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book review: Summerland
Jun. 21st, 2018 09:14 pmI read Hannu Rajaniemi's Summerland courtesy of NetGalley.
Hannu Rajaniemi's first novels, the Jean le Flambeur series, involved an elaborate heist in a posthuman universe where people could make near-infinite copies of themselves. Summerland retains the preoccupation with immortality, but the setting is different and the weirdness builds more slowly. The story's architecture is built around a spy novel: it's 1938, there's a war in Spain, and British and Soviet spies are playing cat and mouse. The difference from our own history is that, in this book, ghosts and electricity are linked: with sufficient technological support you can go straight from life to afterlife (for the British, Summerland) without Fading like ordinary ghosts. Afterlife in Summerland is painfully bourgeois, but the narrative slowly makes it clear that death is more complicated than a simple Ticket to a ghostly city. There are some interesting alternate-history comments on the way that technological development changed, when an afterlife became an option.
Any ghost can see the emotions of the living, which complicates the efforts of spies and counter-spies. The heroine, Rachel, is a spy who has done reasonably well for herself in a mostly-male profession. One of the ways that she manipulates the ghosts is by channeling her justified anger at the sexism all around her. To me, those pieces felt a little bit too obvious: in my own experience with mostly-male professions, the big things are exhausting and tacitly understood, so when you need to shout you yell about small, anomalous things.
In many ways, Summerland feels similar to Ian Tregillis' Bitter Seeds, which is another novel about spies, occult-powered technology, and the Second World War. But in Bitter Seeds characterization takes second place to horror. Both books have women married to war heroes who grieve the loss of children, but in Summerland the strengths and failures of the relationship both seem more real, and the eventual rapprochement feels earned.
At the very end of Summerland, we see a glimpse of the broader universe, beyond Summerland and the equivalent Soviet enclave. I hope this is a promise of more books to come.
Hannu Rajaniemi's first novels, the Jean le Flambeur series, involved an elaborate heist in a posthuman universe where people could make near-infinite copies of themselves. Summerland retains the preoccupation with immortality, but the setting is different and the weirdness builds more slowly. The story's architecture is built around a spy novel: it's 1938, there's a war in Spain, and British and Soviet spies are playing cat and mouse. The difference from our own history is that, in this book, ghosts and electricity are linked: with sufficient technological support you can go straight from life to afterlife (for the British, Summerland) without Fading like ordinary ghosts. Afterlife in Summerland is painfully bourgeois, but the narrative slowly makes it clear that death is more complicated than a simple Ticket to a ghostly city. There are some interesting alternate-history comments on the way that technological development changed, when an afterlife became an option.
Any ghost can see the emotions of the living, which complicates the efforts of spies and counter-spies. The heroine, Rachel, is a spy who has done reasonably well for herself in a mostly-male profession. One of the ways that she manipulates the ghosts is by channeling her justified anger at the sexism all around her. To me, those pieces felt a little bit too obvious: in my own experience with mostly-male professions, the big things are exhausting and tacitly understood, so when you need to shout you yell about small, anomalous things.
In many ways, Summerland feels similar to Ian Tregillis' Bitter Seeds, which is another novel about spies, occult-powered technology, and the Second World War. But in Bitter Seeds characterization takes second place to horror. Both books have women married to war heroes who grieve the loss of children, but in Summerland the strengths and failures of the relationship both seem more real, and the eventual rapprochement feels earned.
At the very end of Summerland, we see a glimpse of the broader universe, beyond Summerland and the equivalent Soviet enclave. I hope this is a promise of more books to come.