(June 2017)
Justina Robson is a novelist whose scope of
imagination frequently leaves me in awe, but whose plotting just as frequently
leaves me scratching my head trying to work out exactly what’s going on. In this
regard Glorious Angels, somewhat counterintuitively,
seems to do slightly better than those of her other books I’ve read.
This is counterintuitive because Glorious Angels is one of those
sprawling, multiple PoV books that I suppose we’re now required to compare to A Song of Ice and Fire, so on the face
of it there’s a lot more room than usual for the plot to spiral out of control.
A slightly meandering middle third aside, however, it’s all kept on a
relatively tight leash, aided by the fact that about halfway the penny drops
regarding the nature of the world and, bells and whistles aside, it then
becomes a relatively traditional far-future quest narrative.
The city of Glimshard is one of eight
around which the human empire is based, each with its own telepathically-linked
empress. Glimshard’s ethos is the old duality of the sensual and the
scientific, with the empress encouraging what we might recognize as a sort of
free love. The city is populated, meanwhile, by various hereditary, scholarly
houses whose principal role seems to be finding and resurrecting useful
technology from a more advanced but bygone era. A war has been raging at the
fringes of the empire against some nondescript barbarian analogues and, more
threateningly, the Karoo, an alien race of matriarchal shapeshifters upon whose
territory Glimshard’s archeological investigations have trespassed. The massive
artifact/macguffin which is the cause of this transgression is, it turns out,
of interest to a number of competing groups.
The point of view characters include:
Torada, the teenage empress of Glimshard, capable of commanding loyalty through
some sort of pheromone type thing; Zaharin, a seemingly louche dandy and
intelligence agent; Tralane Huntingore, the head scholar of a house of
engineers, and her daughters Isabeau and Minabar; and Tzaban, a karoo who has
taken it upon himself to act as mercenary and diplomat to Torada’s court. There
are several others besides, and once things pick up pace it’s a mild
disappointment that the story coalesces around Tralane, as she’s one of the
less interesting characters here; it’s not that she’s dull (she isn’t), but both
her daughters and Zaharin seem to have much more about them.
This is a novel centred on the social, and
the minutiae of interpersonal calculation can get a little stodgy at times.
(Related note: whenever I read something like this I find myself asking if
there really are people who dissect their interactions to this degree, in the
moment. After the fact I get, and I’d hardly hold myself up as a paragon of
social grace, but how much conscious
calculation of the sort described here does one person really make during small
talk?) This is leavened, however, by a decent dose of horror—the Karoo in full
effect are terrifyingly alien—and on a couple of unexpected occasions some
straight-up (for want of a better phrase) porn, which certainly keeps things
moving in an interesting direction.
There’s a lot to like (and to have other
more instinctive feelings about) in this book, and I’m mildly surprised it didn’t
get more attention when it came out. It’s the sort of Big Idea SF that, when it
gets it right, can really take your breath away with the depth and the scale of
its vision. Despite the uneven pacing, it does this more often than not. It’s
that whole sensawunda thing, which Glorious
Angels has in spades.
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