GLIMMERING

SFX Review by John Courtney Grimwood

A novel of the coming millennium, announces the cover. It isn't. At least it isn't a novel about our coming millennium, though the references are current (hip New York shops, britpop, retro Lou Reed, cable TV)

What this is though, is a very serious book. You know it's serious because Elizabeth Hand keeps quoting TS Eliot. And then there are the acknowledgements which credit Italian philosopher/novelist Italo Calvino, not to mention dead rock-dude Kurt Kobain and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. (There's also an interesting credit to SF authority John Clude for showing her 'true north', mmm.)

Glimmering is what you'd get if you asked classic US novelist Henry James to write Neuromancer but take in Nostradamus and Japanese war atrocities, a clash of style against content that occasionally clambers up towards sheer genius only to fall flat on its face.

The basic plot is simple. Take rich, literate HIV+ Jack and white trash Christian rock star Trip Marlow and make circumstance inexorably bring the two together, while US society collapses around them and Jack's old lover, the death artist and mephistopheles-character Leonard tours the world recording its end.

The apparent complexity comes from that old (but good) trick of adding depth by making sure events conflict. So that two incidents are described as happening but the reader knows - perfectly well - that one of them can't have done.

Depending on how you look at it, this book is either three years or thirty years out of date. Thirty years too late, because John Fowles did the complex, lets-not-make-sense routine in the Magus - with which this book has startling (but probably absolutely accidental) stylistic similarities. And three years too late, at least as elegiac cyberpunk because the Millennium is currently old hat.

We're not in 1998 yet close enough to be laying in booze for the parties and we've already digested and discarded the magazine articles about millennial fever, weird cults and crystal gazing.

The whole back plot also gives problems, since the whole novel turns on a new fuel being invented in 1996 and gutting out the ozone layer a year later, leading to the destruction of effective communications, the Glimmering. Even starting out in 1987 there's not enough time between 87 and 99 for all the new technology to be realised.

Bits of this book are beautifully written. There's a density of information that isn't about info-dumping but just describing places and situations down the last intricate detail. From the dense flowers that recur as a motif throughout the book; to the Mongolian corporation that rules Wall Street and it elegant metal covered, talking brochures (kind of Java-rich Web-pages but on paper); to the tender, doomed love affairs (the main characters are either gay, HIV + or dysfunctional).

Beautifully styled, literary rather than literate, this is the kind of SF novel that wins mainstream prizes. A Booker-contender that is SF almost by accident... In fact, if you stripped away Glimmering's often clumby overlay of technology what you have left is ghosts, myth, big houses and damaged people. A perfect Henry James for the next century.