The Centauri device [by] M. John Harrison [Hardcover]

I must disagree with all of my fellow reviewers! This is, without any doubt on my part, the worst book, out of a dozen or so, I have read in this series so far. Being fairly well read in SF, I was a little surprised to find the name of an author completely unknown to me herein. If this is the best of his work, I certainly have no wish to read any more.

Far from 'empathizing' with his characters, I found almost all, at best, unengaging, and, at worst, actively repellent. Being a huge fan of Iain M. Banks, I am unable to find any comparison between this work & his own. I am at a loss as to why he should apparently admire this dreadful book.

"...never verbose or pretentious..."? Au contraire, it is never anything else, and the prose is empty and meaningless, when it is not utter rubbish. It puts me in mind of the archetypical Main Street of a Western film set, where the buildings are merely facades with nothing behind them. At worst, he describes a room as 'frugal & austere' and then procedes with 'little chintzy curtains, a stained wooden floor and carpets of Turkey' Chintz curtains - frugal? Turkish carpets - austere? Uh, I think not!

The book is riddled with clumsy deus ex machina, one of my pet hates. The 'hero' is moved smoothly from chapter to chapter, not because he would naturally do so, but because people (usually one 'villain' or another) conveniently turn up, for no apparent reason other than that the author needs them to do so. He could easily have suggested, for instance, that the various groups pursuing Truck had bugged his clothing, but no, he seems more concerned with his florid phrases. Characters, particularly the military, behave in a singularly stupid fahion, because the author wishes them to do so. One group in the book has conveniently 'found' some alien ships in deep space & have, apparently, easily been able to utilise them (because the plot requires it). Speaking of which, Mr Harrison's grasp of military tactics & the advance of technology is pathetic - he describes the culminating space battle, in unlikely terms, as though it were a WWI dogfight! If it were written in the 40's it would be a poor effort, as it was written in the 70's it is simply woeful. Thankfully, he leaves the hard science of how things work very, very vague, since what little he does say suggests a surfeit of flowery language & a deficit of any scientific knowledge at all.

From first to last, this is a pitiful effort. If I may alliterate, this is poor pulp packaged in pretentious prose. It seems to me as if, throughout the entirety of the book, the author is crying "look what wonderful phrases I can write!" The phrases aren't wonderful, and there is nothing else to the book. As my title says, a lamb in wolf's clothing, it should never, in my opinion, have got anywhere near a 'masterworks' series.

Adventures are an entertaining series of unpleasantnesses that happen to other people. Those having adventure thrust upon them are, in real life, unaware at the time of the entertainment and have far more important things to worry about. That adventures are actually enjoyable for the participants is a significant difference between the worlds of fiction and reality, and to read something that breaks that mould is refreshing.

John Truck, the nominatively determined protagonist (I dare not call him a hero, for he spends an awful lot of time running away) is the future's equivalent of a white van man, just scraping a living from his battered and barely legal ship, one of society's losers. A self-confessed loser too. For reasons completely outside his control he is bullied, cajoled and threatened by governments and cults who want the eponymous Centauri Device under their control. Of course, in reality it would all go horribly wrong and one of the antagonists would get their way, but Narrative demands that Truck win through - although unlike the traditional hero he does so entirely by accident and would really like to just be left alone to continue as a loser orbiting around the fringes of society. I suppose that in a way he's like General Flashman - he ends up appearing to be heroic despite spending most of the time wetting his pants with terror - although unlike Flashman he's not himself a bully and makes no effort to hide his cowardice.

So we have a splendid, refreshing story, in which at least some characters are rounded, detailed and sympathetic even if some of the antagonists are a bit less well developed. It's already excellent and verging upon getting five stars.

We also have the most superb writing. It's clear and direct, but peppered with biting commentary. For example, "he leered at a receptionist ... as long-legged and unapproachable - by losers - as any ice-princess. She smiled back politely, because that year it was polite to be polite to the underpriveleged", "for a narcotics offence ... no one could reasonably expect a lawyer, but the twenty-fourth century admits - indeed insists upon - your right to religious representation". It's also - and I was initially somewhat annoyed at this - full of surreal imagery. But that annoyance soon evaporated, when the surrealist anarchist "Pater" (is it a coincidence that his name is Latin for "father"?) is introduced. He gives the text-book definition of surrealism as his manifesto - "here we begin to guess at the nature of space ... We infer reality". Surrealism is not all about melting clocks and elephants with too many joints in their legs, it's the exploration of the underlying functioning of thought and morals, the prefix sur- meaning "the basis of". Surprise and odd juxtaposition of images are only tools for finding that basis through challenging conventional ideas.

So, it's enjoyable, which is of course the most important thing about fiction. It's populated, it's relevant to today despite being written in 1975, and it's literate. It's not just literate in terms of language, it's also historically and artistically literate. This is a superb book, and you should read it. Five stars isn't enough.

At an austere 200 pages, The Centauri Device has destabilized my preconceptions of Space Opera. I heretofore assumed that all Space Opera was self-defined as such by merit of its Homeric length as much as by any adherence to established themes or argument (admittedly I've been reading a lot of Alastair Reynolds). But like a literary Tardis, The Centauri Device is abundantly more vast than its meagre pagecount would suggest, a feat entirely due to M. John Harrison's mastery of the imagist mode. In hand, this may be a lightweight flit of a novel, but the depth of its ideas belies the economy of its prose. The Centauri Device rivals, if not supersedes, any 800 page genre brother you could care to name. Harrison has a penchant for abstract, metaphor heavy, dream-state writing that is unfortunately absent in much current sci-fi, but the influence this book did have is undeniable; apparently it was the progenitor of those long poetic spaceship names that're now so ubiquitous (notably in Iain M. Banks, Peter F. Hamilton and the aforementioned Alastair Reynolds). The fact that Harrison developed, perfected and then abandoned this trope over the course of a single novel is testament to his talents (incidentally, among my favourite of his spaceship names are: Let Us Go Hence and the comically grandiloquent The Melencolia That Transcends All Wit). So, I'll try my humble best to do The Centauri Device justice in the paltry compass of this review - but no promises...

Here's the blurb: Several decades ago, humans bombed the living daylights out of the plant Centauri, all but eradicating the native population. Now an archaeological expedition has unearthed the so-called Centauri device, and the four major human factions go to war over its ownership. There're two problems however: 1) only the last remaining carrier of Centauri DNA (an anarchistic, drug-involved semi-criminal freight captain called John Truck (our protagonist)) can activate it, and 2) nobody knows what it does. The Arabs (note: this is a loose, hand-down moniker with no geographical or religious relation to the present day) are a powerful movement of space socialists (stick with me...) who believe the Centauri device is the ultimate propaganda machine; the Israelis (again, no relation) think it's a bomb; the Aesthete Anarchists don't have a clue what it is, and the body-modifying religious nutjobs of the time, the Openers, believe the device is God Himself. In effect, The Centauri Device is a strange incarnation of the alien artefact novel that was popularised by Arthur C. Clarke, but here tempered by a contemporary mid-period Cold War context reflected in the arms race agenda of the novel's rival sects.

In this regard, The Centauri Device definitely shows its age; constant hyperbolic references to a Leninist takeover and hysterical fear of `Trotskyites' are thinly veiled renditions of contemporary societal fears; plus there's a space-hippy Stratocaster playing rock star who functions as a bizarre incarnation of Hendrix (Harrison was a big fan, apparently); likewise the drug du jour is a kind of future-Heroin imbibed at a never-ending psychedelic party; the Centauri device itself is clearly analogy for Nuclear weaponry - safe, but only in the right hands (whosever they may be). But is it a failing of far-future sci-fi to be such an obvious product of its time? Well, no, because a fundamental aspect of the genre is an implicit, albeit removed, questioning of contemporary mores, without which the whole oeuvre would be meaningless escapism (not necessarily a bad thing), and arguably poorer as a result.

But where The Centauri Device suffers from a traditionality of plot and a contemporariness of reference which, though I enjoyed, may alienate many readers, it's most striking achievements are of style, theme and character. Let's forget the a-to-b-to-c mechanisations of scene, and focus on tone. The Centauri Device is beautifully written; it has a kind of supernal, vertiginous otherness to it that augments the already bizarre goings-on with an impetus on metaphor, dreamscape and grammatically non-standard expression. While this frequently results in baffling sentences and tangential musings that necessitate re-reading, the overall effect is to elevate the book's more mundane aspects into the realm of aesthetics: the disconnect between the conventionality of the plot and the beauty of the writing is forgivable (hey, Harrison was a ridiculous 25 when he wrote it), purely because the style makes so much more of the story than would elseways be apparent. A recurring motif, for example, is the description of the character Ben Barka as a desert, which is so stunning and well-realised that it adds both emotional depth and history to a character otherwise only cursorily featured - the empty but violent desertscapes suggested in his glance betrays an inner anger convergent with pain:

"As he moved, he shed brittle echoes of past deserts and intimations of the Desert to Come. And, far off in his liquid brown eyes - broken white columns, like reflections in a failing cistern."

It's rare for a sci-fi writer to employ such imagist language but, surprisingly, it really, really works. Where else in sci-fi could you find such an eloquent description of post-battle unconsciousness as this:

"All of them, the asphyxiated and the dying, had worn coloured glass masks, or swum in senselessness, fish of the Impossible Medium; all solid forms had vanished in amazing twists and contortions, and he had felt his interface with space diminish, felt it crawl through him in slow, luminous ecstacies."

I'm showing restraint by not just quoting the entire thing verbatim here. Harrison's prose is like some inter-dimensional tentacle that slips and slides between genre spaces, appropriating imagist language here, literary realism there, grasping at Shakespearean gravitas and Nabokovian satire and consolidating them into a unique style that transcends the conventional vagaries of sci-fi. The Centauri Device functions in a surreal hinterland between the frivolous (guitar genius space rock-stars) and the literary (metaphor-heavy, imagist prose), and it's the instability of this relationship that makes it so darn fun!

But don't get me wrong, it's not just a fundamental exercise in style; many of the book's themes betray Harrison's anarchist leanings: "Politics, Religion and dope: they keep us happy in Hell", and the downward spiral from audacity to despair via mass-murder and responsibility of the protagonist John Truck is brilliantly realised, displaying a moral depth more in keeping with so-called Literary Fiction than sci-fi. If you were feeling particularly grandiose, you could claim that The Centauri Device evinces the literary legitimacy of Science Fiction: its ability to engage with real-world concerns while concurrently displaying a mastery of style, syntax and such higher-yield techniques as metaphor and allusion is no mean feat. Some heavy handed plotting is problematic, particularly when John Truck is being passed around from faction to faction like some kind of Pass the Parcel Chosen One, but this book's events are merely launch pads for its more ideological concerns of power, responsibility and the unknowability of technology. The stark anti-war agenda may operate as an obstacle to readers disinclined to didacticism, but this is a minor thread and in no way detracts from the book as experience or idea. The Centauri Device is beautiful sci-fi; flawed, but by no means broken - Space Opera in minor mode, a worthwhile way-in for newcomers and simultaneous stylistic pinnacle for genre purists.