by
Brian Sfinas
174
pages, Heartless Press
Review
by Bill Kirton
This
is a teasing, tantalizing book. Part of that may be because I’m not familiar
with the conventions of the genre, but I know enough about it to sense that in
this instance, the writer may actually be testing and stretching those
conventions. The sci-fi essentials are there – space travel, extra-terrestrial
entities, a close dependence of humans on machines and a society which has clearly evolved from some
of the processes and preoccupations that prevail today. But there’s also a
deliberate confusion, passages which challenge accepted social and moral
behaviours, a reluctance to ascribe qualities such as heroism and treachery to
exclusive sources. Motives and reciprocations overlap, acts of simple human
jealousy sit among and are mixed with threats of potentially cataclysmic conflicts
which may only be resolved by the premeditated creation of black holes. As Mr
Spock might say, ‘It’s sci-fi, Jim, but not as we know it’. In fact, the
impression I’ve retained from my reading of it is that it is so layered with events
whose significance operates simultaneously at many separate levels that it
might need several readings to understand all the author’s intended themes.
It’s
certainly unconventional in its form and narrative techniques. Others have compared The Darkest Of Suns will Rise with the epistolary novel,
but examples of that genre seldom offered as many distinct viewpoints as this
author exploits to convey the different layers and elements of his story. His
principals share their interior and exterior monologues with us and are, in
turn, probed and ‘explained’ by the advanced alien civilisation which has
access to their rational and irrational thought processes. Between their diary
entries and written interpersonal communications are extracts from databases of
the type into which Wikipedia will evolve, written reports of serving officers,
records of thought processes infiltrated and interpreted by the alien
consciousness, items of correspondence. In other words, there are many voices,
many opinions, many narrators. And this, too, must be a deliberate choice of
the author. We’re told so often that a writer must show and not tell and, in my
opinion bizarrely, there’s a reluctance to grant authors omniscience. The
creation is theirs, everything in it is a product of their own thinking so of
course they’re omniscient. The trick, the skill, is to parcel up that
omniscience in such a way that it doesn’t intrude. The technique adopted here
is to assign different aspects of the narrative – the internal fears and
feelings of characters, the precise nature of the prevailing social conditions
and structures, the policies driving the various factions, the actual events
which occur and provoke reactions and plot developments – to appropriate
sources: diaries, reports, conversations, internal monologues. Yes, it means
the point of view changes repeatedly, but the change is signaled in a clear,
bold headline immediately before the relevant passage so there should be no
confusion in the reader’s mind about where the information’s coming from. The
overall impression is of a carefully designed mosaic representing the
preoccupations, sensations and perceptions of the story’s principals.
I
know I’m focusing on the formal aspects of the book, but that’s because I found
them intriguing. I’m also reluctant to summarise the plot because I don’t want
to risk any spoilers and I think in any case that just ‘telling the story’ would
do the novel an injustice. There aren’t any goodies and baddies in the
conventional sense. The aliens, The Prognosticate, have infiltrated humanity
and helped it to what, on the surface at least, seems to be a utopian peace.
Illness has been banished, our despoliation of the earth has been reversed and
there are logical futuristic developments of familiar everyday processes. The
internet has become internets, nanotechnology has solved most of the problems
which prevail today, religions have been superseded. But, perhaps as a result
of all this, life seems dull, too easy, featureless. One of the elements which
may disturb some readers is one character’s need for pain, an extreme masochism
which makes excruciating demands. Objectively, in this monotonously perfect
existence, it is perhaps a signal of the forces that have been suppressed but
not extinguished. And, indeed, there are those who don’t accept the pacifying
intrusions of the aliens. They are the Orphanage, led by a Mother, and they
have not rejected the old Gods, so conflict is still a factor in this utopia –
at private and public levels.
And,
in the end, perhaps that is the book’s main message. The couple at its centre
enjoy a relationship of domination and submission, the themes of subjugation
and control are constantly restated. Maybe we’re not made for peaceful,
unthreatened existence. We need to fight, to feel, to be challenged. But that
‘perhaps’ and that ‘maybe’ are important. The book’s teasing complexities may
have other significations, different interpretations. What does seem clear is
that the author has not taken an easy route here, but he has created a totally
absorbing, well-constructed, poetic examination of the interplay of very
mysterious forces.
No comments:
Post a Comment