‘I do not know who he was, nor do I care,’ the Marshal said. ‘That was an example. You are less than nothing to me and my staff, and we will kill any one of you without a second thought. If you wish to remain alive you will do everything in your power to avoid angering us, and even that may not be sufficient. You have no rights. You are nothing more than vermin and the boat brings more of you every month. I could have the lot of you killed here and now, and not want for workers.’
Strap on your gun-belts, guys. It’s going to be a bumpy ride…
Stefan Advani, whose family once owned a grand house and whose father had a way of charming even his most persistent creditors, has fallen from grace in the most conspicuous manner possible. Escaping poverty through education, Stefan’s resourcefulness and mental agility have seen him gain a promising reputation within the cloisters of the Academy. But there are those who would rather the clever-dicks remained in their ivory towers as opposed to raising the consciousness – literally – of the working people. Charged with incitement to revolution, Stefan is captured and shipped to the Island Chemical Mining Corporation Colony, aka the Island, aka a forced labour camp no one escapes from except through death. And death stalks the island constantly, in multiple guises. ‘This is the oubliette,’ Stefan informs us, ‘the cage of souls. Sending an enemy to the island was as good as killing him. Better, because the island could deal out years of suffering.’
Not that the world beyond the Island is a bed of roses in any case. Ravaged by climate change, environmental degradation and wave after wave of genocidal wars, not to mention a sun that has entered its declining years, the Earth is a dying planet. Its jungles, deserts and waterways swarm with hostile, mutated life forms. What people remain cluster together in Shadrapar, the last city on Earth: sanctuary, bunker, redoubt, criminal underworld, all sitting in the shadow of the Weapon, an annihilating force turned memorial whose original purpose and origins are long forgotten. Shadrapar is no utopia but it is the only home Stefan knows and the focus of his determination to escape the island.
As he learns the pitfalls and occasional pleasures of prison life, Stefan makes friends as well as enemies. When the Marshal’s reign of terror is finally challenged, the comrades know they have only a limited time in which to make their escape.
Regular readers of science fiction will be quick to recognise Cage of Souls as a ‘dying Earth‘ novel, a subgenre in which the action is played out at a purported ‘end of time’ against a background of societal decay and environmental degradation, with technology absent or half-forgotten or assuming the properties of magic. Dying Earth stories have their origins in the fantastic literature of the late nineteenth century, though the subgenre was named and popularised by Jack Vance, with his 1950 collection The Dying Earth. The most complex and ambitious example of dying Earth literature is almost certainly Gene Wolfe’s four-novel sequence The Book of the New Sun, which appears at first to be traditional epic fantasy but reveals itself gradually and through a series of bravura literary manoeuvres as science fiction.
Well, I love Gene Wolfe’s work, and if you’d rather not be present at a blood-letting, look away now. Better still, go away and read this masterful essay by Brian Phillips on the literary legacy of Gene Wolfe – it’s one I return to whenever I get depressed about the state of the field, which is depressingly often. All I really knew about Cage of Souls going into it was that it is a dying Earth novel, a fact that made me hopeful that I was going to enjoy it. It’s not just Gene Wolfe I love, it’s the tropes of dying Earth stories in general, not only their elegiac resonance but also the seeds of hope and regeneration and new beginnings they carry within them. The omens were good. So were did it all go wrong?
Where do I start?
The chief problem with Cage of Souls is that it’s not really about anything. And when a novel is six hundred pages in length, that’s one hell of a problem. Stripped to its bare essentials, Cage of Souls is a prison-break novel: Advani is a young man riding high who makes a crucial mistake. He ends up in jail with no hope of release. He forms a pact with other prisoners and manages to escape (none of these details are spoilers, 1) because the chapter headings lay out the map for you and 2) because the trajectory of the plot is obvious from the start). He returns to his old stamping ground to find himself and his erstwhile home irrevocably changed. What’s wrong with that? I hear you ask. Thousands of novels have been built on less. Aren’t the simplest plots the best, because they leave space for the writer to focus more on character?
Yes, and yes, but focus on character is not what Tchaikovsky chooses to do. The question I asked myself most often throughout the course of my reading, and in tones of increasing desperation, was why? Why should we care about Stefan, other than that he is the narrator of this bloated shaggy dog story? Is our focus supposed to be Stefan, or his world? Are we supposed to care about the reasons for society’s collapse, or are we just in this world now, marooned in a kind of Mad Max situation where the point of the novel is literally the action, nothing more?
Tchaikovsky’s writing is professional and competent. The story flows smoothly enough – at least for the first three hundred pages – to keep you interested and coming back for more, the characters are well enough defined to encourage at least a modicum of personal investment. But there is no true depth of field; no one ever does anything you haven’t been expecting them to do for the preceding fifty pages, no one achieves autonomy over and above their designated archetype. The unwilling hero, the comic relief (although I did rather enjoy Lucian, actually), the guard with a heart, the thuggish despot, the evil nemesis, the good aliens – they’re all here, all playing to type. The dialogue’s fine so far as it goes (this is no Last Astronaut) and we do get some women in play, but their characterisation isn’t great, to be honest:
Like so many others brought up in strict religious purity she gambled, cheated at cards, drank stuff that made men blind, swore like an Outrider and flirted with everybody. Everybody but myself.
That’s Rosanna, our hero’s first serious girlfriend (until she’s fridged) and classic kickass ladette. Kiera and Hermione are just bit-parts, the cool girl and the big girl. Lady Ellera the ‘Witch Queen’? Speaks for herself. And the mysterious Faith – is she an android or a genetically modified human? Who cares, except that every man who encounters her is left with a suicidal/homicidal Helen of Troy complex. Faith’s plot strand is never resolved – which is pretty much the story of every plot strand and detail that might conceivably have been interesting. For example:
In Shadrapar we ate what we grew in the ground. Raising animals for food was a disgusting process abandoned in ancient times. The idea of consuming the flesh of another creature was vile and turned my stomach.
This kind of societal shift could have been a fascinating premise to explore, but sadly it’s a gesture only, never properly imagined or invested in. The supposed vegetarian lifestyle of Shadrapar’s citizens feels wildly out of kilter with the dawn-to-dusk random killing that goes on throughout the rest of the book, and we could say the same of the ‘back to the earth’ culture of burial, so respectfully alluded to at one point, never mind the genocide of the Underworlders. I can’t see anyone finding the time to feed that mountain of bodies back into the great circle of life.
An early expedition into the desert could have provided a rich opportunity for Tchaikovsky to give us more detail and discussion of the trajectory of the disasters that led us here. Instead, it’s just a loosely disguised opportunity to fight more monsters. And while we’re on the subject, Tchaikovsky’s constant, undifferentiated, literally hundreds of usages of the word ‘monster’ are in themselves indicative of a failure of imagination. Language gains power through specificity: to be told a tree is a tree is one thing, to be told a tree is an oak is to be furnished with a richer and more resonant image. The more precise we can be, the more accurately our vision is transmitted to the reader. Used incessantly and ubiquitously as it is here, ‘monster’ is a dead word and a lazy one; it tells us nothing. For a book that clearly prides itself on its worldbuilding, there’s not enough of it going on.
Similarly with the past-cultural references, which are a time-honoured tradition in dying Earth stories. On the aforementioned trip into the desert, Stefan and his, uh, short-lived comrade Jon de Baron find an ancient copy of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark – we know what it is from the line Stefan quotes from it. Is the appearance of this particular text supposed to underline the dangerous futility of their quest? Cast a light upon past cultures and the attitude towards them now? Turns out it’s just casual name dropping. Similarly:
Sergei [a time-travelling cosmonaut from 1972] had joined up with the Morlocks first of all. They were a proactive and impolite debt-recovery crew who put his imposing appearance to good use.
which I present without comment. H.G. Wells in-jokes aside, Sergei as a character has more potential than any other to give this novel some backbone – yet again he’s just a bit-part, comic relief.
There are germs of ideas everywhere in Cage of Souls, gestures towards consolidating a vision, each one abandoned in the service of yet another killing spree. Indeed, there is precious little to be told that doesn’t involve people running around with big swords. Cage of Souls is basically Grimdark fantasy that just happens to be placed in a dying Earth setting.
And the point of all this?
The agitators behind that crowd had been selfish and evil reactionaries, and Peter was a good man. I was unsure that this was a material difference. I was also unsure that once a man has raised the mob (for there is really only one mob, waiting in potentia to be raised) whether anyone can keep it from the barbaric acts of violence it strains for. We must be careful what we become when we seek to change things. An old principle of physics: if you push, you yourself are pushed in turn.
Power and the struggle for power, the inbuilt limitations of the Marxist dialectic – this is the gist of what the book is about, though the pointlessness of the journey massively overwhelms the destination. The novel’s philosophical underpinning, when set against the kapok-stuffed vastness of its interior spaces, is scant, and ultimately, the battles and the killing are not about anything save what is literally described. Let us be clear: it is not the violence per se that is an issue – there is plenty of violence in The Light Brigade, and what is more, Hurley’s violence is more upsetting because the story and characters are deep and rich enough to make us care about its outcome. The point is, the subject of The Light Brigade is military violence – a subject that is explored, investigated, argued over and confronted, the novel’s plot and action seamlessly in service of its central idea. It would be impossible to argue that Cage of Souls is ‘about’ violence and power in the same way; there is simply a lot of violence in it, an endless array of battles, stand-offs and executions that become excruciating not so much through their cruelty as through their unending narrative tedium. Ironically, this is something Stefan himself is made to realise:
The Marshal stared about him, and there was less of a reaction than he was expecting. Deep inside, I was not the only one who was becoming jaded. One can only live with random violence for so long before the shock wears off.
You said it, Stef. Yet Tchaikovsky only seems to become invested in his narrative when describing a battle or other scene of conflict, and it is clear from the beginning that it is these fight scenes – not just the set pieces themselves, but the technical aspects of choreographing them – that form the core of the author’s purpose in this novel. I wanted to be interested by his interest, by his own immersion in the nuts-and-bolts detail, because I am fascinated by specialist knowledge whatever the area. But God alive, the fight scenes in Cage of Souls must add up to at least fifty percent of the narrative. That’s three hundred pages of stuff that reads like the screen directions for House of Flying Daggers. ENOUGH ALREADY!! It gives me no pleasure to say this, but rarely have I felt so bored and so trapped when reading a book. Towards the end, my sense of being held mentally captive began to assume the discomfort of being physically restrained.
*
Helplessly immured within the six hundred pages of Cage of Souls, there is a tightly woven, intensely descriptive three-hundred-page novel begging and crying to be set free, and I don’t think I’d be nearly so wound up about this book if it weren’t so frigging long. To write at such length, to demand the reader’s attention over such a prolonged stretch is a presumption, and there should be a reason for making it. One would expect at the very least that the author has something urgent, important and complex they wish to communicate. Cage of Souls waffles on for a very long time but it has nothing of significance to say, either in the manner of its telling, the power of its story or its contribution to the dying Earth genre.
Where Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade and indeed Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire stand in dialogue with earlier works, challenging and directly subverting them, Tchaikovsky does little beyond aping the style and story furniture of Vance and Wolfe, neither making commentary upon it (as M. John Harrison does in his Viriconium sequence) nor extending or augmenting our understanding of dying Earth archetypes. As science fiction, Cage of Souls is basic and largely derivative, a series of events as opposed to an overarching concept. Although Cage of Souls purports to be SF, this lack of a guiding central conceit leaves it insufficient impetus to be properly science fictional in its sensibility. Its loose, episodic structure and extended trajectory have much more in common with works of epic fantasy. This is an old-school, high action adventure story, composed with intelligence, some style and a sound knowledge of its predecessors. But to what end and, most importantly for our purposes, why the Clarke?
As with my commentary on The Last Astronaut, I find myself in an uncomfortable position, a position I would not willingly have chosen. For the purposes of entertainment and reading pleasure, for those who enjoy action-adventure in a fantastical setting, Cage of Souls holds up OK. The tropes are hoary and the situations predictable but the world Tchaikovsky creates is colourful and textured, peopled with a cast of characters we come to know and if not exactly love, then at least enjoy following. I was never the intended audience for this book, and I would not normally have presumed to comment on its fitness for consumption. But as a critic and as a writer of speculative fiction I take a passionate interest in the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and if a novel is presented to me as one of the six best science fiction novels of the year, as reader and writer I am bound to sit up and take notice. As critic and commentator, I am bound to subject that work to the kind of critical scrutiny I would expect from the Clarke jury.
As critic, writer and reader, I am hereby mind-boggled. Even from my own reading of 2019 novels – not nearly so deep and so wide as the reading undertaken by the jury – I can attest with some confidence that Cage of Souls is not one of the six best science fiction novels of the year, and I could point to a dozen and more on the submissions list that would easily take precedence. I have read and searched in vain for a single good reason why Cage of Souls has been selected for the shortlist, and I cannot find one. As with The Last Astronaut, the only explanation I can think of for how it ended up there is that one or other of the judges really got a kick out of reading it. That is not a good reason, or at least it is not a proper deployment of critical process.
To give Cage of Souls a place on the shortlist is necessarily to deny that place to another, with all the publicity and attendant benefits such a placing implies. Bizarre anomaly or critical laziness? Either way, I am disappointed.