Review - Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland

Deathless Divide

Justina Ireland
Titan Books, 4 February 2020
PB, 576pp

I'm grateful to Titan Books for an advance copy of Deathless Divide.

Picking up exactly where 2019's Dread Nation ended, Deathless Divide takes forward the story of Jane McKeene and her... well maybe I shouldn't say friend... associate, perhaps? Katherine Devereux after the Survivalist town of Summerland falls to the zombie ("shambler") horde.

Seeking refuge in the nearby town of Nicodemus, Jane and Katherine soon find old enemies catching up with them - shamblers without, and humans within...

I loved Dread Nation. In Ireland's alt-nineteenth century, the US Civil War was overtaken by a zombie plague. Young people of Colour are dragooned into training schools, learning to fight the shamblers - and none gives a better fighting education than Miss Preston's, where young women are taught and polished to be "Attendants", defending fine ladies from the undead tide. It is, at the same time, a shrewd commentary on racial prejudice, an exciting (if at times gruesome) fantasy adventure and a fine coming-of-age story.

In taking things forward, Deathless Divide has high standards to meet but in fact it surpasses the first book. Told in alternate chapters from the viewpoints of Jane and of Katherine, this story gives us in effect the tale of a stormy but growing friendship. Spiky and distrustful, Jane makes it hared for anyone to get near her, and her first meeting with Katherine wasn't auspicious. To a degree they are now thrown together. The situation in Nicodemus - another Western town best by shambles - is uncannily similar to that of Summerland, with no way for the young women to escape so that they have to depend on each other. Fortunately, the one thing they each have going for them is their fighting skill, something that enables them to respect each other even when feelings are high.

And then Ireland shakes everything up and this book changes...

Deathless Divide is, simply, stunning. Moving from the plains of the Midwest to the golden state of California, Ireland continues to deepen, and to explore, her imaginary world, while also - and doesn't this seem unlikely but it works so well - using the fantasy, fictional setting to starkly depict the situation of people of colour in the Old West. From the higher prices charged them for goods to being burned out of desirable areas of San Francisco to the ruses mean ing that, despite the abolition of slavery, they're still subject to the control of their former owners, this all feels very real indeed.

The situation is one that Jane and Kate are very familiar with, and they're young women of great determination and courage. They are not about to give up. But Ireland shows the debilitating effect of the inequality. Following events in Nicodemus, Jane is bent on revenge and, having to survive in a pitiless world, she loses pity and does things that are gradually destroying the Jane we first met in Dread Nation. That is the whole crux of the book - Jane's descent, and Katherine's determination (despite their differences and initial dislike) to pull her back. It is, at its heart, a tale of friendship. In Deathless Divide, against a backdrop of horrors, little kindnesses and attentions matter - taking in a stray child (or for that matter, a stray dog). Sharing food. Politenesses that seem more appropriate in a genteel drawing room than on a rough trail. Katherine's determination to continue with her corsets, even if they have to be loser than she'd like.

It's a sweeping, compelling story, that defies the normal fantasy goal of achieving Big Things. Here the Big Things (the driven scientist hunting for a cure for the zombie plague, the avenging bounty hunter tracking down their prey) turn out to be hollow, or equivocal, while the things that make us all human - the things that make life a bit better - are celebrated and bring salvation.

An excellent read, deserving of wide attention and also great fun. Strongly recommended.

For more information about Deathless Divide, see the Titan Books website here.

Review - The Never Game by Jeffrey Deaver

Design by Claire Ward

The Never Game
Jeffery Deaver
HarperCollins, 16 May 2019
HB, e, audio

I bought my copy of this book from Wallingford Bookshop and also listened to the audio via a subscription service. (This was another book I listened to mainly on audio, while driving to the station and back, but as ever I got impatient and read the last 30 or so pages).

I've recently become a fan of Deaver's Lincoln Rhymes crime novels, so was glad to see this new series start. The contrasts - and similarities between the two series are interesting. Rhymes, a forensic specialist ac ting as consult to various law-enforcement agencies, has disabilities and spends most of his time in his home which is fully fitted out as a forensics lab. He has a group of colleagues around him who have built over the course of the novels, and they tend to be the ones who go out to collect the evidence (and actually engage in the detective work) so that the books typically have many points of view, including those of the perpetrators.

Colter Shaw is much more of a loner. (Well, he hasn't had a series of novels in which to accumulate a circle of friends!) He travels the US in a recreational vehicle, making a living by claiming rewards for missing persons, abscondees or suspects. That sounds a quite romantic life - here today, gone tomorrow, everything you need in the back of the van - though Shaw is far from a romantic personality, moulded as he has been by his survivalist father and pursuing a career where he breaks everything down to percentage chances. This book was told largely from Shaw's perspective, so felt much more linear than the Rhymes novels, even though there are many flashbacks to Shaw's earlier life.

There's a mystery surrounding Shaw's family, which I think will become an ongoing theme in this series but given that Shaw is a new player and we haven't yet really got to know him that well, Deaver shrewdly doesn't let that get too much in the way of the immediate focus which is an intricately plotted, related series of kidnappings. In each case the abductee is abandoned in a dangerous location - a deserted factory, remote wilderness, a sinking boat - and for much of the first half of the book Shaw is the only person really aware of what's going on, the police paying little attention and Shaw having to persuade them that something is up. At the same time we know he will succeed in this because the story is bookended by Shaw's attempts to rescue the woman in that sinking boat, something for which his background and experience fits him well. (Shaw's father once insisted on his teenage children going mountain climbing, in the dark as a rite of passage).

If that sounds as though it would drain the tension from the story, well it doesn't - Deaver is far to wily for that! - we get plenty of heart-pounding moments, lots of jeopardy and a series of nested puzzles disguising just what is really going on (there are, of course, many red herrings).

Put simply this book is class and if you want a polished, compelling thriller this book will do the trick, as well as promising future revelations and twists about Shaw and his background.

Would definitely recommend.

Review - The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Cover design by Will Staehle

The Future of Another Timeline
Annalee Newitz
Orbit, 24 October 2019
PB, e, 340pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for a free advance copy of The Future of Another Timeline to consider for review.

In 1992, Tess attends a concert in Irvine, California. It's one of her favourite punk-feminist bands and she's revisiting her youth, listening to music she grew up with.

Also in 1992, also in California, Beth lives with a manipulative, controlling father and a tuned out mother. She finds release in stolen moments with her friends, parties, a few drugs - and attends that same concert, where something bad is going to happen.

And in Chicago, in 1893, a group of women put on a show at the World's Fair, challenging the moral puritanism of their time by exhibiting sensual, erotic dances from North Africa.

One of them, oddly, is Tess...

This is a book about time travel, timelines, destiny, history and struggle. In Newitz's universe, the world contains five "Machines" - inscrutable, geological structures that allow for travel backwards in time. Of almost unimaginable age (they seem to have been created in the Ordovician era - look it up!)  their origin and purpose is mysterious, but humanity has learned enough to be able to use them, crudely, and a complex etiquette has been evolved over the generations permitting different ages to share this gift without (too many) dire consequences.

I'm sure you've know the classic SF story A Sound of Thunder, where a traveller to the past inadvertently alters their own present by treading on an insect. That spectre - of a trivial change altering the timeline - haunts the world Newitz describes: there is consensus that such a thing couldn't really happen, that the broad outlines of history are stable - but really, how would anyone know? The central paradox at the heart of this book is that you wouldn't. Living in the present, the past is the past and it always was as it was.

Only that returning traveller might recall a different past... a world, for example, where abortion was illegal... and so there is scope for mischief.

The Future of Another Timeline is a book with a clear message, I'd even say a necessary message. It is really a book about a time war. Not the massed opposition of huge forces in direct conflict, but patient, cumulative snipping away, "editing", to tilt the balance one way or another. The two contending sides are the "Applied Cultural Geology Group", a loose alliance of women time travellers (in this world, "cultural geology" is the name for the study of time travel, based on the deep-time origin of the Machines) and a cabal of misogynists who want to prevent women's rights ever being won (and - as becomes clear - to push things towards a future which makes Margaret Atwood's Gilean look like a paradise of equality). We see the women meet, discover that a hostile edit has caused one of them to wink out of existence, forgotten by all but a traveller from the past. We  see the action they take.

We also see them encounter their pig-headed enemies in bars, theatres and concert halls across the past. This was where things slightly came apart for me. The antagonists - a mixture of real people, such as the Victorian moralist Anthony Comstock, and fictitious characters - comes across as pretty two dimensional. In various historical guises (sometimes literally) they're basically men's right "activists", alternately spouting overblown Victorian sexism,  the debased language of their modern chatboard forums, or pick-up artist jargon. They are as tedious and self-evidently wrong as you might imagine, and hardly seem like credible opponents for the women described here. While some vile things do happen to these women of the Group and to their allies, the two seem utterly mismatched. Indeed, final defeat of the men only seemed to be in doubt because of the women's (especially Tess's) scruples, refusing to kill or injure in service of the cause. (Tess does have her reasons, as we eventually find out.)

So I found that "Time war" angle, while interesting in concept (and involving some great worldbuilding) rather frustrating in practice. In contrast, another strand - that of Beth and family in the 1990s - was well realised with a couple of truly disturbing, brilliantly realised and complex characters. One of them is Beth's father, and the depths of his... wrongness... are painted subtly and slowly, building up to a really unsettling portrait and giving the reader - or at least this reader - many moments of fear for her and her friends. This is an alternate timeline where Comstock's meddling paid off, resulting in sweeping prohibitions which affect Beth, but it is not (yet) the utterly nightmare world that may yet come and the real tension comes from her claustrophobic, pressure cooker family situation. I would have liked to read much more of this strand: I felt Newitz's writing came especially to life here, even though more could possibly have been made of the links between her father's attitudes and the patriarchal drift of that timeline.

Instead, that theme - the origin and development of rules that trammel women - is much more the focus of the 1890s parts of the book, focussing on those dancers at the World's Fair who are the target of "Comstockery" aiming to shut down and even imprison them. Those parts impart a great deal of detail about 1890s attitudes and about the real Comstock's actual activities, but they do come over much more as conveying research, despite the strong female characters here - and real suffering. There wasn't, for me, as much heart in this bit as in Beth's story.

Technically it's all very well thought out and realised - in particular the handling of the time "edits" is impressive. The descriptions of their effects are done subtly and are reflected sideways rather than head on (we are not told what has changed but have to wait till the characters' memories reform to accommodate the new reality). This all felt very believable, as did the, literally, geological time travel tech whose existence and operation is simply a fact of life (so familiar that it features in TV dramas, and the phrase "lucky edit" is used for any fortunate occurrence, such as two friends encountering each other).

So, overall, I found this a fine book and a rattling good story, but one where the different threads felt quite assorted, with one much more readable and affecting than the other. It isn't only Beth's home life, there's a real affection to the accounts of gigs and scuzzy yard parties where she hangs out with her girlfriends (though a sense of menace hangs over those scenes too, I won't say why because spoilers), of female friends and the help they give one another, of love and loss. That's actually what remains most strongly with me from this book: fittingly, perhaps, the flattish male villains fade away while the edit preserves those determined and vividly portrayed women, whether comrades in arms, friends, or both.

For more information about this book, see the publisher's website here.