Purgatory Mount (SF) - Adam Roberts ****

It's not entirely surprising that Dante's Divine Comedy should provide the inspiration for fantasy or SF - this was already the case with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1976 fantasy novel Inferno, which I remember reading in an all-night session shortly after it came out. (It was a weird night, as the hamster from my next door-but-one neighbour at university had escaped and kept appearing on the floor of my room despite a closed door, contributing to the feeling of weirdness.) Adam Roberts, as we might expect, takes a more interesting approach than simply re-writing Dante.

The book consists of three sections, apparently corresponding to the three sections of the original featuring hell, purgatory and paradise - though the parallels in the first and last section are not particularly obvious. These outer sections of Purgatory Mount, featuring a strange far future expedition discovering a vast structure that brings to mind a larger scale version of Dante's purgatory, have little real feel of storytelling. Roberts does this deliberately to reflect the lack of time in Dante's hell and paradise - it's a very effective intellectual representation, but it does get a little in the way of the book working as a novel.

The significantly longer middle section is set in a near future America as the country becomes riven with civil war. This is a second book I've read in a row where the protagonists are teenagers, though here, this develops a much stronger sense of 'us and them' between the teens and the warring adults. It's a Kafkaesque disaster story - I've never been a big fan of disaster movies or books, but Roberts makes it both graphically real feeling and gives the storyline some impressive twists. Given the state of US society, this is one of the most scarily believable apocalyptic SF narratives I've ever come across. I might not have enjoyed it too much, and I probably wouldn't read it again, but I was very impressed by it.

What was particularly effective for me is that one of the themes that Roberts addresses, apart from a wider one of atonement and sin, is the nature of mind. Having just read Philip Ball's The Book of Minds, this was particularly apposite. As is sometimes the case with Roberts' books, there's a danger of it being so clever that the cleverness gets in the way of it being a fully formed novel - it didn't seem to have the completeness of, say, The Thing Itself. But you can't complain about Purgatory Mount on its ideas or mental challenge - it does the job you expect from great science fiction faultlessly.

One final point - many people shy away from a section with the word 'acknowledgements' in the title, but I would strongly recommend reading the closing 'Afterword and Acknowledgements' pages.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here