#17
Where Angels Fear
By Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone
I’ve only myself to blame, really. I’ve complained a few times that the New Adventures aren’t going anywhere, preferring to play their meagre hits (mainly murder mysteries) instead – a problem cheerfully underlined and to be honest, exacerbated in Beige Planet Mars. And though I am 20+ years late, I feel like someone out there has heard me. A monkey’s paw has clenched a finger.
Where Angels Fear starts with a flash-forward: St. Oscar’s University is in ruins. Implicitly Dellah as a whole is in the same situation, but it is the Uni – Benny’s sanctum sanctorum, the heart of the series – that best symbolises the planet’s ruin. This is before we even get to the prologue. They might as well have put “certain doom” in the Acknowledgements.
The prologue is heartily grizzled as well, with an as-yet-undetermined number of random slayings committed on a spaceship. Chapter One then includes a random death by traffic accident. Things, once-editor Rebecca Levene and now-editor Simon Winstone (co-writers) seem overjoyed to tell us, are not okay. And from the first page alone, we know things will not improve.
That flash-forward fascinates me because apart from that, and despite those other early deaths, Where Angels Fear is not a gloomy book – or at least it’s one that takes its time getting there. Clearly a situation is happening on Dellah with all the planet’s religions, specifically the gods, suddenly coming to life. An influential Sultan is creating rules to enforce religion – of any sort – and discourage “immoral” behaviour, which at one point involves scaring a couple of stoners straight. It all seems faintly silly, with Bernice jetting off to investigate a local god with the aid of some Grel – readers will automatically know them as Funny Aliens, obsessed with facts. Irving Braxiatel, of all people, seems to be living through a comedy of errors as he dodges the affections of a voluptuous fellow professor. And that’s after he tells Bernice that his people (the you-know-what Lords) have run away and raised the draw-bridges, evidently terrified of an imminent threat. The book seems slightly crazed in tone, being upfront about a catastrophe and then insisting on playing as the Titanic goes down, entirely unaware.
That dissonance made it a bit hard for me to invest in the story. Well, is it a big deal or not? But I appreciated the idea behind it: religious fanaticism, which is surely the only way things can go when gods legit walk among us, probably would start small. Dangerous beliefs can take hold in little ways that may be easy to laugh off at first, and the gentle absurdity of Where Angels Fear, with New Moral Army soldiers wagging their fingers at non-believers who then end up at faith boot camp, makes it all the more horrifying when you realise there is no way to stop it escalating and – for this book at least – no coming back. Take the god Bernice goes to investigate, Maa’lon, who seems quite charming at first, until a local historical conflict flares up and then he leads a holy war. It is made very clear that Bernice isn’t going to snark her way out of this one, particularly in a creepy scene where she sees Maa’lon smiling on the battlefield and, despite being observed through binoculars, he turns to look at her.
Probably a bigger issue for me was the writing style – or to be more specific, that old favourite of mine, short sections. To be fair, it would be difficult to imagine Where Angels Fear without them as there is so much ground to cover. We’ve got Bernice and the Grel investigating Maa’lon, and then following (and hopefully surviving) his crusade. Emile, tasked by Bernice with investigating those prologue murders by inveigling his way into a local cult, at great personal risk. Renée, a music tutor at St. Oscar’s and a believer in a rather low-key religion, being drafted into the New Moral Army while orbiting the machinations of Braxiatel and a shadowy figure known only as John. A couple of medics/stoners, Fec and Kalten, also getting drafted. James, a Maa’lon preacher, going along with Bernice while terrified that his lapsed faith will be found out. And Clarence, angelic figure from the Worldsphere and friend of Bernice, whose people – like Braxiatel’s – have retreated from all this for reasons that can’t be good. He agonises throughout the book about what to do (still haunted by his significant inaction re Bernice in Walking To Babylon), not to mention his own mysterious past which God, aka the Worldsphere computer, keeps from him.
It’d be a very long novel if you didn’t chop and change between that lot, but all the same, changing the channel up to twice per page is hell for my attention span. And in amongst all of that, inevitably, Where Angels Fear doesn’t really have a protagonist. All of it just happens to everybody. It’s arguable whether this is A Bad Thing, but it’s puzzling for a series that revolves around a familiar character. One of the authors (Levene) purposefully didn’t write any of the Benny bits, as she didn’t feel she could capture her voice. This gives you some idea how regularly Bernice “The Reason We Are All Here” Summerfield is in it.
In some ways this is a nice problem to have, as it means any character can be granted depth as if they were the main focus. Braxiatel has never seemed more down to Earth, being almost frenziedly interested in Renée and passionately committed to staying on Dellah, his adopted home. He almost dies for it. (He refuses the call to we-legally-can’t-name-his-planet and his spaceship-you-might-know-the-name-of is taken away.) Emile – still a wearyingly self-deprecating teen riddled with familial psychological abuse – jumps through his usual gay panics, but also knowingly engages with fundamentalism while knowing the risks only too well. (And he dies! Or he doesn’t. I’m hoping further books will explain the ending.) James, the preacher, gives perhaps the best boots-on-the-ground view of the bubbling zealotry on Dellah, as his sense of guilt allows Maa’lon to flip his mind entirely to his cause, with murderous results. Renée, conversely, goes from a figure of fun caught in an absurd military role to someone who can seriously look Braxiatel in the eye. Even the silly old Grel come out of this richer and more real, from an amusing vignette about the birth of their fact-based society to what happens when they are confronted with proof of divinity – which isn’t even the same for every Grel.
It is perhaps Clarence, though, that comes closest to protagonist if-not-Bernice. He quests for knowledge, goes against his programming, confronts his feelings for Bernice and then rescues her, ending up in exile. (Though that may have been what God intended all along.) Bernice, it must be said, needs rescuing in this fashion twice, which I’m not too thrilled about. But then it’s a book determined to tell us the rules have changed, and there’s hardly a clearer way to do that than to have Benny out of her depth. (Blowing up the main hub of the New Adventures will admittedly also suffice.)
Where does this leave the New Adventures? Well, somewhere else, at the very least. (Which is a pity as I thought more books should have been set on Dellah.) There’s some significant arc stuff in Where Angels Fear, giving Clarence plenty to chew on about his past, and spelling out for us the working relationship between Bernice and God – which puts all those adventures with the Worldsphere in a new light. It’s what I wanted, at least on a moving-the-series-along level, and it’s undeniably very interesting when you dig into all the moving parts. (Some of which are still not entirely clear. See, what happened to Emile. And the strange murderer from Tyler’s Folly. And to be frank, what’s going on in general. Bernice only really vocalises the problem around Page 193.)
Where Angels Fear was still not the most readable book for me, for a couple of fairly semantic reasons, and it’s definitely a bummer overall. But perhaps that’s why they put the flash-forward in there: rip off the plaster right away so you can focus on the rest of it. I have no idea what the series will look like after this point, which is automatically an improvement. Hopefully it can answer my next question: is there a middle ground between bubbly mysteries of the week and Armageddon?
7/10
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