This novel was something of an unexpected gem. Duggan is an historical novelist from the 1950s and 60s, also an archaeologist, and maybe a bit of an odd duck. He was an Argentine raised in Britain by an upper class family. The novel tells the story of the strange Roman Emperor of the third century A.D., Elagabalus, referred to by his likely Roman name of Bassianus throughout the book. Bassianus was the only Roman emperor to have been made divine before his assumption of the Roman crown; he was the scion of Syrian priests of the god Elagabalus, and in the novel he identifies himself altogether with the god. The history alone is fascinating, but the book is a deft, neat, gorgeously written essay on loyalty, family dysfunction, and innocence. Duggan is a writer about whom I’d heard nothing, but his writing is incredibly precise and on the mark. He had the reputation for impeccable scholarship in his day. What’s most impressive about the writing is the ease with which it draws character and place and attitude, not with the belabored paragraphs of exposition to which so many historical writers resort. His writing is quick, sure, and convincing. Scholars are divided in nearly every way on the character of Elagabalus, in particular with his sexuality and gender – one British museum recently declared that Elagabalus was transgender, based on his own statements and the established fact that he wedded both women and men during his four year reign. Duggan simply presents his version of Elagabalus’s actions without any editorializing. If you are a fan of novels about Rome, this is a book that you ought to pursue. Duggan was a treasure and remains so.
Blackouts by Justin Torres
This is a book I admire by a writer I love. There is a studied, literary quality to the shaping of the fiction, and a deliberate otherworldly quality to the overall novel that announce it as a serious engagement with the art of writing. The story accrues in bits and pieces, and the idea of blackouts, which is also censorship – personal and public – is turned round and round and inside out in a delicate, beautiful way. The writing is what one would expect from Torres, lovely and clear, though less engaging, for me, than his first novel We the Animals. That he is a brilliant writer and thinker is clear, and that he is ambitious to be taken seriously and studied is manifest in the careful research, the allusiveness of the prose, and the stretching of the novel form to include what amount to poems – pages of writing in which sections have been blacked out to form a new text out of an old one. In all these facets this gem-like novel shines. For me the problem is not the book itself but the idea of literature, and the tropes of literariness, which have a tedious quality to me. Like many ambitious novels, this one has the feeling that it is meant to be studied more than read. Nevertheless the book engages the viscera, the heart, and not the head only, which is a fine achievement. What I admire most about Torres in the writing of this novel is that he did not attempt to repeat what he did in his first novel but rather sought to expand it. The novel covers vital territory in its exposure of the past. It reaches its peak for me in the short section about the protagonist’s love affair with Liam. That I cannot quite love it the way I did the first book is my own failing; as I have aged I read for what moves my feelings more than what moves my mind. This is a fine, important book, deserving of its accolades.
The Language of Love and Loss by Bart Yates
There is much to like in this book, and the beginning chapters are its strongest argument for quality. The character of the poet-mother is complicated, and the scenes in which Noah arrives for his visit, learns the news about her health, and reawakens his feelings for his old home town, are fine work. The novel is an exploration of family, trauma, and the collisions involved in this territory. Nothing in the book breaks much new ground but the writing is clear and insightful and a bit daring. Noah, the protagonist, learns that his mother wants to find the daughter who was given away in adoption when she was twelve years old – a shocking age for a girl to give birth. Her own father is the father of her child. This was enough to keep me reading. The ensuing entanglements don’t stop there but spread out through the blood family and the chosen family. There are some very good scenes where all this explodes, as one might expect. All the complications are well chosen and well handled, though I won’t go into them all. But the problem here is Noah himself, who is an often nasty piece of work, both in his thoughts, which drive the book, and in his behavior. I disliked him from the beginning, softened toward him in the early chapters, but went back to disliking him in the middle and end. This is not the usual problem of a character who is written to be imperfect and I certainly don’t need to admire all the protagonists of books I read. But Noah is not really examined, and the book is written much as if he were three inches from my nose chattering away. When his old flame leaves his husband and comes back to him I felt myself cheering for the husband and a little sorry that something good happened to Noah. Maybe I’m just irritable because it’s Christmas.
Leviathan Falls by James S. A. Corey
The final book of the Expanse series focuses on the echoing conflict between the aliens who built the ring space and protomolecule and the entities from a separate universe who destroyed them. In this summary you can see the strength and the weakness of the whole concept around which the novel is built. The concept of the ancient conflict is sweeping and grand and breathtaking in some ways. But the concept is also vague and distant and has to be brought into the present day of the novel in mundane ways that don’t enthrall. The result is a novel that veers between attempting to narrate a conflict vastly older than the human race and outside its scope, and attempting to tie that concept to the present through the vehicle of Duarte, the emerald planet, and the Protomolecule-infected children (and Amos, at the end). All the while bringing this enormous series of novels to a conclusion that still keeps faith with the central core of characters, including Holden, Naomi, Amos, and the rest, with whom we’ve made this whole journey. When it’s described this way, the novel is amazingly successful. During the reading, though, it falters, sometimes flailing from one conceptual framework to another, insisting at last on the agency of Holden at the helm of the Ring station to bring it all together, save the day, and destroy what’s left of the protomolecule builders and their network of gates. Since we never entirely understand the nature of the old conflict or the terms in which to read it, that side of the novel and series is unsatisfying. On the other hand, the human conflict, the fall of Laconia, and the end of Duarte, are very strong. I found myself liking the whole series very much after I no longer had to read it. The achievement of the books is actually epic, especially given the failure of so many other multi-novel series even to reach a conclusion at all.
Tiamat’s Wrath by James S. A. Corey
This is the high point of the Expanse series in my opinion, in part because the old and slightly hackneyed politics of the early novels has become irrelevant, but mostly because the purity of the grand space opera dominates the book. The Laconian Empire felt like a faltering turn in the series when I saw that it was coming but instead it delivered an energy and a surprise that lifted the whole narrative. I hated Duarte more than previous antagonists precisely because I could sympathize with him at the same time, and his view that one wise man with immortality could provide good government has resonance with anyone who has read much history. So to see his comeuppance delivered with such conviction, first with the destruction of the battleship in the Sol System, and then with the invasion of Laconia and the end of the alien shipyards, was enthralling. The use of Holden was different in this book, a lovely variety. The use of all the Rocinante family/crew was fresher here as well. I had my usual questions, wondering why it was that the protomolecule builders had need of facilities for building warships to begin with, since they were a hive mind. In Cibola Burn the presence of the protomolecule causes the ruins on that planet to activate in uncontrollable ways, but on Laconia, which is clearly a more central world to the civilization, there is no report of any such problem. There is also a faceless quality to the Laconians themselves. The idea of Laconia is modeled on the Spartans of Sparta, who were a noisy and raucous bunch; the Laconians have no feeling of character and are not explored much. But the feeling of vengeance powerfully delivered brings quite a rush to this book and this overcomes other considerations. This is probably the single best space opera novel that I have ever read. Truly fine.
Persepolis Rising by James S. A. Corey
This book begins the final long arc of story in the Expanse series. Being that the streaming series on Prime never covered these books, this was my first experience of the series that was not overly colored by the filmed versions, though of course the faces of the actors remained in my head while I was reading. In this final trilogy of novels (I think it’s fair to think of them that way since they are unified and tell a complete and separate story) the series moves away from solar system politics that were a bit simplistic at times into a grander arena. The Laconians, who began as a splinter group of the Martian navy, reappear with alien tech drawn from their study of the ruins of the ancient aliens and sweep through the ring space and the Sol system with unstoppable force. The image of the single battleship that wreaks havoc on the navies of Earth and Mars is rather fine, and unsettling in a way that felt more visceral than I expected. It was as though I was reading about the conquest of my actual home. This is an impressive feat of speculative storytelling and indicates how deeply the books have affected me even when I quarreled with them. At the same time the story depicts the aging of the Rocinante family and all the other characters in the series, given that there is a long time gap between book six and book seven. And the book takes us to Laconia, which is the culture built in the intervening decades by the Martian colonists; the use of the word “Laconia” and the reference to the culture of Sparta indicates the ambitions of Duarte and his followers, but the actual setting of Laconia is complex. Duarte himself is a better antagonist that many of the others in the series, even with his ambition and delusion. The deepening of what we learn about the older race of sentients who built all the ruins and sent the protomolecule to Earth in the long-ago is also sharp. This novel is the writers hitting on all cylinders.
Babylon’s Ashes by James S. A. Corey
This novel is the low point of the series for me, though it is, as these novels always are, readable and compelling, largely due to the deft use of action, point of view switches, character familiarity, and the rising swell of the larger arc of the story. At this point the background story of the protomolecule and the ancient aliens is becoming something to follow. The story of Marcos Inaros and his Free Navy, though, becomes heavy-handed and cumbersome. The signs of his decay as a leader are very clear, maybe a bit too much so. The whole soap opera-ish arc of Naomi, her lost son, and her former, now-evil lover feels ungainly, as if the sweep of history is reduced to a subplot of The Young and the Restless. There is also the uncomfortable and continuing depiction of the Belters as victimized underdogs in the face of the catastrophic attacks on Earth and the death of fifteen billion (I think this was the last count) people on Earth. The novel never reconciles the crimes committed against the Belters with the crime that a faction of their own people commit against billions of others. The depiction of this is startling and unrealistic. The scales have been more than balanced by this act of revenge. The boot against the neck of the Belters – a phrase that is repeated dozens of times throughout the novel series – has been well amputated. This level of genocide would horrify any decent people but the book tends to use it more as a plot device than a real and devastating event. Also disappointing is the god-in-the-box ending. The protomolecule and its magic destroy Marcos just at the last moment, after the intrepid crew of the Rocinante figure out how to evoke it. It was a bold choice to introduce the devastating attacks on Earth in book five, but the implications of that savagery overshadow the clever plotting of the next book. It feels wrong.
Nemesis Games by James S. A. Corey
I liked this book best of the series when I had been apprehensive about it upon learning that it would flow into such different directions and contain so many different point of view characters. In this novel the Expanse series opens up a vista on a future that seems tangible, possible, and terrifying. It is not without its flaws but they are secondary to the wide look at the world(s) it offers. There is something transcendent here, a book that employs the tropes and schemes of action and adventure and manages through all this to offer a mirror to our own world that is rather profound. What awful things human beings will do to one another in the name of justice. The book accomplishes this without losing its appeal as entertainment and it made me think hard about my own naiveté about the reality of human nature. The story opens the way for the second act of this enormous series of novels, the boiling over of the political tensions between humans who left the planet and humans who remain. The plot is too complicated to summarize, but the authors make it hurt: billions of people die on Earth when a Belter faction launches an astonishing attack with asteroids as their weapons, an echo of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, only in this novel we see the devastation wrought in the sequence with Amos roaming his old city of Baltimore in fulfillment of old obligations. It is the impact of this attack that the novel traces, through a labyrinth of iterations, and they are compelling. There are the weaker moments that are at the same time necessary: the impossible coincidence that it is Naomi’s older lover who leads the Belter faction, that she has a son she’s never mentioned (shades of dozens of soap operas) who is part of the faction; this a plot choice that has a good deal of cheese in it but that nevertheless takes the reader inside the world of these attackers and gives a long look at their psychology, their self-justification. The fact that the novel opens up this territory of vengeance and genocide without attempting to resolve the whole within its pages leads to the permutations that will carry the series forward. This is the novel where the protomolecule and its semi-magical properties have the least effect and matter hardly at all, which makes the story more of a human thing. This is a strong piece of writing. Reading it made me glad I had decided to take on this series in the first place. I will never look forward to the wonder of space exploration in the same way.
Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey
To begin with, I read this book with a lot of speed and interest and at the same time fought with the writers’ choices the whole way. Who thought it was a good idea to colonize a bunch of worlds all filled with alien technology and ruins? Who realistically thinks a few hundred people in a ratty little colony have an actual claim on a whole world? When the second, so-called official colony follows the first band of Belter settlers, why wouldn’t they make a second colony somewhere across the planet, which is, after all, a pretty big place? All this is niggling, of course. The writers went for the high-drama choices, as anyone would expect them to do. But the premise felt like a mess to start with. Then along comes Murderous Murtry, the chief villain here, and one of the most over-the-top villains of the whole series. Nothing will stop him from exerting the preeminence of the claim of the corporation for which he works, certainly not logic or decency or diplomacy. Then the alien ruins wake up because there’s a scrap of protomolecule on the Rocinante. By now it’s well established that the protomolecule can be used to explain most anything that needs explaining. Then comes the prolonged action sequences and the chase across the planet and the standoff in space as the planet wakes up and does nasty stuff to the colony. It reaches out it reaches out indeed. There are battles on the planet and battles in space and the bad guys just want to kill everybody when there’s a whole entire planet to share if they would just think about it. But anyway. That was the argument in my head. But I devoured the book and skimmed the parts of it that felt too long, because, well, they were too long. It’s amazing that I came away still liking this series as a whole so very much when I quarreled with so many parts of it.
Abaddon’s Gate by James S. A. Corey
The problem with this novel is that you could take care of all of it in about a paragraph: the Rocinante (or some other ship) enters the ring and discovers gates to other star systems and boom, you’re at the next installment. Instead we have more of everything that has worked so far, more Belter/Earther/Martian politics, more fleets of ships, more hapless Rocinante running from missiles, more Holden heroics and more military/corporate villainy, more Mao (Clarissa this time). On the theory that it will all work again. And of course it clunks along like a solid used car. This novel is the very definition of churn. Where we arrive is at the point where things can be different because suddenly the protomolecule has finally done something. The something is, of course, a revelation of stargates to other places. Which many a novel and TV series has accomplished just by use of the word. But anyway. It is more readable than it sounds but if this book of the series had to exist it could be much shorter. There is some interesting stuff with the ability of the ancient aliens to manipulate the laws of physics inside the ring. But that’s about it.