British Summertime
Paul Cornell
Gollancz, 341 pages
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Like his popular Doctor Who books, Paul Cornell’s non-media tie-in novel British Summertime
centers around time travel--though from a very different perspective, a story
that might, perhaps, be best described as a Socialist mystery wrapped up
in a Christian enigma.
Alison Parmeter is a young woman with a gift--or a curse, depending on how
you look at it. She’s able to read patterns: body language, facial
expressions, tones of voice, the arrangement of buildings on a street that
point to the existence of a particular sort of restaurant. While this makes
her a whiz at her job (setting odds for a betting shop), it’s pretty depressing
always to know what people are going to say and do. And things have,
abruptly, gotten very much worse: for Alison’s gift is now telling
her that the End of the World, something she has always sensed as a very
distant possibility, is extremely close. And there’s nothing
she or anyone can do about it.
Standing in line at a shop one day, Alison meets a man whose patterns
tell her he comes from somewhere else--and not anywhere so mundane as another
country. His name is Douglas Leyton, and he’s from the future, caught
up in a space-time anomaly that his shipboard navigator (Jocelyn, a bodiless
head hooked up to a quantum computer) couldn’t avoid, and thrown back one
hundred and thirty years into Alison’s time. But Alison’s time is puzzlingly
unlike the history lessons Leyton learned as a boy--much darker and more terrible.
Leyton, a deeply religious man, has the sense that God is farther away here.
Leyton and Alison soon discover they’re being hunted--by a British intelligence
agent named Frederick Cleves, who has found Jocelyn in the wreck of Leyton’s
ship and is searching for the truth, and, more mysteriously, by four great
golden beings with swords for tongues. What do the Golden Men want?
Are they aliens--or angels? Does Jocelyn know more about the time anomaly
than she’s letting on? Who’s the man who looks enough like Leyton to
be his great-grandfather and is, spookily, also named Douglas? Why
is Alison’s time so apparently different from the history that belongs to
Leyton’s time? And why does Alison keep dreaming she’s Judas Iscariot?
This is not a novel to read with your brain turned off. The plot has
enough twists and turns to give you whiplash; if you don’t pay close
attention you’ll lose the thread. And Cornell’s language can be opaque--many
passages require a second reading to properly extract their meaning.
There’s also a fairly demanding exploration of Christian theology (a reading
of Revelation wouldn’t be a bad idea before you tackle this book, the better
to appreciate the many references and allusions), combined with some trenchant
social criticism. The core of Christianity (Cornell seems to be saying)
is a sort of enlightened socialism. This is embodied in Leyton’s timestream,
where money is only a memory, along with capitalism and private wealth and
all their ills, and the world is run by a benevolent World Government that
apportions resources according to need. In this setting, where the
competition and alienation engendered by money and its pursuit are absent,
and the beast of greed and domination that spoils the human heart has been
tamed, there’s little distance between man and God. This distance is the flaw
that Jesus gave his life to heal: in Leyton’s timestream, the Kingdom of
God really did follow on Jesus's sacrifice, and Revelation is absent from the
Bible because the world has already ended and begun again. But in Alison’s
timestream things have been subverted by the Golden Men, who are quite literally
the embodiment of Mammon. Having entered the timestream and transformed
it in their own image, they are now fighting to ensure their permanent existence--part
of which involves bringing on the Apocalypse. This is the challenge
Alison and Leyton face: not simply to defeat the Golden Men, but to
eliminate them from history, so that Leyton’s timestream can reassert itself.
One of the things the Golden Men have managed to do is to divert Leyton’s
ship from 1947, when it originally crashed, to 2000, believing this will
alter things in their favor. This is just one of the many time travel
paradoxes with which the book is filled, and Cornell does a heroic job of
unraveling them all. Inevitably there are some closed loops--for instance,
a technology from the future that’s passed on in the past, but is never actually
invented. But this is really just quibbling; on a larger level,
everything makes admirable sense.
British Summertime isn’t a perfect book. Cornell doesn’t
write especially sympathetic characters; the rapid-fire shifts of viewpoint
can be disorienting, and some of the over-the-top plot elements (for instance,
what Alison does about the mote the Golden Men place in her eye) put a strain
on the willing suspension of disbelief. And I’m still trying to figure
out the title (although Britishness, especially a kind of 1940’s movie-style,
gallant-RAF-pilot Britishness, is one of the novel’s themes). But overall
this is an impressively rich and detailed work--one of the most interesting,
and also one of the most idiosyncratic, I’ve read this year.
Copyright © 2002 Victoria Strauss
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