Dark Heavens
Roger Levy
Gollancz, 389 pages
Order this book Roger Levy’s second novel, Dark Heavens, is billed as a sequel to
his debut, Reckless Sleep. But fans of that book shouldn’t
be expecting to read about the continuing adventures of antihero Jon Sciler.
Dark Heavens is a thematic followup rather than a direct story
continuation, involving a whole new plotline and a (mostly) different cast
of characters.
The setting, as before, is a near-future Earth slowly being ripped apart by tectonic
collapse, in the wake of devastating acts of global eco-terrorism. The environment
has become all but unlivable--the air choked with volcanic ash, the ground
and water poisoned, the landscape scarred by enormous rifts. The only hope
for the human race is to go elsewhere: Dirangesept, a distant planet with
an Earthlike environment. But Dirangesept has its own inhabitants, mysterious
beings that to human perception appear as mythological beasts, and they aren’t
interested in being colonized. Twice they have savagely driven the human
forces back. Now Earth’s government prepares for a third attempt, promising
the would-be colonists that they have finally found a way to overcome the
beasts.
Cy Augur works for the Active branch of the CMS (Consensual Mass Suicides)
Department. As the world collapses, suicide cults have become commonplace,
led by religious visionaries who promise their followers a straight trip
to heaven in exchange for the hell that’s life on Earth. It’s Augur’s job
to make sure that these Leavings aren’t mere mass murder, and even though
he’s fully aware that Earth’s government would be just as happy to turn a
blind eye in the interest of population reduction, he takes his job seriously.
But his conscientiousness has made him enemies. When a Leaving goes horribly
wrong, those enemies step in to strip him of his investigative responsibilities,
demoting him to a desk job in the Passive branch of CMS.
Among the cases that have been taken away from Augur is a series of odd apparent
suicides among GenMed students. GenMed has special (and terrible) meaning
for Augur, for his wife, a former nanotechnology researcher, is a patient
in its research wing, locked in a virtual coma. Though he’s been forbidden
to have anything to do with investigation, Augur finds he can’t let this
one go, and he continues, secretly, to dig at the case--with the help of
Astrid, another GenMed student, who has become suspicious about some of the
odd research going on at GenMed. Slowly, Augur and Astrid uncover a dark
conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of government, involving the
Leavings, GenMed’s shady research projects, and the dark side of the nanotechnology
pioneered by Augur’s wife--all of it pointing toward Dirangesept, and the
soon-to-depart third colonization attempt.
Like its predecessor, Dark Heavens
takes the nominal form of a murder mystery--though once again, it’s not really
the murders that are the point, but the journey of discovery their investigation
forces the protagonists to undertake. The denouement has far less to do with
who’s killing GenMed students than with why--and the why goes to the heart
of a much larger and more encompassing mystery, in which the deaths are almost
a red herring. The mystery structure allows Levy to build considerable suspense--and
also, cleverly, to misdirect the reader, so that though each new piece of
the puzzle follows logically upon the rest, it’s impossible, all the way
to the end, to predict how things will turn out. It’s really adroit plotting,
accomplished with an assurance and a narrative drive that propel the reader
irresistably forward--even where the puzzle pieces aren’t quite plausible
(a twist toward the end, in which a character too conveniently deduces a
crucial fact from the slimmest of clues; the final mystery, which involves
a not-entirely-convincing altered-human-as-VR-operating-system theme reminiscent
of Tad Williams’ recent Otherland series).
This is a deeply cynical book, with its hypocritical religious leaders selling
dreams of tailor-made heavens to their desperate flocks, its unctuous politicians
willing to sacrifice thousands of lives for “the greater good”, its scientists
so enamored of their research that the suffering of their subjects never
registers--not to mention the moral darkness of the human race as a whole, which has no qualms
about committing genocide if it will win escape to Dirangesept. Dirangesept
isn’t just a refuge, a last hope, it’s the archetypal human dream of paradise--both
the promised paradise of the afterlife, a reward for terrible suffering on
ravaged planet Earth, and the lost paradise of the beginning, a chance to
regain the Eden humankind has destroyed--and it’s used and manipulated by
ruthless leaders in order to control the masses, just as the idea of heaven
always has been. Gloomy as Levy’s vision is, however, at the center of his
story are honorable people who refuse to sacrifice their integrity even in
the face of the most awful desperation, who scrabble for, and find, love
among the ruins. In the end his protagonists choose to turn away from the
dream of heaven--a false dream, gained at too great a cost--and embrace,
in hope and compassion, the ordinary hell they live in.
Despite the stand-alone plot, Dark Heavens assumes a familiarity with crucial elements of Reckless Sleep--the
circumstances that brought the earth to devastation, the cults and mass suicides,
Dirangesept and its beasts, the mysterious virtual world of Cathar (which,
as before, holds the key to a greater mystery). Enough information is provided
so that the first-time reader will probably catch on, but if you haven’t
read the first book some things, such as Augur’s journey into Cathar, may
seem arbitrary, and others, such as the government’s strategy for annihilating
Dirangesept’s beasts, won’t carry as much impact. Dark and gripping, challenging
and suspenseful, this fine novel is a worthy followup to Levy’s impressive
debut, and should continue to establish him as one of the more original voices in
British SF.
Copyright © 2003 Victoria Strauss
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