Necessary Evil

[sawyl]

It looks as though Necessary Evil, the final novel in Ian Tregillis' superb Milkweed Triptych alternate history series might just be the first novel to get written up within six months of reading. Inevitably, given that it's the last book in the series, there are going to be some pretty broad clues as to the events of the early books but I'll try to avoid any particularly blatant spoilers.

The novel opens with a brief prelude that puts us inside the head of Gretel, the series' precognitive anti-heroine, and recaps events from her twisted, solipsistic viewpoint. With the setting re-established, we jump back to Raybould Marsh as he returns to 1940 on the very same day that Lord William Beauclerk first attempts to use the Eidolons, malevolent intelligences from outside reality, to try to understand how Doctor von Westarp managed to create his nazi übermenschen. Escaping from the Admiralty, Marsh goes underground and uses a combination of cunning and foreknowledge to set up a persona that he can use to manipulate his younger self, his wife Liv, and Will Beauclerk into a series of actions that ought to change the war so that history no longer unfolds as it did in Bitter Seeds.

With Gretel's assistance, Marsh arranges to plan a spy at the heart of the Reichsbehörde project to destroy the nazi's superman program from within. Meanwhile, he himself arranges to remain in England, partly to keep Will from becoming too deeply involved in Milkweed's plan to harness the power of Britain's warlocks in defence of the country. But he also chooses to remain in the hope of converting Gretel's strange desire to keep him from harm into a shield for his wife and baby daughter.

As the war plays out, it becomes clear that history is unfolding along a track that takes it away from the alternate version of Bitter Seeds and brings it much closer to our own: the BEF, obliterated by the Luftwaffe in Seeds, survives to be evacuated from Dunkirk; Stephenson, the head of Milkweed, arranges for the construction of the Admiralty Citadel on Horse Guards; and Coventry suffers extensive bombing in November 1940.

As events diverge from Bitter Seeds, so too do the principal characters. But in keeping with Tregillis' approach of first making mad those he would destroy, this means Gretel, who'd previously been able to keep herself safe from the worst of events by diverting the trouble onto others, here finds herself descending into insanity. Marsh continues to bare the scars, both physical and mental, of Gretel's former meddling, but he is able to channel enough of his anger into action that it's almost possible to overlook his loneliness and isolation.

Tregillis also manages the neat trick of keeping two different versions of the same character in play, keeping them distinct enough to distinguish but also making sure they share enough common traits — both with each other and with their appearances in the earlier novels — to make them convince. He achieves at least part of this by switching perspective between sections: one character gets to narrate from a first person perpective, while the other remains a close third person.

I wonder whether the reader isn't supposed to think of the whole series as a found history of a secret version of World War Two: the Bitter Seeds version being the original alt-history of the war and our own timeline being the Necessary Evil version, complete with a series of occult happenings that have been so comprehensively erased from history through a combination of official secrets, fog of war and high explosive, that if it wasn't for the ramblings of a lonely old man, we might never have known it at all...