Light | ||||
M. John Harrison | ||||
Gollancz, 335 pages | ||||
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A review by Jeff VanderMeer
Some books make you want to run for a thousand miles, to dive off of buildings just for the burn of the fall. Some books are like
drugs, adrenalin rushes, fireworks. M. John Harrison's Light is not just among the best SF novels of the year -- it's without
question the best read of the year. Harrison has jettisoned all banality, dead spots, padding, and come up with a novel that moves
without sacrificing depth. Not since Stepan Chapman's The Troika and Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons has a novel managed
to so single-handedly revitalize and re-energize the SF field.
Light balances two main threads: one set in 1999, centered around Michael Kearney, a physicist with, for lack of a
better description, very dark secrets, and the other set in 2400, after humankind has spread out across the universe
due (in part) to Kearney's discoveries. The Kearney storyline has all of Harrison's trademarks -- the tortured characterization,
the faintly uneasy truce with the affliction called life, the awareness of the artificiality of the modern world. These traits
have served Harrison well in recent years, especially in the novels The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life. Such
works functioned as brutally depressing acts of honesty -- to the point of being, perhaps, too hopeless. The appeal of Harrison's
earlier Viriconium stories was that they meshed this emotional starkness with the outwardly more cheerful exotica
of fantasy. Now Harrison has combined his astute, ruthless characterization with the SF form, to create a work that bristles and
seethes with energy and intelligence, a work both playful and sublimely serious.
In the far-future sections, which center around the mysterious Kefahuchi Tract in deep space, Harrison manages to satirize the
swagger of space opera while extending, expanding, and amplifying its effects. Characters such as Billy Ankers, Seria Mau
Genlicher, and Ed Chianese are as deftly drawn as those in the contemporary setting. Harrison's descriptions of space maneuvers rival Banks'...
Michael Kearney, meanwhile, gives Harrison the opportunity to create a character as tortured as he is amoral, a man who almost
by accident facilitates the discovery of faster-than-light travel. Kearney's lonely childhood has warped his consciousness; he
is unable to fully function in society. More importantly, when given what amounts to a mental push, he descends into a kind of
madness. Kearney is haunted by a vision:
All of these effects lead to an ending that, despite a whiff of deus ex machina, is truly satisfying.
Harrison is not the first writer to attempt these types of effects -- but they've never been done this well before, or in this
combination. Imagine the best pure adrenalin SF novel twinned to a stunning mainstream novel to get an idea of the overall
effect. Harrison's manipulation of layers of reality also deserves mention -- the book is often truly mind-bending as a result.
Light proves a number of things. First, the New Wave was not a failure, despite propaganda to the contrary. Harrison,
a founder of that movement, is as relevant today as any living writer. This book, as well as recent fiction by Michael Moorcock
and J.G. Ballard, shows that the "shock of the new" provided by the New Wave has yet to subside. Second, Harrison, at an age
when many writers are figurative dust, doomed to repeat themselves until they're literal dust, is a tough, clever, talented
son of a bitch who hasn't had blinders on while creating his more introspective work over the last decade. Light is a book
to make both Iain M. Banks and Vladimir Nabokov blush with envy, a book that uses hard SF concepts like poetry and is merciless
in its assault on the irrelevant. I cannot think of a SF novel in recent memory that has both mocked the stereotypical "sense of
wonder" and yet simultaneously created a sense of wonder. The pleasures of this book are wide and numerous. I cannot
recommend Light highly enough.
Jeff VanderMeer's reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, The New York Review of SF, Nova Express, and many others. Prime will release his non-fiction collection Why Should I Cut Your Throat? in April 2003. |
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