#5
Down
By Lawrence Miles
I wasn’t much looking forward to this for some reason. At a guess this was because Lawrence Miles has at least two modes and I don’t know which one I’m getting. Perhaps the clever, plot-driven, fannish-until-he’s-just-the-right-side-of-fanwank Miles? Or the one that has some (probably) very interesting ideas, spends ages filling a big bath tub with them and then asks you to get in and splish splosh about for what feels like an eternity.
I’d call Down a bit of both.
From the outset it’s playing with ideas from The Also People, which I’m all for. With the appropriate understanding that everybody loved The Also People and invoking it may invite comparisons that find you wanting, Ben Aaronovitch’s book threw around some enormous ideas (aka the People, not to mention their creations) that, quite frankly, should have become a bigger thing by this point. (We at least got shades of them in So Vile A Sin, and even some influence on Oh No It Isn't!)
What follows is, consciously, something of a parody of Aaronovitch’s “world sphere”, if not a bit of a parody in general. Bernice, along with a couple of students (Ash and Lucretia, the latter having been kidnapped as bait) heads for the mostly unremarkable world of Tyson’s Folly. They soon find the core of the planet, itself a Dyson Sphere, filled with impossible life forms, such as yeti of varying intelligence and oh yes, Nazis. (These are futuristic pretend Nazis – hobbyists playing at fascism, amusingly named the SSSSSSS – and they are here for a reason, promise.) Also in attendance is Mr Misnomer, a fictional character from old (by Bernice’s time) comics. (Think Abslom Daak in a fedora.) Not to be missed off, we have a terrifying alien related to the People, named !X, and his terrified companion/medical support Fos!ca. Before long Ash ends up with !X, Lucretia ends up with Katastrophen (an SSSSSSS bigwig) and Bernice with Mr Misnomer. The entire bonkers expedition is related to us retrospectively by Bernice, now a prisoner, and it includes all the different POVs. (This is not a mistake, but I wondered why so much of the book went by happily letting it look like one.)
So we’ve got shades of Parasite (look at my big bonkers planet!), All-Consuming Fire (it’s old-timey SF time!), Conundrum (Mr Misnomer is real?) and on a more boring textual level, The Also People. (Just War also has some significant impact for Bernice.) Down is doing a lot, mostly ticking off the crazy sights in its hollow world and then later playing narrative tricks with us, but for the most part it’s a romp – which is all good fun (ahem) but arguably doesn’t always make any great shakes as a story. Because Down, in the end, is one of those books/episodes/movies that has one big idea and then proceeds to unpack it. This it does, extraordinarily slowly, with pages seemingly multiplying before my eyes as I neared the 300 mark. Definitely felt like we ran out of romp at some point.
It’s not as if nothing interesting is happening with the characters, but some of it only becomes clear retrospectively. Bernice sits quite a bit of it out (Christ I'm sick of saying that – guys, stop it!), while Mr Misnomer has plenty to do – what’s that about? Turns out she added him wholesale to the narrative to help cope with some more violent moments, but while that is very interesting as a concept (and there’s more to it that she learns later), there wasn’t time for me to feel or her to significantly reflect on it. I did, though, get to spend time with Mr Misnomer. (“Abslom Daak in a fedora” was not a compliment.)
Lucretia has some intriguing neuroses: she comes from a planet obsessed with breeding (and therefore attractiveness) so she needs to wear a duffle coat to hide her body. She is also petrified of transmats as she believes they kill the original and build a copy – a popular SF bogeyman which is presented here and, unless I missed it, never satisfactorily disputed. Sleep tight. (She also develops an oddly progressive friendship with Katastrophen, but given the Misnomer fake-out which on some level seemed inevitable, I was surprised that he was real.) Ash has some stuff going on, mostly in relation to !X (which makes Fos!ca a touch redundant), and !X is at least hard to look away from: a sort of homicidal tenth generation echo of the Doctor, being an unknowable alien exile who travels around in a quirky geometric shape and has a name you can’t pronounce.
There’s oodles of stuff here all right, but the switching between Bernice/Misnomer, Lucretia/Katastrophen and Ash/!X, all variants of interesting female protag/awful and slightly ridiculous male, leads to some confusion over who the heck is who. (This might be deliberate, and certainly it becomes so nearer the end: a psychic melding has taken place which explains Bernice’s multi-narrator narrative, so perhaps she’s just repeating herself. But again: clever concept, still got to read through it before it become clever thing.)
Call me old fashioned, but this is a Bernice book, so I’d like the focus to be on her. (It’s not as if Down is the first book to give her “companions,” but the range isn’t yet consistent with them.) What Bernice we do get is as champagne-bubbly as ever, at one time described thus: “The prisoner is unarmed, but has a finely honed sense of irony.” (I also loved the bit where she’s strapped to a table facing a mirrored ceiling and tells her reflection: “Don’t just sit there – do something!”) This Bernice, however, feels like all funny stuff and no gristle. Is Miles doing a thing there? We know she might be massaging the narrative to exclude (and/or ridicule) the SSSSSSS because of her wartime experiences, and we know how she feels about “Mr Misnomer”’s actions; we also repeat and underline her famed habit of papering over the bits of her diary that she doesn’t like (controversial opinion: I never liked that. How would that book even work? Post-its aren’t that strong!) but this book isn’t the time for her to reflect on any of that. Shame.
It’s got plenty of time though to discuss the hollow world’s mysterious MEPHISTO (the world sphere is run by a computer named “God,” draw your own conclusions), along with alien processes and lizard dirigibles with built-in yeti. And don’t get me wrong, some of that’s very diverting and much of it is funny. I love that Lucretia’s planet is called Sarah-361 because it turns out when you name a celestial body after yourself it’s legally binding; there’s a bit where the characters watch a sort of information recap (of course they do) and the intro looks like the 80s Doctor Who titles; and there are nerdy little nods like: “According to the Roddenberry-Harrison model of Zeno sociology, ‘God’ was the name given by primitive people to the insane alien supercomputer that secretly ruled their planet from its concealed bunker while keeping them in fear and ignorance.” But there came a point where I wanted everyone to just spit out what it is they want to tell us about MEPHISTO, or shut up.
Plenty of ideas. Multiple laughs. Colours, craziness and fun. But I dunno. This feels like the bath tub full of ideas again, more than it does a solid story.
6/10
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