Marcus Sedgwick, The Ghosts of Heaven (2014)

[Note. There are four quarters to this review; they can be read in any order and the review will work. The four quarters assembled here are in just one of twenty-four possible combinations; this order makes one kind of snark, but the reader should feel free to choose a different opinion of the book, if desired.]

QUARTER ONE.
Not 'first quarter', but, instead, 'quarter one', like that.
Ever-so-slightly unidiomatic.
No matter. For the whole section is
written
in a diffuse kind of
verse. A stone age girl
sees a spiral carved in the rock, in a cave.
Under ground, under-
powered. Some great novels have
been able to pull-off the 'start with a long poem'
malarkey.
Not this. The problem,
the problem is the verse
just isn't
very good.

QUARTER TWO. The Witchfinder General rode into the 17th-century English village his heart full of malice. Devilry was everywhere! Oh, nobody calls him the Witchfinder General. Oh, nobody marks his physical resemblance to Vincent Price. They think he's just the new vicar. But he sees the simple villagers dancing their spiral dance in the graveyard! He smells out their unreformed pagan rituals!

Ah but the villagers have the social cohension of a Simpsons instamob, and are easily persuaded to turn. Drown the witch! Drown pretty young redheaded Anna Tunstall, whose mother has just died! And (when her brother pulls her out of the pond and saves her life) put her on trial!

'If you please sir,' said the virtuous, sobbing young Anna. 'It's all a misunderstanding! This is no Vincent Price-era schlocky Hammer melodrama! No, no, sir, it is a focussed tragedy after the manner of Arthur Millers Crucible!'

'Silence wench!' screamed Father Escrove, spittle flying from his withered lips. The whole courthouse moaned. 'Nuance and subtlety are the Devil's cruet set! We aim for a broader emotional response, here! So I order: strip this toothsome young redhead naked, here in the very courthouse, for all to see how attractive, er, I mean, how witchy-wicked she is!'

QUARTER THREE. It's the 1920s. The spacious insane asylum in upstate New York is build around a large spiral staircase. Spirals you see. You're starting to see how this works? You're grokking the Cloud-Atlasishness? Anna saw the same rock-carved spiral under the water, as they were trying to drown her, as the cavegirl saw, and there's bound to be a plethora of spirals in this section too. Shells, waves, but most of all stairs. There's a mad poet inmate who watches the sea obsessively (his famous collection of poetry is called On Drowning), and one of the asylum doctors mourning his drowned wife Caroline. Dexter is terrified of the staircase; so the bullying Asylum Director forces him to look at him at it ('Dexter's eyes were wide with terror as he looked to the very top of the building where that fine spiral staircase ascends into the cupola, and he screamed a long and empty scream, a howl from the bottom of his mind, that spoke of the unnameable horror at the world before him' [25]. Wait, how can the scream be both empty and speaking?) Of course the Asylum director is a cackling villain, and his hired goons are violent rapists. Of course our narrator is a sensitive, troubled soul.

QUARTER FOUR. Stardate 2001 plus howevermany years. Starman Keir Bowman (seriously; that's the dude's name) is on route for 'New Earth' in the constellation of Lyca. He is woken every ten years to perform 12 hours of shipboard duties. A couple thousand passengers in deep sleep, ready to be woken at the far end of the journey, and he the caretaker-astronaut. But people are dying in their Longsleep pods. What about all the stuff to do with spirals? 'Spiral rotation of galaxies ... the hurricane eye of Jupiter ... the motion of the Earth ... the DNA inside him' [371]  ME: Affirmative, Book. I read you. BOOK: Open the pod bay deeper cosmic significances, Adam. ME: I'm sorry, Book. I'm afraid I can't do that. BOOK: What's the problem? ME: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.