Light (GOLLANCZ S.F.) [Paperback]

Interesting how this book polarises opinion. I loved it. I fail to see how some reviewers view it as "infantile" or "puerile", referencing the few sex scenes and the character name Billy Anker. Playful and honest, but not puerile. And I can see how the opening is a bit disorientating: it does take a fair while before you can tell what's going on, and even longer before the threads start weaving together. But that's part of the manic pleasure it provides as you're carried along through one atmospheric environment after another. I thought the writing was absolutely extraordinary in places, tight, precise, evocative. Yes, it is a bit overwrought in places, overwritten, too stylish for its own good. But overall, it's stunning. The characters aren't particularly sympathetic, but one of the strands (Seria Mau) concerning a human in a symbiotic relationship with a starship, is superbly imagined and moving; as another reviewer noted, it captures actual sensation of N-dimensional space fantastically (comparable in quality to Christopher Priest's capturing of the perception of infinite width in Inverted World). Read it, unless you only like thick books which come in series and have swords on the front.

I'm not surprised that this book has polarized opinions, don't read this if you think it's going to be another formulaic space opera. Light is a book that asks more questions than it answers and certainly isn't from the Clarke or Asimov branch of "science" fiction. Instead you get something a lot like the film Pi, an exploration of madness and obsession mingled with the strangeness that is pure math and quantum theory. Nothing much is explained, it's just left for the reader to piece together in whatever way they want.

This is a challenging read, but if you're tired of the same old formula of derivative fiction try this guy out. It is a truly intense book that might not be on everyone else's wavelength but is all the better for that. I've been devouring his work since rediscovering him a while back. I had read the Virconium books a long time ago but had lost them (and his name wouldn't come to me) until I found Light.

Reading Harrison's work you begin to see his influence refracted through all that is good in SF/Fantasy at the moment, from Iain Banks to China Mieville. His strength, apart from some wonderful prose, is his ability to transcend genres; moving through the full spectrum of pastiche, science fiction and literature, sometimes in the same paragraph.

Highly recomended if you like to think about what you're reading.

I've read in numerous places, which I'm far too lazy to reference here, that M. John Harrison's 2002 novel Light does for Space Opera what his Viriconium sequence did for Fantasy back in the 1980s. This is quite the claim, as Viriconium towers over the landscape of postmodern fantasy literature as a definite and unchallenged Olympus; the book that finally did-away with the literary naivety of the field by drawing direct attention to the problematic artificiality of secondary-world High Fantasy, all the while remaining deeply enamoured of the tropes, traditions and history of the genre; a genre with which Harrison is clearly well-versed and much in love.

To think that the same writer could reinvigorate not just one, but two distinct genres both of which, let's be honest, suffer from more than their fair share of cliché, repetition and imaginative exhaustion is difficult to believe, but having read the frankly staggering (and not to mention extraordinarily beautiful) Light, I'm definitely coming round to the idea. It's 30-odd years since Harrison seemingly abandoned New Wave sci-fi with his early (and criminally underrated) novel The Centauri Device, but his forays into the lands of Fantasy and (later) Literary Fiction were obviously time well spent, as Light meshes a keen commitment to psychological realism with a penchant for inventive, stripped-back imagist prose. The book toys with and deconstructs many of the familiar tenets of science fiction, but in a joyous and celebratory way, never sneering. Harrison's frame of reference is galaxy-spanning, and Light is replete with subtle (and not-so-subtle) tributes to the canon of famous (and not-so-famous) science fiction literature, T.V. and film. Please don't think the book is just some big party of self-indulgent genre references, it most certainly isn't: the narrative is dominated by an unflinching and unsympathetic portrayal of horrific violence, manipulative sex and mental illness, but underpinning this grit is a definite comic treatment of the vagaries of space opera. The satire is tender, and the commitment to sensawunda is genuine.

Light focuses on three larger-than-life characters; the theoretical physicist and serial killer Michael Kearney; Seria Mau Genlicher, a woman who's been (voluntarily) cybernetically mutilated and encased in a vat of protein fluids from which she pilots a strange alien craft - an artefact from some long-extinct race of star-moving galactic engineers; and Ed Chianese (/Chinese Ed), a Virtual Reality addict enlisted in what can only be described as a... er... space circus. Michael's story takes place in 1999, the latter two narratives (Seria's and Ed's) transpire around 2400 AD, with chapters alternately flitting between each character.

All three protagonists are haunted by different manifestations of `The Shrander', an ungraspable and incarnately weird creature that variously functions as terrifying apparition of death, anti-hero, malcontent, surgeon, seer and sage. The Shrander's most memorable form is that which haunts Michael Kearney in the guise of a be-robed and spritely stalker with a horse's skull in place of a head. Not only is this a clear aesthetic reference to the Celtic Welsh tradition of the Mari Lwyd (and a knowing wink to fans of Viriconium with a suggestion of a shared universe), but the horse skull-headed version of the Shrander also acts as microcosm for one of the book's major themes: the estrangement of the familiar. By tradition the Mari Lwyd is a luck-bringing and festive Celtic ritual, and while The Shrander definitely contains elements of this festivity, it is by turns a much more terrifying and grotesque presence: it's the Mari Lwyd uprooted from its traditional contexts and placed, instead, within a weird and defamiliarising alien landscape. Removed from its place as a curio of Celtic festive and musical history, the writer imbues the image of the horse skull-headed puppet-creature with more sinister connotations - death, madness, murder. This is largely achieved by a fixation with the anatomical otherness of the Mari Lwyd. In general the image of a skull is inseparable from the concept of death, and Harrison manipulates this to truly horror fiction-esque scales. A big part of Lights' aesthetic is a making-strange of otherwise common place or traditional objects.

Outside of The Shrander's haunting, much of the plotting is concerned with explaining how the three protagonists found themselves in their current situations. Seria Mau's life before her cybernetic implantation into an alien ship is told through a series of disjointed and cryptic dream sequences that, though initially baffling, come together in a way that rewards patience and is immensely satisfying. The disorganized memories of her troubled childhood gradually expose the awful circumstances that led her to make the irreversible choice to be implanted into her ship, and I expect the visceral scenes of techno-surgery to stick with me for some time. It's a testament to Harrison's skill as a writer that something so physical and disturbed can also be so moving. Seria Mau is mutilated, trapped and profoundly alone, but these are truths the reader has to parse out from prose dense with scientific jargon as she concerns herself not with pitying introspection, but with the everyday mechanisations of her FTL alien ship and the technical demands of operating in nano-second time frames stretched out by mind-altering drugs to last, for her, for subjective minutes. The tragedy of Seria Mau isn't her present circumstance, but that the universe organised itself in such a way that she made the choice to live like this.

Choices made and not-made, then, form the thematic heart of the novel. This is re-iterated by Michael Kearney's work as a quantum physicist exploring the various theories surrounding probabilities, quantum states and branching, possible universes. Driven half-mad by the stalking Shrander and his failure to devise a useful system of quantum computing, Kearney defers all of his choices to a strange set of dice that he stole from the Shrander in some un-written prologue to the novel. The dice are loaded (... I apologise in advance for this...) with symbolism... with connotations that range from choice theory and quantum mechanics to the world that could have been if only different choices were made. Of course "dice stuff" is a big cliché of post-modern fiction, but here the beauty and pitch-perfect tone of Harrison's prose and the playful morality of his ideas stop Light from ever seeming trite or disingenuous. Also there are cats (two cats - one black, one white) that manifest in all three timelines and that play a significant part in the choices and directions of the characters' lives, both literally and figuratively.

This is all well and good, but where Light really (again, I'm sorry...) shines... is in its examination of the ways these characters' choices affect the lives of the people close to them. The supporting cast is a lowly and agency-less collection of tragically damaged individuals tossed around like ragdolls by the selfish and often misguided decisions of the three protagonists. Michael Kearney's ex-wife Anna, for example, is a mentally unstable woman in thrall to Michael's every movement. The beautifully constructed, psychologically piercing and eloquent exchanges between the two are a stylistic highlight of the novel, albeit harrowing and difficult to "enjoy" in the usual sense of the word:

"I try to help you - only you won't let me"

"Anna" he said quickly, "I help you. You're a drunk. You're anorexic. You're ill most days, and on a good day you can barely walk down the pavement. You're always in a panic. You barely live in the world we know."

But in terms of its style, Light is a book of many shades (... just take my apologies as a given from now on...). Several long passages of esoteric technobabble (much of which I suspect is more nonsense than science) are almost David Foster Wallace-esque in their challenge to the reader to actually look up the words you don't understand (only to find that a percentage of them actually are nonsense). While some may argue that this renders the "science" part of "science fiction" arbitrary and spurious, I think the real point is a playful fixation on the glorious sounds and tones of jargon, absent their content, to become a kind of poetry. It doesn't have to make sense, as the narrator puts it: this is "a place where all the broken rules of the universe spill out".

Light is a challenging, oftentimes abstract novel that, in spite of (or maybe in complement to) it's title, contains a lot of dark. The novel's dénouement ties the three narratives together in unexpected yet fulfilling ways, and the book's examination of senseless cruelty and selfishness only lend the ending greater poignancy. It's a book of clichés turned in on themselves, of constant references to a saturated history of science fiction that Harrison neither attempts to ignore nor to revolutionise, but to celebrate. I'm not sure if Light is the Viriconium of Space Opera, simply because I don't think Space Opera suffers from the same institutionalised problems as modern Fantasy literature. It is, however, an incredible novel; perfectly balanced, relentlessly beautiful; puzzling but always fascinating.