his sequel to MacLeod's magnificent The Light Ages (2003) jumps us ahead nearly 100 years after the closing events of that first book. The backstory is given in condensed form early on in the new book. We learn that the characters are inhabiting an alternate Earth where the discovery of "aether," a potent, wonder-working, magical substance, resulted in a radically different history for the British Isles over the past few centuries. But as we saw earlier, aether was finally partially discredited and supplanted by other technologies, such as electricity. These hybrid technologies, half-physical, half psychical, have ushered in a golden age of wealth and plenty.
At the heart of this shining empire lies the Guild of Telegraphers, and at the heart of the guild reside the Meynells. Tom Meynell is the ostensible head of the Guild. But his wife, Alice, is the power behind the throne. A conniving serial killer of any who stand in her way, Alice knows how to use the communications network in a duplicitous manner unsuspected by anyone else. Her beauty maintained against aging by near-poisonous doses of aether, Alice is a monster dedicated to personal power and the advancement of her Guild.
But in one respect, Alice is totally human. She is a mother troubled by the illness of her only child, Ralph. Dying of tuberculosis, the teenage Ralph possesses a mind as sharp as his mother's. But unless he can be cured, he will never get a chance to employ that intellect for the good of mankind.
In a last desperate move, Alice and Ralph take up residence in the mysterious house named Invercombe, near Bristol. Manufacturing its own weather, built upon a place of power, Invercombe offers the only chance for a cure for Ralph. But even this last-ditch strategy seems fruitless until Alice visits nearby Einfell, where the Changed live, those weirdly mutated humans who have been warped by too great an exposure to aether. She elicits a cure for Ralph, and suddenly her son is whole again.
This development frees up Alice to return to her plotting, which includes the murder of her own husband. Meanwhile, Ralph falls in love with a poor local "shoregirl" named Marion Price, who is herself a bright and wise figure. Together, the two plan to escape the toils of England and the Guild by fleeing to a foreign land. But Alice's astral spying soon discovers their plans, and the domineering mother breaks up the pair.
Fifteen years pass. Ralph is now head of the Guild of Telegraphers, and Marion is a nurse. But more crucially, the two are enlisted on different sides in the civil war that has come to grip England. Is there a chance for the two ex-lovers to stage a reunion amid the carnage? And what of the lost son they had between them, a wild boy named Klade whom they thought dead? Even if all three can come together, will anything of England's society remain unshattered?
A world so close and so far
Ian MacLeod writes like an angel. It's as simple as that. He strings together ideally chosen words into sentences that are variously lush, sparse, subtle, bold, joyous, mournful, comic or tragic. These sentences mount into perfectly balanced paragraphs, which in turn assemble themselves into poised and dramatically organic chapters. The reader is carried along effortlessly on the flow of MacLeod's prose, internalizing his vision as if in a dream.
But there is no mere "fine writing" here, splashy effects for the sake of effects, no showoff grandstanding. The prose is always in service to the concepts and the plot and the characters.
Conceptually, MacLeod offers us a portrait of a world so close to ours, yet so far removed. The estrangement created by the aether-driven technologies masks basic power structures and ethical dilemmas that correspond exactly to our world of dwindling resources and ideological rancor.
In terms of narrative action, MacLeod features both broad sweeps of action—the way the world evolves, the way wars are fought, the way science progresses, the way people grow up and grow old—side by side with perfect miniature moments (such as when Ralph and Marion go swimming for the first time together). And he shows how the macroscopic is composed of the microscopic.
But it's on the character front that MacLeod truly expends his best efforts and achieves the most. The depths with which he limns his people—even the minor ones, such as Weatherman Ayres, who maintains Invercombe's climate—is astonishing. His empathetic portrait of Alice is tinged with both pity and condemnation. (And note how Alice's fascination with the mirrors of the telephone system adds a symbolic Carrollian facet to her portrayal.) The love affair between Ralph and Marion is so touching that when it falls apart we almost feel that we've lost our own first heartthrobs.
Delivering deep human truths in a setting of impressive strangeness has always been the stated goal of the school of fantasy known as New Weird. And no one succeeds at this project better than Ian MacLeod.
