Skip to main content

Arcadia (SF) - Iain Pears ***

The new novel Arcadia by Iain Pears comes as a beautiful hardback from Faber with a very effective cover design (the thing that looks like a number 7 is a cut-away door in the cover, so you see through to the illustrated world within). This book is a strange mixture of fantasy and science fiction. One of the main characters, Henry Lytten, is a member of the dregs of the Oxford Inklings, the leftovers and second-bests after Tolkein and Lewis have moved on, at the cusp of social change in Britain in 1960. Lytten is writing an epic fantasy novel, creating a world unlike his predecessors where story is the governing thread, rather than magic or royalty.

Interwoven with this storyline is one from the future involving a device that hovers vaguely between time machine and a way to enter alternative universes (the 'science bit' is very woffly). However, the alternative universes aspect seems increasingly to be the case as a girl from 1960 accidentally uses the technology to enter Lytten's fantasy world made real, after an intervention from a rogue future mathematician.

For those who want to be trendy, there is also an app version of the book. The idea is that the text is broken into a whole load of relatively short segments which can be read in any order, so that the reader creates the experience, or some such guff. As you might guess, I think this totally misses the point of a novel. As a reader, I don't want to do the author's job for him. I want to be led - that's the whole point of reading a book. If I wanted to write my own book I would, and often have.

The idea that somehow the reader is freed up by throwing away structure, just because this is a multi-threaded story just doesn't make sense. It's like the difference between listening to Ralph McTell* sing about taking us by the hand and leading us through the streets of London and just putting 'streets of London' into a search engine. The unstructured approach does not deliver a satisfactory experience. So, for me the app is a waste of time - and I suspect it will fall by the wayside as often happens with these attempts to take books into a new dimension. (Remember CD-ROM interactive books? Or ebooks with sound effects?) I could be wrong. It could be the next best thing since sliced bread, but I genuinely can't see the benefit.

We return, then, to viewing Arcadia as a straightforward novel. It takes a while to get into because of the multi-threaded storyline, and to begin with it's hard not to feel that the fantasy world concept is a touch derivative, particularly when C. S. Lewis is deliberately brought to mind, but once the author's ideas kick in on the full scale, we discover an impressive conceit, with an enjoyable interplay of fantasy and different timeline versions of reality (giving us a chance to ponder just what reality is). However, I did find my interest levels dropping at times. Like Lytten's fictional creation is an epic book as far as length is concerned - 596 pages - but it doesn't have an epic topic. In fact, the fantasy world Anterworld is explicitly designed not to be epic. The result is to sometimes make reading an uphill struggle.

Perhaps the book's greatest weakness, causing some of this lack of reading drive, is that none of the multiple protagonists is well enough drawn, or far enough from a two dimensional central casting character to strongly identify with them. Perhaps reflecting the author's idea of a fluid structure it's hard to really get behind any of these individuals. Admittedly, though, that's nothing new in fantasy and SF (think Asimov's Foundation saga - the characters are far more cardboard there), so it isn't the end of the world, and Pears has certainly come up with a genuinely interesting, original and well-detailed premise.


Hardback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...