I
have finally caught up with the series that I started back in October
of 2019. All things considered, I don't think I made a bad job of
it. I read 8 novels that are all around 500 pages long in the space
of a year and a half. When I first started
Leviathan
Wakes, I had bought a set of the
first three books in the series. As I finished the first one and
moved into the second, I thought that I would finish these three and
see what happens, not really planning on going beyond those three
books anytime soon. But it turns out that I read these pretty well
back-to-back over that time since. (This isn't really true. I was
reading this series concurrently with the
Foundation
and
Dune series. I
had them going one after the other to give myself some breathing room
in between them.)
The scope of the
novels has grown increasingly larger since the very first one. The
nature of the conflict changes, the political context in which the
characters find themselves shifts nearly constantly, and the
technology changes over the course of the entire series. Sometimes
all of these things change at once in an instant, and quite
dramatically.
What this series
does well is to give us a lot of variation on the influence that the
large-scale changes have on individuals. There are some hugely
catastrophic things that take place that the characters seem to take
in stride while other events can change everything down to the way a
character lives everyday life. I realize that I am being very
general here and I will get to specifics in a moment. The reason
that I single out this aspect of the novels is that I think that this
is true to life. There is something honest about the presentation of
everyday life in a world that is constantly bombarded from all
directions.
In this series,
when a vast unknown force, the Laconians, emerges and takes over all
of known human existence with alien technology, there is a
fundamental shift in political interactions. Former enemies band
together, some allies split from one another, things such as trade
agreements that had previously meant the difference between life and
death fall into complete irrelevance, and repercussions just
reverberate through all known quadrants of life. But on the small
scale, for the Belters and other groups who were already
marginalized, all this meant was resisting a different master. For
the protagonists of the series, the current and former crew of the
Rocinante, things turn in a different way. The crew is broken
up and scattered. The plotting is pretty dense, so I won't get into
specifics here. But what happens after the split is that the members
spend a lot of time thinking about their lost members but they
continue to serve the same functions. Their relationships repair
with different groups of people but they all proceed in the direction
that they were already headed.
This novel was
originally published in March of 2019, but I think of this book in a
lot of ways as a plague book. This notion that we can face
catastrophic change in our lives that is simultaneously Earth
shattering and mundane seems very familiar to people who have lived
through a year plus of quarantine due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
This also makes me think about living through the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001. In some ways, everything changed. Or enough
changed that it had broad influence throughout our lives. Some of
the change was personal and psychological, other change was political
and only touched most people in a theoretical or ideological way.
But in both cases, for as much as things changed, there were large
swaths of our lives that were just the same as they have been.
Moving to the
smaller scale in this book, there are two things that really stood
out to me about how this story was told. First is that the narrative
is even more split than it had been in any of the previous books. In
every one of the novels, the chapters are structured around a
particular character's perspective so that the overall novels
achieved a sort of kaleidoscopic quasi-omniscience. Each of the
character's perspectives is limited, but when taken all together,
there is a collected perspective that is much broader. It isn't
really omniscient. This would properly be called shifting limited
perspective, but the authors do something that some authors at the
turn of the 20th century (Henry James, most notably, but
Edith Wharton and some others) used to good effect. That is,
occasionally the reader gets a moment from one character's
perspective and then we see the same moment narrated from a different
character's perspective. Narration of one event will talk back to
itself within the novel and the reader gets a different point of view
of the same idea or same action. It's a neat trick.
This leads to the
second big thing that struck me about this book, which is the extent
to which it uses re-narration throughout. There are a number of
instances throughout the book in which this narration and
counter-narration happen. This broadens the already broad
perspective of the novel. It shows the shades of disagreement and
misunderstanding that happen between the characters, and it also
shows reciprocated emotion in a novel way. But what is particularly
effective about this device in this novel is that it allows the
authors to describe their established characters again from a new
perspective. New people see these characters differently. And the
fact that these characters from the first novels are now 30-something
years older than they were when this all started means that not only
have their outward appearances changed, but their conceptions of self
and interactions with each other have changed as well.
The problem is that
this can get a little confusing and distracting. There is just so
much going on in this novel that I found myself re-reading passages
or checking up on wikipedia to make sure that I didn't misremember
something from a previous novel. There is a lot going on.
Which makes me a
little nervous about the final book. Or, at least what is reportedly
the final book which is due to come out this year or next. I am
uncertain where everything is going and the authors have shown
themselves willing to kill off characters, make significant shifts in
the setting and events of the novels, and even to change the laws of
physics in their books. This means that pretty much everything is on
the table. This is exciting for a fan because it could lead to
something really inventive and it will certainly be surprising. But
it is nerve wracking for the same reason. Finales don't always have
a great track record. I have high hopes for the conclusion to this
series and I look forward to reading the spin off novellas once they
become more widely available.
I'll just have to
wait to see what the rest of the story looks like.
