#BlogTour #Review - The Fall of Koli by M R Carey

Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio

The Fall of Koli (Rampart Trilogy, 3)
M R Carey
Orbit, 23 March 2021
Available as: PB, 530pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy provided by the publisher
ISBN (PB): 9780356513508  

I'm grateful to Orbit for a free advance copy of The Fall of Koli and to Tracy for inviting to take part in the blog tour.

The Fall of Koli is the final part of the Rampart Trilogy and - as Koli, narrating the start of the first book, told us it would - brings things full circle, with the return of an older and wiser man to Mythen Rood. We finally learn more about certain recurrent themes - the demon Stannabanna, and Dandrake who fought him; The Sword of Albion, which Koli, Ursula, Cup and Monono were searching for, and the Unfinished War (well named). It's also made clear how the story came to be narrated, by Koli (in all of the first book), by Koli and Spinner (in the second book) and here, by both, plus a third person - who turns out to have had a hand in certain earlier events which are now visible form a new perspective. 

It's a satisfying and well rounded conclusion with a tense and dramatic ending, but I do advise you to read the previous two books first (and to stop reading my review now because it'll both confuse you and spoil the story!)

The Fall of Koli picks up exactly where The Trials of Koli ended, with the company desperately trying to get aboard the mega ship, The Sword of Albion, with their precious "diagnostic", rescued from the ruins of Ursula's drudge. They succeed, but this only brings them into a very strange world indeed. There are three people on the giant ship - Paul, Lorraine and their son, Stanley. There is something odd about Paul and Lorraine, Carey's portrayal deftly painting their strangeness which only morphs and becomes more complex as Koli (mainly) strips away layers of deceit. Who they are, what they were and what their purpose is prove to be deeply tangled matters and the more Koli understands, the more danger he and his friends prove to be in. 

While this part of the story proceeds, Carey cuts away from time to time to follow Spinner, back in Mythen Rood. Spinner's story in The Trials of Koli was for me one of the best  parts of that book, giving. whole new perspective on events in The Book of Koli and also presenting in Spinner a fascinating, clever and resourceful woman who is pushed into a difficult corner but determined to survive and to protect her family and village. That continues here, with Spinner becoming something very close to the leader of Mythen Rood. That requires joining in the deceptions the Ramparts pull on everybody else and Spinner recognises the moral ambiguity of that. She's determined to end the system, but has to play a complex game of politics to retain her position and address the growing threat of the Peacemaker, who lays claim to all and any "tech" in "Ingland". Basically, Spinner is forced to go to war, and it's a desperate conflict. 

It's difficult for me to convey just how engaging, convincing and entertaining The Fall of Koli (and the trilogy of a whole) is. The reader has, of course, an advantage over Koli and his friends (except perhaps for Ursula) in recognising many places, events and things and even more so now that Koli has landed in something closer to our world. So there's that sense of recognising something and then seeing how Koli will cope, what it will mean to him and how he will make sense of it. But there are also many moments when Koli's world is baffling and it's his experience an intuition that guide us through it and help us make sense of things. That process is, as I've said, supplemented in this book by another, third point of view - in fact, by a fourth, kind of, as Koli finds a new and different resource to guide him but one that may put him in desperate peril.

Even in this third book, Carey is exploring new themes and elaborating existing ones. When the reasons for the Unfinished War become clear, you may want to think about them in relation to where we are in this country now. Ursula's repugnance for an independent Monono is explained at last, and the presence of humanity alongside that hostile Nature ("Everything that lives hates us...") is revisited but from the perspective of what balance we might be able to find with it. It's an ideas-rich book with the vastly different perspectives of the main characters - the trans girl Cup, educated doctor Ursula, virtual Monono who is in some ways the oldest of the group, and Koli himself - constantly sparking off one another and suggesting new and unexpected truths and conclusions. 

That goes on to the - rather unexpected - end, with the final passage a musing on identity and reality from a character you might not expect. It's a neat pairing with the opening words of the trilogy, and satisfying place to conclude.

I would strongly recommend The Fall of Koli, and this trilogy as a whole. Reading the books has been a real treat one of my highlights of 2020 and 2021.

You can find out more about The Fall of Koli at the other stops on the blogtour (see the poster below) or from the publisher's website here. And you can buy it from your local bookshop, or online from Bookshop, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyles, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Blogtour #Review - The Book of Koli by MR Carey

The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy, 1)
MR Carey
Orbit, 16 April 2020
Available as: PB, e, 376pp
Read as: PB
ISBN: 9780316477475

I'm so glad today to be joining the blog tour for The Book of Koli by MR Carey and am grateful to Orbit for an advance copy and to Tracy Fenton at Compulsive Readers for inviting to take part.

This was never a book I wasn't going to read. Carey's books - especially those set in the world of The Girl with all the Gifts, and the haunting Someone Like Me - are immersive, readable and remain with you.

But it did add a little frisson to see that in his latest, we are dealing with a world where Nature has, as it were, taken its revenge. It's easy to see that right now, I think. And the post-apocalyptic feels relevant in a way that it can't have when this was being written.

Not that our present pandemic is going to see us reduced, like Koli here, to scattered communities living on subsistence agriculture and bits of scavenged, ill-understood tech. But we can perhaps see how dependent our society is on everything working together, and how fragile it all might be.

In narrator Koli's (a young man living in remote Mythen Rood, in the North of England, perhaps a hun dared year from now) world, Nature is the enemy. Everything is trying to kill us. The very trees are hostile, as are a host of fierce creatures - wasps the size of a human head, "needles" that will take your arm off, floating seeds that will take root in your flesh. There are also dangerous remnants of human tech - attach droids gone feral, for example. And there are other people - the Shunned Men who have taken to cannibalism, and various messianic sects. It's a cruel and hard world outside the village stockade and not a place you'd willingly go, except for short hunting tripos, but it's where Koli went and, apparently, came back from.

Telling this journey over three books, Carey takes his time in the first to establish the setting, the history and the language. Koli and his village speak a very distinct variety of English and in places the reader has to work a bit too understand, especially, the names and some of the references but this speech adds greatly to the atmosphere and helps one believe that, yes, here is a future community.

The language also adds a hint of comedy when Koli stumbles on a piece of working tech - a media player hosting an avatar who speaks in a hip dialect (well, hip a long time before Koli was born) of English-Japanese-teen. Seeing him trying to communicate with an AI that uses this language, when his world and his references Arte so narrow and, well, different - is quite funny, but also rather sad, underlining what humanity has lost.

Against this larger theme, though, much of what Koli does and what happens to him in this book flows from basic human motivations - love, jealousy, desire to be someone - which an adolescent boy in a hardscrabble place like Mythen Rood feels just as much as anyone else. Carey tells a story that, well, just works, at this elemental human level so that for the greater part of this book the reader just wants Koli safe, wants him not to take the catastrophic course of action he does here - rather than caring about that wider world, the causes of the collapse, and what might be done now to put things right. Carey only leads us up to that slowly and by the time he does we really care about Koli and his world, its people, even its AIs like Monono.

In feeling and content the book reminded me of John Wyndham's The Chrysalids, particularly in the way that the future world, apart form being post-apocalyptic, turns out to be flawed even in its one terms. I'm sure comparisons with Riddley Walker are also inevitable, especially given Koli's dialect (although I found this perfectly accessible) and the composite religion that has emerged. No doubt other parallels can be drawn but really, Carey makes this setting and own, peopling it with credible characters who have credible motivations and addressing many other themes than "how to survive societal collapse". There are trans characters here. There is misuse of power. The ethical implicates of AI is an issue. And there is that fundamental question - when is is permissible to kill?

If that makes the book sound too solemn and ideas-y, it's really not. This is an absorbing and involving story with plenty of action and a thinking, three dimensional protagonist who you may want to slap at times but who will quickly find his way into your heart.

I'm so glad that The Trials of Koli and The Fall of Koli (ooooh...)  are coming later this year because I for one would not like to have to wait a whole year to see what happens next - and how the story finishes.

One to grab and read quickly, I think!

The tour continues with many great stops got come - see the poster below for details.

For more information about The Book of Koli, see the Orbit website here.

You may, in spite of These Strange Times, be able to get the book from local shop - if you can, please do, because they needs your support as ever before. Alternative you can go online to Blackwell's, Foyles, Waterstones or Amazon.