Posted on Saturday, December 05, 2009 12:44 PM
Astronomers have marveled at the stately dance of the planets, moons, planetoids and comets of the solar system describing their circles around the sun since the dawn of history, and modern telescopes and have since imprinted images of this ballet on the consciousness of even the common man. Even more: Huygens, the Voyager and other probes have given us unprecedented details from the surfaces of the moons of the outer planets. For the first time, mankind has a view of the frills in the tutu’s of the dancers. This is a slow and graceful dance, a choreography of perihelion, aphelion, eclipse, conjunction and collision, on a stage inhumanly vast yet beckoning to be explored and cultivated, to inscribe meaning onto these dancers and their movements.
In the two related novels (and really they should be considered as one) The Quiet War (2008) and Gardens of the Sun (2009), British author Paul McAuley not only paints a vivid picture of this astronomical ballet, but projects onto this stage the dance macabre of human affairs, where events unfold with a similar slow inevitability, and where the individual characters are, like the planets and moons themselves, not good or evil, but propelled forward by their own momentum and the forces within and around them. Through sparse and even alienating, and exactly because of this at times starkly beautiful prose, McAuley takes his characters through oppositions and collisions that indicate a deep understanding of our flaws and potentials.
This is compelling reading that reflects back onto recent history – while The Quiet War made me relive the disappointment and anguish of the defeat of the Peace Movement in the run-up to the Iraq War, Gardens of the Sun dealt with the perils of reconstruction and the difficulty of winning the peace. While it clearly illuminates our deficiencies and mistakes, War/Gardens also rejoices in the promise of life’s proliferation.
Yes, it by no means perfect, the novel has many flaws. However, like most masterpieces, the flaws often become irrelevant, part of the tapestry. As Adam Roberts noted the info-dumping, probably the novel’s most contentious aspect, not only present technical information central to the novel’s themes and action, it also serves as a tool to illuminate a specific character and reinforces the character’s – and the novel’s - detached style. Certain characters ( Alder for example) are underdeveloped, but that somehow only enhances the realism of the novel. I disagree with Roberts about the ending which to me mirrored the way astronomical bodies would continue gracefully along their new orbits after even the most violent and catastrophic collision.
Regardless, I truly liked the novel and know that it will continue to grow on me. I can only concur with Roberts’ verdict:
To be clear: my sense is that The Quiet War/Gardens of the Sun, taken together, is a very major work of contemporary science fiction, amongst the great genre achievements of the noughties, a long novel that will still be being read and remembered fifty years from now …. If you have any interest in SF today you’ll need to read both books.