Context [Paperback]

At the end of the first volume of the Nulapeiron Sequence, Tom Cocorigan risked his life to save Lady Sylvana, the Noblewoman who he had dreamed he was in love with. He had to save her from the very revolution he had began with the wanton killing of Oracles in a bid to gain the freedom of all of Nulpeiron and free the lower stratum from the kind of abuses he had suffered as young man due to the stratification of society. He no longer believes in that cause. After all is said and done, nothing has really changed all that much. Tom just wants to fade into obscurity and be left alone. Alas, the quiet life is not to be, for when Tom is summoned to an audience with an Oracle, his only companion, Elva, inexplicably commits suicide and soon after that the Oracle himself is killed by what seems like assassins who can bend space and time. After the death of Elva, Tom suddenly realizes that he was in love with her, but now it's too late to do anything about it. Well, that's not entirely true. Before he died the Oracle showed him a vision in which Elva is still alive. Tom will stop at nothing to learn where she is and how she can still be alive, even as dark forces threaten to take over his world!

I'm not going to beat around the bush and so I'll tell you what brought this book down from a masterpiece to an "OK" novel. These three things would be martial arts, rock climbing, and jogging! Whatever happens in this book seems to bring up these too overtly personal interests of the author. Every time Tom gets in trouble he has to resort to one of these techniques. If some enemies are after him, he climbs a cliff, he has to work himself up a ventilation shaft, he has to suspend himself on the ceiling, etc. And then all these supposedly advanced humans are still kung fu fighting and everybody knows one fighting art or another. But the worst facet is the jogging. Whenever Tom feels down or stressed, he goes jogging, which Meaney has to recount over and OVER again, describing his breathing, the scenery, with very little contemplation. He even joins a monastery where the monks jog to gain enlightenment! If I wanted to read about these activities, I would get books on them. They stick out like sore thumbs in Context and it seems like the writer bent the plot just so he could include his hobbies in this series. What a waste. Another thing that brings down the book is Tom's what seems like insincere love for Elva. I mean, it's like there was no clue in the first book and he doesn't love her until she's dead. And then he just wanders around in an aimless plot that is a pale imitation of a picaresque adventure tale without showing much urgency to find her. The book just kept repeating itself to me. Tom gets beat down. A stranger heals him. Tom is almost killed. Somebody heals him over and over, making the coencidences seem trite and unrealistic. The last thing that just wounded the novel was that Meaney even injects analogies to WWII and the Jewish Holocaust into the plot which seem just dumb and out of place. While the end of the book begins to make up for the shortcomings in the work, even that is a retread of the climax of the first volume in my mind. Probably some of the concepts in these two books would have been easier to digest if Meaney's first book, To Hold Infinity, which has not been published in America, would have come out first, since it concerns the same universe.

Paradox, the first book in this series, was chock-full of ideas and story. There was some violence, but it advanced the story, and the descriptions were ... not restrained, but appropriate.

Context is chock-full of blood and gore. Resolution, the third book, is worse. It's as though Meanie ran out of ideas, even ran out of story, but had to keep going to make a trilogy, and replaced the science fiction with shock value. Context and Resolution together could have been told in half a book.

Tom is now Lord Tom, and doing the whole rise and fall thing ends up seriously hurt, and having to involve himself with those annoying future predicting seer people again.

He wants to turn the use of these Oracles to his own ends, and to help the underprivileged, basically. He also wants to get his woman back, or see if she is not dead, anyway.