(January 2017)
A surprisingly nostalgic reading experience,
this. A ripsnorting thriller praised by a number of authors I like (Philip
Pullman, Alastair Reynolds) and which, despite being set in the early 1990’s,
has a distinctly Cold War feel that threw me right back into the Tom Clancy
novels I ploughed through as a teenager. It’s also utterly ridiculous.
That’s not always a bad thing, y’know? Our
hero is Johnny ‘Raven’ Porter, a multilingual, multi-PhD’d superman who’s never
spoken to a premenopausal woman he didn’t fuck. The opening is very slow-burn:
we don’t even meet Porter until the 10th chapter. Instead we potter around
Oxford as a professor receives what turns out to be a series of coded messages
from a secret Russian research station, which eventually ends up with him
recruiting Raven as a de facto spy in the wilds of British Colombia. The slow
burn works as well, once you’ve gotten used to the fact this isn’t a thriller
so much as an espionage-procedural. There are very strong similarities
throughout with classic ‘competent man’ SF: here’s a technical problem, here’s
how a man (and it is always a man) goes about solving it. Lots of detail about
how messages are decoded and what they could mean and jumps of narrative
viewpoint to satellite tracking stations and whatnot.
Trouble is, this attention to detail on the
part of the author and characters also encourages it on the part of the reader,
which does rather exacerbate the effect of plot holes and narrative shortcuts
and the like. Davidson is just a little too fond of the device wherein
character A explains a plan in exhaustive detail to character B, right up until
the most dramatic moment, at which point the narrative voice intones “and then
he explained what would happen next” and we cut to the plan in action. Not all
that subtle, as tension-creating hooks go, really. There’s also the hundred-odd pages Porter spends undercover in Japan, smuggling himself onto a death-trap
tramp steamer, getting into fights, and deliberately giving himself hideous
tropical diseases in order to get to the town right next to his objective, only
to then fly to Murmansk, change identity, and fly back again in the space of a
page and a half. This makes no sense whatsoever, and I read the rest of the
book waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for some reason, however
tenuous, that this massively convoluted and risky insertion plan might have
been chosen instead of having him just fly to Murmansk in the first place.
Nope. Basically the narrative needs him to run the risk of being recognized
later on, however ludicrously manufactured that risk turns out to be.
“Ludicrously manufactured” would be a
pretty good tag line for the book as a whole, with the understanding that that’s
not necessarily a pejorative. I mean, yes, the female characters are all
matrons, or sluts, or ice queens who only need a decent rodgering to get them
weeping about love everlasting; there is a fair amount of significance attached
to the ethnicities of various Arctic indigenous peoples that I don’t know enough
about to comment on authoritatively on but feels rather suspect; and the SFnal
macguffin at the heart of Porter’s quest is both paradigm-shattering yet
curiously underwhelming; but the journey is amazing and the final act is one of
the most vividly imagined chase sequences I’ve ever read. It takes a good long
while to get there, and I am slightly at a loss as to why this had quite so
much of a revival a couple of years back, but a nearly two-hundred pages of
first-rate tension dashed across the wilds of Siberia is value for money, however
you reckon it.
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