Paul McAuley, "War of the Maps" (2020)

The blog tends, not by design so much as the sheer cumulative pressure of stuff—what we might call the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the world of commercial SFF programming, vis-à-vis ‘good versus mediocre’—to the Negative Review. This, I know. More: I’m reading a dumpertruckful of fantasy as the moment and there’s a danger that this blog will sag into a swampy, snarky monotony as a result. So let’s break that monotony. Let's talk about a novel I read recently I really rate.

I am, I should say before going further, a hard-core McAuley fan. Part of that is, I think, a simple admiration for his technical skill as a writer: he has a marvellous sfnal imagination, writes very good prose (his default style is deceptively unshowy, but it packs a significant amount of artistry and evocative sleight into its hand), structures his stories well—never too rushed or over-busy, rarely too slow—and sketches character deftly and compellingly. But part of it, as with any writer a reader really groks, is personal. I happen to like very much the way McAuley blends aspects of SF pulp melodrama with what (for want of a better phrase) I’d call a literary sensibility. He articulates certain recurring fascinations, and in some cases recurring images, that happen to really resonate with me, for who-knows-what reason: dogged plodders and Odinic antagonists, secret sharers, strange biologies, iterations of loss and withdrawal, particular refractions of London and some other, I think closely related, refractions of fairyland (some of these latter surprisingly austere). Art is sometimes highly personal like this, and that’s fine. What lands with me may not with you. It might be interesting to try and pin it down a little more precisely—interesting for me, I mean—but then again I’m not sure I do want to murder to dissect, actually. We’ll see. Where we are at the moment is that he’s one of those authors (it’s a smaller list, for me, than you might think) whose work I buy automatically, all of it, as soon as it comes out.

Which brings me to War of the Maps (2020). This is a Big Dumb Object novel that is, I presume by design, (a) relatively lean (400 pages or so), (b) smart rather than dumb, and (c) much more about subjectivity than objectivity. The BDO here is an unusual Dyson sphere built around our sun but in the far future after sol has become a white dwarf. The sphere is constructed at that radius where the sun’s gravity pulls 1g on the outside surface of the structure, and here, illuminated not directly but by networks of orbiting mirrors, is where the characters live. It’s a vast topography, of course, although mostly given over to a ‘world ocean’ in which continent-sized (and smaller) islands, known as ‘maps’, are located. The ‘maps’ terminology is also used to refer to the inhabitants' various gene-lines, which some of the inhabitants of this BDO are skilled at editing. Anyway: the original, godlike builders of this world have long since abandoned it, and its myriad ordinary inhabitants are living with a series of mundial delapidations, not the least of which is a kind of quatermassian ‘red plague’, a ‘tailchaser virus’ that rewrites biological forms in monstrous and spreading new forms. The story is hung on a central thread: a lawman, known as the lucidor, has come out of retirement to track a dangerous criminal—another of McAuley’s charismatically deranged geneticist wizards, this one called Remfrey He—through foreign lands. The first two thirds of the story or so follow the peripatetic, episodic adventures of the lucidor; the last third brings the story to its denouement at the (extraterrestrial, or extradysonic) source of the plague.

Like many major artists, McAuley returns over and again with a kind of creative obsession to certain types, or tropes, or images. His bibliography is divided broadly between far-future space opera, and now-or-near-future-thrillers, with the occasional alt-historical or environmental standalone dropped in (he’s also written a few non-sf thrillers and procedurals). War of the Maps revisits his Confluence trilogy: not in the sense that it’s set in the same world—it’s not—but very much in terms of vibe and focus. This is not a criticism. I consider the Confluence books, taken as a whole, one of the very best works of 1990s SF. Confluence is a trilogy, and so, in its briefer compass, is War of the Maps: it’s three parts are, respectively, a sort-of Western, a war story and a weird sea-story Treasure Island retread, into which is mixed, as I noted earlier, a Conradian Secret Sharer narrative.

The lucidor tracks across this strange world and has various adventures. Some readers might find the pace over-leisurely, but I think it’s right, since it gives the Les-Misérables-from-the-cop’s-POV narrative just the right amount of time to accrue the needful momentum for the ending to punch its weight. McAuley is an old hand when it comes to providing his reader with artfully suggestive glimpses of his larger world, and some of these were definite highlights. Not that it all comes off, I think. Inhabitants of these maps have various, if mild, X-Men-mutation-esque powers (Remfrey He, for instance, has the ‘silvertongue’ power of rhetorical persuasion; the Lucidor’s power is also an X-Men staple, the power to damp-down other characters’ powers) but this aspect of the story isn’t entirely developed or integrated into the larger whole. The huge ‘alter nests’, filled with plague-mutated humans living ant-like lives shorn of higher brain functions, make for some striking and memorable biogothic set-pieces, but there are also quite a lot of sub-James-Herbert giant crabs, which spooked me rather less. And although the slower pacing here didn’t bother me, it’s not always easy to hold a radically episodic plot in a larger shape. More, there seemed to me something slightly, well, blurred about the representation of the lucidor himself. He’s an older man, a widower, determined and dogged, and that determination and refusal to give up not only powers the plot but drives the denouement—well done, I'd say. Sometimes the novel has him as a kind of Clint Eastwood, or perhaps more a Mike from Better Call Saul, figure, which works fine. But sometimes he is a rather different, less outward character: more a figuration of grief as such, somebody internally locked down, often affectless except for his one driving shard of determination to go onward (man, to quote Thom Gunn, you gotta go). This, I think, is better, and not entirely miscible with the elderly action hero version of the character.

And if I had to call it, that’s what I’d say War of the Maps is really about. McAuley has been eloquent about grief in several of his earlier novels; he can write that condition from the inside out, and do so expressively, movingly, never over-playing it. It seems to me, for all that his novels often contain whizz bang outward-urge space operatics, that McAuley's peculiar genius is for loss: an affinity for that which is passing, a sunt lacrymae rerum particularity. His real interest sits, I think, in a strange lagrange point between a fascination (evident in his life as an academic biologist) with the bursting fecundity of life, and a fascination with entropy, actual and metaphorical. In that sense War of the Maps does have a different centre of gravity to Confluence: that earlier, and I think greater, novel is about things flowing together; this new one is about things falling apart, the centre struggling to hold, and the anarchy of losing that which matters most being loosed upon the world. It’s about the edges of maps, about here-be-monster liminalities as a trope for being old and alone and facing the end. It’s a fine, powerful novel and easily the best thing I’ve read in 2020. So far.