4 out of 5 stars
The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.
Stefan Advani is on a boat heading towards an island. He has been banished from the city of Shadrapar, the last of all cities on a world that is ever more alien to humanity. The island is a place where criminals are sent. His crime is agitation, subversion, and attempting to pervert the course of justice. It is a brutal place and almost no one leaves there alive…
It is bleak there. The prison is organic and is in the middle of a swamp. It is somehow kept afloat by ancient pumps that are somehow kept going by an equally ancient engineer. As well as surviving the sadistic prison warders, he has to kowtow to the prison hierarchy which is equally brutal. He doesn’t think he is going to last a week in this hellhole.
The second part of the book takes us back to the city of Shadrapar and is about the events that led up to his incarceration. He has come from a moderately privileged position, though not the upper echelons of the society there. He and some friends decide to write and publish a book. They print 50 copies of it, and no one shows any interest in it at all. Until one day they authorities decide that the book is actually very dangerous as it threatens their status quo, and if there is one thing that the people in power don’t like, it is the possibility of losing it.
His adventures take him underground, to a place that he thought only lived in the darker recesses of his imagination. To find it actually exists comes as a bit of a shock, and what he finds there makes his imagination seem quite tame in comparison. The narrative returns to the island again. Things are afoot there now, and he knows that as the tension builds, he is going to be caught up in the maelstrom.
This is quite some book. It is the first of Tchaikovsky’s that I have read, and I thought it was astonishing. Where he has imagined this world from is a complete mystery. That said, there are elements of it that do feel familiar. There are hints of Venice and the lagoon in which it is located in. The remote prison where criminals and other prisoners that the authorities want to have removed for their convenience is a common happening in societies, even today. Then he has layered that world with all sorts of things that will shock and possibly scare you in equal measure. There are two books that it reminded me of were Paradox by John Meaney and Perdido Street Station by China Miéville. If you have read and liked those books, then I can wholeheartedly recommend this too.
I really enjoyed Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time – I think you’d like that one a lot too, since there’s a natural history angle with a race of extra-intelligent spiders. He’s so prolific.
I have a copy of that to read at some point, Elle