Review by Ian Braidwood
Cast of Characters:
Anatole Daumier, Father Ferigny, Asmodeus, David Lydyard, Siri, Cordelia
Lydyard, Elinor Lydyard, William de Lancy, Mandorla Soulier, Gabriel
Gill, Jacob Harkender, Dr James Austin, Luke Capthorne, Pelorus, Mercy
Murrell, Jason Stirling, Hecate, Perris, The Clay Man, Machalalel.
Normally,
I go to great lengths to avoid spoilers when writing my reviews. I
try to walk a tightrope between piquing your interest and giving the
game away, but in this instance that would be a disservice. Things
are different, so if you've decided to read this book and don't want
the plot spoiled, stop reading now.
There
must still be some last vestige of the uncritical sycophant in me,
because I've been agonising over what to write about this novel. However,
I don't think there's any getting away from it: The Carnival of Destruction
fails and on its own terms.
Carnival
starts by introducing us to a new character: Anatole Daumier, who
is laying in a ditch on the battle fields of France with a bullet
through his brain. It is 1918 and he is sharing his hole with a dead
british soldier.
As
he lies there, he reconstructs the circumstances which brought him
to his end; the French and British armies conceding territory to the
Bosche time and again, before folding under a devastating assault.
Then
Anatole has a vision of the maid of Orléans and being a good
atheist, he assumes it's a hallucination and decides to have fun with
it. When the saint asks what favour she can bestow upon him, he chooses
to take the place of Laplace's Demon: to know the exact position and
velocity of every particle in the universe, and by deduction, all
eternity.
The
werewolves of London have had conflicts of their own. Carnival finds
Pelorus struggling to find David Lydyard's east coast cottage, carrying
an injured and unconscious Mandorla Soulier. Also on their way are
Anatole and David's daughter Nell.
Lydyard
meanwhile, has grown into his rheumatism as it has progressed. His
knuckles are now so swollen that his hands are reduced to useless
claws.
The
tone of the novel so far is a continuation of that in The Angel of
Pain, which is to say: an evocative literary ecstasy, where the pages
disappear to be replaced by the vision.
As
with the previous volumes, the climax of Carnival involves Lydyard
and Co joining with the angels to experience an oracle, for the angels
don't need the humans only for their sight, but for their vision.
However, this time there is not one oracle, but three: to the future,
to heaven and to glimpse the universe itself.
The
future is the domain chosen for Mandorla and Clay Man. They start
from the end of World War One with days and nights flickering past
as if illuminated by strobe, until London settles once more; its streets
are dark and austere. A wailing warning introduces a blitzkrieg and
after witnessing destruction, the two time travellers are moved on.
Together, they witness the escalation of prosperity and carnage, as
people learn to live under more and different threats.
The
angels' sense of irony must be acute, for they send Harkender to a
succession of heavens, accompanied by Pelorus. Each vision, be it
Arcadian or Utopian, is scorned by Harkender, whose understanding
has always been restricted by his arrogance. A fact which has always
limited his usefulness to the Angels.
Finally,
Anatole and Lydyard explore the physical universe; witnessing its
ramifying and encapsulating structures, before shrinking down to the
levels of quantum indeterminacy. It is what I referred to in my introduction
when I used the phrase '… and shows you the limitations of godlike
percipience.' I do not commit hyperbole lightly.
The
scope of these three visions is difficult to get across, Brian is
quite the polymath and his knowledge of myth and fantasy seem as extensive
as his knowledge of science. Mate this to his well-established visual
imagery and the affect is quite profound as well as - and I have to
say it - bleak. It seems that humanity couldn't even imagine a heaven,
leave alone live in one and Brian seems to have little confidence
that H.sapiens is going to survive its own creativity.
Don't
let this get you down though, because in this immense universe, even
the suffering of angels counts for little… and humanity's proportionately
less.
So
is this why The Carnival of Destruction fails? For many people, I
would think so. As a genre pitched to adolescents, science fiction
usually has happy endings where the protagonist at least makes his
way through the ordeal, so that he can re-establish himself. More
often, by some clever scheme or just brute force, he secures the prize
and the girl. For these people, the denouement of carnival is so crushing
that even the battle seems pointless.
However,
for me this is not enough. I'm quite happy with what should have been
the ending: The entire future of humankind suspended from just one
sub-light starship and the characters faced with a new set of formidable
problems. I think Sir Edward Tallentyre stated the heart of the Werewolves
trilogy when he said that you have to live in the world as it is.
A novel exists in its own terms and as long as the author remains
true to the spirit of the work it will succeed.
For
me, the failure is in the epilogue, but first, here is what Brian
told me when I emailed him:
"The
ending is a trifle ambiguous, but my interpretation of what happened
is that the alien intelligences of the implicate order, having finally
(with great difficulty and after much misunderstanding) obtained an
accurate idea of their own nature and prospects from the human minds
which they were using as "seers" - and having also realised
that they had gone through the whole palaver several times already,
using seers of other species - retired whence they came. By way of
apology and compensation to those they had used, however, they wound
back time to undo as much of the harm they had done as they could
contrive - although the cynical reader will probably read the last
line in such a way as to conclude that troubles and disappointments
still lie ahead, for Lydyard at least."
Well
I am not a cynical reader, though the idea that the whole story might
recapitulate itself did occur, but this is a quibble by comparison
with what follows:
It
is questionable whether the angels would have ability to turn back
time, certainly nothing in the narrative before this indicates they
have this ability. You may respond that the angels can do anything
and perhaps you'd be right, but introducing this feature right at
the end smacks of a deus ex machina and spoils the coherency of the
story.
As
I said before, I have no problem with the ending being downbeat. If
only certain types of ending are allowed, then fiction loses most
of its danger and becomes a form of conjuring, where the question
isn't so much how it will end, but how the author will pull it off.
I guess this is why I don't read many detective stories.
A
positive aspect of the starship ending is that at least the angels
would have learned enough humility to stop them messing around with
people's lives. Okay, it would hardly count as a finale, but I think
this is as close to a victory as you can get with such beings.
However,
the biggest problem with this series is that nothing is learned. The
angels can't learn, because as soon as they return to their implicate
state all memory is lost. The human (and quasi-human) characters do
lose massively during the story, but at least on the starship they
have gained so much wisdom from their experiences. This is lost however,
when they are all returned to their starting points and whichever
character you sympathised with, there is no avoiding the feeling that
you've been robbed.
In summation, I would say that the Werewolves trilogy is the best evocation
of what super-natural beings might actually be like - and what that would
mean for us all - that you'll ever read. It is stylish, fabulously intelligent
and beautifully crafted. However, if you're going to read it, skip the
epilogue.
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