters the conservative isolationism of the Family the whole society starts to make what we ourselves might define as progress. Certainly that’s how John thinks of it. But of course he has spoiled the edenic paradise that was his elders’ way of coming to terms with the world, doomed though that world view was. Although John longs to escape from it,  he cannot do so without breaking it – perhaps much sooner than it might otherwise have been broken, and in very different ways. He’s the serpent, of course, but he’s not necessarily evil in and of himself. The ramifications of the changes that he has set in motion will not become clear until long after he is dead. Those ramifications will be explored in the sequels to Dark Eden.

Dark Eden won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom in 2012.

There are two sequels to Dark Eden. Earlier I described them as mediocre, but perhaps I am doing them a disservice. In themselves they are perfectly good books which tell interesting stories set in a strange and fascinating environment. But there is no doubt that they suffer in comparison with the first book. Somehow the magic has gone away.

Many generations have passed since John Redlantern opened Eden up and the now enormous population has spread itself out all over the planet. The people are no longer in an exploration phase, rather they are consolidating what they have and they are no longer dealing with completely unknown situations. Instead the stories are more concerned with politics, with territorial squabbles and with love. In other words, the stories that the novels tell us are stories with which we are much more familiar, though of course they are taking place in somewhat exotic surroundings which helps a little. If it is possible to describe SF novels as mundane, I think these sequels exemplify it.

* * * *

I first came across Gene Doucette in a series of amusing novels he wrote about an immortal man who had been born in the stone age and who has lived through everything the world can throw at him. Clearly he’s well equipped to survive even in the sometimes perilous twenty first century…

There are quite a lot of Immortal novels to read and for a time I thought that perhaps Gene Doucette was a one trick pony, vastly entertaining though that single trick was. However I was wrong – it seems that he has written quite a few books about this and that and occasionally the other. The Apocalypse Seven is his quirky, funny and hugely entertaining after the apocalypse novel.

Robbie staggers home after an extremely boozy party, collapses on his bed, and passes out. When he wakes up the next day (at least he thinks it’s the next day – you always wake up the next day, don’t you?) he is puzzled to find that although he is definitely in the right room, someone else’s clothes are hanging in the closet. That’s only the first of many mysteries...

There is nobody else around. Outside, the city is overgrown with vegetation and infested with packs of wolves and coyotes. Why is there a deer standing in the middle of the road staring curiously at him. What on Earth (or off it) is going on?

Eventually as time passes seven people come together, seven people from different times and different places who all woke up in and around this oddly deserted city. It becomes clear that they are the only people left in the whole of the world. Obviously there must have been a Whateverpocalypse. But what was it? Why was it? Where is everybody and what happens next?

To an extent the trials and tribulations suffered by the characters are exactly what you’d expect if you’ve read lots of other Whateverpocalypse novels. But Gene Doucette infuses the events with such great good humour that you often find yourself laughing at truly terrible tragedies. Quite a feat!

After a certain amount of noodling around the characters finally find out exactly what the Whateverpocalypse was and exactly why it happened. And the explanation is so utterly bizarre, and yet at the same time so well told, that it left me grinning in amazement at both the author’s inventive tongue in cheekiness and at his ability to make something so utterly outrageous sound so convincing.

* * * *

By now I was in an apocalyptic mood and, serendipitously, I stumbled upon a discussion group on the internet that was debating the subject. All the usual novels were discussed, praised with faint damns and damned with faint praises. And then someone mentioned that they had just read a trilogy of after the apocalypse novels which had fair taken their breath away. The books were written by an author that this person had never heard of even though he’d been reading SF avidly for more than sixty years. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the books had come seemingly out of nowhere, they were, he claimed, the very best apocalyptic novels he’d ever read.

I was intrigued. Like the discussion group member I too had never heard of Mike Mullin, the author in question. But clearly now that he’d been brought to my attention I had to read the books, if only to find out whether or not they were as good as this chap claimed them to be.

So that’s exactly what I did.

The trilogy Ashfall, Ashen Winter, and Sunrise, are set in the aftermath of an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. Although published as a trilogy, the books actually tell a single, continuous story. The novels are nominally YA fiction, but they deal with such deep questions of morality and of growing up into a sexual maturity that they are perhaps best considered as being a very thoughtful and imaginative coming of age story as circumstances force the teenage protagonists into learning very quickly how to cope with the life-threatening challenges that the catastrophe has forced on them.

The effects of the Yellowstone eruption are the common thread that binds all the story incidents together. Earthquakes and the initial huge falls of volcanic ash lead to an ongoing, and seemingly never ending winter. The struggles of the survivors to find sufficient food and water to allow them to keep on living in the societal collapse that result from these terrible conditions are vividly and memorably described.

The second and third books have rather too many pointless and long winded action sequences for my taste. These seem to serve no real purpose other than to expand the page count. The two novels would probably benefit from a bit of heavy editing to boil them down into just one book. Nevertheless the story continued to hold my interest – it is definitely one of the better after the apocalypse stories that I’ve read and the nature of the apocalypse itself was sufficiently interesting to keep me turning the pages.

* * * *

Abir Mukherjee is the author of a series of detective novels set in India in the years immediately following the end of the first world war. India is chafing under the rule of the British. The seeds of revolution have been sown. Terrorist attacks and civil protests are common occurrences.

Sam Wyndham is a Scotland Yard detective newly transferred to Calcutta from London. Sam is scarred, both physically and mentally, from the years he spent fighting in the trenches during the war and from the death of his wife in the flu pandemic that followed the end of the fighting. He self-medicates his traumas with opium and, from his point of view, one of the benefits of his transfer to India is that opium is much more readily available in Calcutta than it is in London...

He works closely with Sergeant Surendranath Bannerjee. The British find the sergeant’s first name quite impossible to pronounce. The closest they can get to it is the phrase "Surrender-not", and that becomes his nickname. Fortunately Bannerjee finds the nickname amusing. The growing friendship between Wyndham and Bannerjee and the dry humour of their interactions are a genuinely amusing icing on the cake of the mysteries they investigate.

Sam does not believe in the accepted wisdom of the innate superiority of the British and neither does be believe that the British character makes them any more moral than the natives. Nevertheless despite this he does sometimes have lapses of judgement which cause him to indulge in displays of casual racism that can mislead him about what is really going on. But to his credit, he definitely does not share the sheer contempt for the Indians that he observes in so many of his colleagues. He particularly despises the attitudes of the lower class Britons who make up the bulk of the British civil service. They live immeasurably better lives in India than they ever could back home surrounded as they are by (generally obsequious) servants and the trappings of luxury.

In the first novel, A Rising Man, Sam has just arrived in Calcutta. Before he has even had a chance to settle in, he is called on to investigate the murder of a high ranking British official who has been found lying dead in an open sewer just outside a notorious brothel. His throat has been cut and, presumably to make assurance doubly sure, he has been stabbed in the chest as well. A note, written in Bengali, has been screwed up and forced into the dead man’s mouth. The note orders the British to leave India. It quickly becomes clear to Sam that the man had not been at the brothel for the usual, quite obvious reasons. So why on Earth was he there? And why do the terrorists even care?

Sam soon begins to feel that unseen forces are manipulating his inquiries. He has some justification for this – Section H, the military secret police, are themselves openly investigating the crime and, by and large, they are refusing to share their findings with him. Perhaps they are covering up for somebody or perhaps they are themselves more deeply involved in the political struggle that is never very far away from everything that happens in the city.

Things come to a head when British troops massacre large numbers of unarmed men, women and children in Amritsar. The British try to cover up what has happened, but knowledge of the atrocity quickly spreads, adding fuel to the fire of revolution. The degree of corruption and self-interest that motivates the civil and military bureaucracy becomes exposed and the reasons for the murder that started the whole thing off are revealed. The results are not pretty.

With the second novel, A Necessary Evil, the focus shifts away from Calcutta to the fabulously wealthy semi-independent kingdom of Sambalpore. It’s an exotic place, a home to tigers and elephants both of which turn out to be important to the story, the first rather passively as a background distraction, the second rather more actively as Sam witnesses an extremely gruesome execution carried out piecemeal by a specially trained elephant.

The Maharajah skilfully maintains the kingdom’s status by using the riches derived from the country’s diamond mines, and those mines too have a significant role to play in the telling of the tale. But now the Maharajah is old and ill and feeble. Prince Adhir, the heir to the throne, has become more and more involved in the running of the country. He’s a progressive, modern minded man whose non-traditional attitudes together with his romantic relationship with a white woman have offended a lot of people. When he is assassinated, Sam and Surrender-not are sent to investigate the crime.

They quickly find themselves mired in the complex, byzantine bureaucracy of a country where everyone seems to be at everyone else’s throat. Allegiances float, enemies and allies change places without notice and, as always, corruption is rife. It’s all a massively tangled political spider-web and both Sam and Surrender-not soon begin to feel a bit out of their depth.

Clearly it is time go on a tiger hunt.

Prince Adhir’s brother, Prince Punit is a major suspect in the case. He is a devotee of the hunt and Sam thinks that attending the hunt will provide a good opportunity to get closer to the Prince. Unfortunately, during the hunt, an attempt is made to assassinate the Prince and consequently Sam is put back to square one again, wondering just how things all fit together. Curiouser and curiouser, murkier and murkier.

The answer turns out to lie, as it so often does, much closer to home than anyone had imagined and as the motives become clearer, so too does the identity of the puppet master who is pulling the strings of the great and the good, as well as those of the not so great and the not so good. When Sam finally finds out the truth, it takes his breath away. And it will take yours away as well.

Life in the exotic and mysterious court of Sambalpore is vividly described in the novel. It is utterly fascinating to see how the political machinations that Sam struggles to unravel are motivated by both the hidebound rules of tradition and the more crass imperatives of money and power – some things are universally part of the human condition no matter how the society organises itself.

Abir Mukherjee himself is of Indian descent though he was born in Scotland. He was educated within the British schooling system. At school he learned little or nothing about the events that took place in India during the dying days of the Raj – that history was not taught in British schools except in the most general terms . The author has stated publicly that a major motive for writing the Wyndham / Bannerjee novels was so that he could learn more about his own heritage and put some flesh on the bones of the stories that his parents told him. He has done a magnificent job. Not only are the mysteries that the detectives are called upon to solve intriguing in themselves, the exotic environment in which they take place is brought brilliantly to life, warts and all. The books are simply superb.

A Rising Man won the CWA Endeavour Dagger for best historical crime novel of 2017 and was short listed for the MWA Edgar Award for best novel. A Necessary Evil, won the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing and was a Zoe Ball Book Club pick.