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rushthatspeaksOh God this is so beautiful.
sovay told me to read this because it is a masterpiece, and she was absolutely correct to do so. This is one of those books that makes me want to wave it at people and quote Julian of Norwich and say 'all shall be well and all shall be well and one reason why is that people write books like this'.
Uh.
The thing is, ninety percent of the reasons why this is so fucking good are intensely and book-destroyingly spoilery. But also, ninety percent of the reviews I've read of this book seem to have missed, well, the plot, when it happened. At least, what I believe to be the plot.
This is one of those novels in which the event many books would have considered central, and begun with, is never depicted: some years ago, a young couple, Lucas and Pam, took part in a ritual, or summoning, or incident, together with the magician or would-be magician Yaxley. It was a Gnostic rite intended to summon the Pleroma, the Gnostic realm beyond all realms of perfection, one of whose names may be Heaven. Neither of them can remember exactly what happened, and their lives go oddly afterward, not well, and filled with strange hauntings.
We never hear what happened in the ritual. What's important is what was lost, or gained, or thought, or attained, or found, and that's what we see, the ramifications of that down all the years.
As time goes on and their lives become worse and worse, Pam and Lucas spin a story between them, as consolation and something more, about a city or country called the Coeur, which is the interstice and place between the Pleroma and this world of ours, and also a hidden history of Europe. We hear about the fall of the city, the death of its last Empress, the line of her descent woven into and out of historicity, an unceasing yet unaware flame. The Coeur is visible as a shadow in the world, most detectable when it isn't present, closest when it is farthest away. The Coeur, during the dissolution of the couple's marriage and the threat of Pam's death and the endless incomprehensible haunting manifestations, is the immanence that can be hoped for and yet is not, unceasing magic in a form that works for humans.
The question, one would think, is whether the Coeur and its heirs are real, and whether magic can save anything.
SPOILERS NO REALLY I MEAN IT I TALK ABOUT THE ENDING
That isn't actually the question.
If you've read the novel, you will notice that I haven't mentioned the (not-quite) unnamed narrator, the fourth party at the ritual, the one who's telling us all this.
Who is he? Why was he at the ritual? Why is he the one narrating? And, most importantly, how does he know the details of Lucas and Pam so firmly, so strongly, how can he tell us the innermost secrets of the parts of their lives and marriage he was never there for?
That last is the crucial question. It is of course because he doesn't exist. Or, well, he does. Just. He didn't always.
What the ritual did was split Lucas and Pam into several things, as the Pleroma and the World are separated, and the Coeur stands between them. Lucas and Pam are the version in the World, unable to stay married, racked by illness, slovenliness, anger, the alchemical ghosts. The narrator is-- not the Pleroma, for he isn't in perfection all the time; he lives in the Coeur. His life is the life Lucas always wanted, the beautiful wife who always loves him and with whom he has wonderful sex, the career in publishing, the house that fits like a glove, the occasional wanders into magical revelation and the numinousness at the heart of landscape. He got all the joy in life. But he has his problems, too, his continuing entanglement with Yaxley (who never understood what happened), his inexorable bond to Pam and Lucas, and the fact that he does not know what he is.
The book says outright several times that you cannot both comprehend the Pleroma and live in it. One or the other. Pam and Lucas have the gift of comprehending it. They tell the story of the Coeur, which is the highest version that can be understood, but they do not live there. The narrator lives there sometimes and cannot understand it.
It is important to note that the narrator is not married to the alternate version of Pam. It's not that she isn't his ideal wife, because she is; if you look at Lucas's stories he keeps writing himself as the captains who love the empress, but the narrator knows what Lucas doesn't. He isn't her fantasy. She never wanted to be the empress, she wanted to be the empress's daughter and the Gnostic Sophia and to love and be wise, and she does, and the narrator only meets the real Pam (Phoenissa, of the Coeur) after the Worldly one has died. Whereupon they enact the alchemical marriage, and from this wedding everyone gets what they most want, their heart's desire.
Pam lives on, on multiple levels, because Phoenissa continues her wandering and the narrator has also had a daughter, heir to the Coeur. Lucas and the narrator each get what they most wanted, too. They switch. Lucas gets to become the version in the Coeur, to fall into the story he was telling to Pam and to become the writer of it, and to disappear into the heart of time, the silence.
And the narrator? Well, being in the world hurts you. His wife dies (she had to, being only a shadow of Pam, and in the World Pam is dead). He isn't as happy. But he understands now. He knows what the story was, from start to finish, and many philosophers would say that is more important than happiness, and he knows now where it was he lived. He has the memory of Paradise as well as the knowledge of good and evil, to use terms the book wouldn't. He is fully and completely human.
All this in a novel so densely packed, so subtly woven. Everything foreshadows and echoes what is going on at its heart, every couple is a version of the alchemical marriage, every relationship the same relationship at a greater or lesser distance from Pleroma.
And a book so full of allusions. I had had my suspicions about the narrator for some time, and then someone who ought to know called him by name, once, Jack, and I thought I am Jack's total lack of surprise and I knew. According tosovay whole huge chunks of the secret history are based on things that really happened (saith Patrick Leigh Fermor). There is, too, a name-check of Norman Cohn's In Pursuit of the Millennium; I was glad of that because I had seen it woven in, like a thread of silk.
END GIANT BOOK-DESTROYING SPOILERS
I also greatly admire the prose here. Harrison's sentences are so subtle as to be almost self-effacing, until they hit you over the head. He'll say something like "They were married one year, and then five," and it tells you everything. It's one of those styles that feels as though it isn't a style at all, but read it over aloud and it will surprise you.
So yes. That. More of that, please. That was amazing.
sovay told me to read this because it is a masterpiece, and she was absolutely correct to do so. This is one of those books that makes me want to wave it at people and quote Julian of Norwich and say 'all shall be well and all shall be well and one reason why is that people write books like this'.Uh.
The thing is, ninety percent of the reasons why this is so fucking good are intensely and book-destroyingly spoilery. But also, ninety percent of the reviews I've read of this book seem to have missed, well, the plot, when it happened. At least, what I believe to be the plot.
This is one of those novels in which the event many books would have considered central, and begun with, is never depicted: some years ago, a young couple, Lucas and Pam, took part in a ritual, or summoning, or incident, together with the magician or would-be magician Yaxley. It was a Gnostic rite intended to summon the Pleroma, the Gnostic realm beyond all realms of perfection, one of whose names may be Heaven. Neither of them can remember exactly what happened, and their lives go oddly afterward, not well, and filled with strange hauntings.
We never hear what happened in the ritual. What's important is what was lost, or gained, or thought, or attained, or found, and that's what we see, the ramifications of that down all the years.
As time goes on and their lives become worse and worse, Pam and Lucas spin a story between them, as consolation and something more, about a city or country called the Coeur, which is the interstice and place between the Pleroma and this world of ours, and also a hidden history of Europe. We hear about the fall of the city, the death of its last Empress, the line of her descent woven into and out of historicity, an unceasing yet unaware flame. The Coeur is visible as a shadow in the world, most detectable when it isn't present, closest when it is farthest away. The Coeur, during the dissolution of the couple's marriage and the threat of Pam's death and the endless incomprehensible haunting manifestations, is the immanence that can be hoped for and yet is not, unceasing magic in a form that works for humans.
The question, one would think, is whether the Coeur and its heirs are real, and whether magic can save anything.
SPOILERS NO REALLY I MEAN IT I TALK ABOUT THE ENDING
That isn't actually the question.
If you've read the novel, you will notice that I haven't mentioned the (not-quite) unnamed narrator, the fourth party at the ritual, the one who's telling us all this.
Who is he? Why was he at the ritual? Why is he the one narrating? And, most importantly, how does he know the details of Lucas and Pam so firmly, so strongly, how can he tell us the innermost secrets of the parts of their lives and marriage he was never there for?
That last is the crucial question. It is of course because he doesn't exist. Or, well, he does. Just. He didn't always.
What the ritual did was split Lucas and Pam into several things, as the Pleroma and the World are separated, and the Coeur stands between them. Lucas and Pam are the version in the World, unable to stay married, racked by illness, slovenliness, anger, the alchemical ghosts. The narrator is-- not the Pleroma, for he isn't in perfection all the time; he lives in the Coeur. His life is the life Lucas always wanted, the beautiful wife who always loves him and with whom he has wonderful sex, the career in publishing, the house that fits like a glove, the occasional wanders into magical revelation and the numinousness at the heart of landscape. He got all the joy in life. But he has his problems, too, his continuing entanglement with Yaxley (who never understood what happened), his inexorable bond to Pam and Lucas, and the fact that he does not know what he is.
The book says outright several times that you cannot both comprehend the Pleroma and live in it. One or the other. Pam and Lucas have the gift of comprehending it. They tell the story of the Coeur, which is the highest version that can be understood, but they do not live there. The narrator lives there sometimes and cannot understand it.
It is important to note that the narrator is not married to the alternate version of Pam. It's not that she isn't his ideal wife, because she is; if you look at Lucas's stories he keeps writing himself as the captains who love the empress, but the narrator knows what Lucas doesn't. He isn't her fantasy. She never wanted to be the empress, she wanted to be the empress's daughter and the Gnostic Sophia and to love and be wise, and she does, and the narrator only meets the real Pam (Phoenissa, of the Coeur) after the Worldly one has died. Whereupon they enact the alchemical marriage, and from this wedding everyone gets what they most want, their heart's desire.
Pam lives on, on multiple levels, because Phoenissa continues her wandering and the narrator has also had a daughter, heir to the Coeur. Lucas and the narrator each get what they most wanted, too. They switch. Lucas gets to become the version in the Coeur, to fall into the story he was telling to Pam and to become the writer of it, and to disappear into the heart of time, the silence.
And the narrator? Well, being in the world hurts you. His wife dies (she had to, being only a shadow of Pam, and in the World Pam is dead). He isn't as happy. But he understands now. He knows what the story was, from start to finish, and many philosophers would say that is more important than happiness, and he knows now where it was he lived. He has the memory of Paradise as well as the knowledge of good and evil, to use terms the book wouldn't. He is fully and completely human.
All this in a novel so densely packed, so subtly woven. Everything foreshadows and echoes what is going on at its heart, every couple is a version of the alchemical marriage, every relationship the same relationship at a greater or lesser distance from Pleroma.
And a book so full of allusions. I had had my suspicions about the narrator for some time, and then someone who ought to know called him by name, once, Jack, and I thought I am Jack's total lack of surprise and I knew. According to
sovay whole huge chunks of the secret history are based on things that really happened (saith Patrick Leigh Fermor). There is, too, a name-check of Norman Cohn's In Pursuit of the Millennium; I was glad of that because I had seen it woven in, like a thread of silk.END GIANT BOOK-DESTROYING SPOILERS
I also greatly admire the prose here. Harrison's sentences are so subtle as to be almost self-effacing, until they hit you over the head. He'll say something like "They were married one year, and then five," and it tells you everything. It's one of those styles that feels as though it isn't a style at all, but read it over aloud and it will surprise you.
So yes. That. More of that, please. That was amazing.
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Very belated and tangential comment
Date: 2011-05-10 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-23 07:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-23 07:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-23 08:08 am (UTC)The two novels are pretty different creatures... _The Centauri Device_ is a pulpy space opera as written by a nihilistic depressive with radical political leanings. Reading it feels like taking your inner grumpy teenager out for some kind of sleazy self-destructive debauch. _Light_ is also sf and fairly dark, but it's much more mature and sort of honed and spare. I loved and warmly recommend both of them, but if you're going to read only one, read _Light_. It's a book I'd like to wave around as an example of what SF is good for.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-23 07:12 pm (UTC)Have you read Signs of Life? It's his only other book which reminds me a bit of this one.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-24 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-22 11:07 pm (UTC)