Glorious Angels

[sawyl]

Justina Robson has a new book out for this first time in a little while. Glorious Angels mixes science fiction with fantasy to create a strange world where engineering is as much magic as mechanics and where wonders from the world's lost Golden Age are as likely to turn up in the attics of aristocratic houses as archaeological digs. While the world conjured up by the book is beautiful and strange and engaging, the first part of the novel is desperately slow and there is barely a hint of the plot until over half-way through, at which point it emerges and drives the events towards an intriguing conclusion.

The scene opens in the City of Glimshard where Tralane Huntingore is battling to land a small aircraft on the roof her house, watched by unseen spy Zharazin Mazhd. With the war in the south going badly, Tralane, a hereditary engineer, has been manipulated by the Minister of Defence into reconditioning a piece of old and poorly understood technology for a use in a weapon of mass destruction. Zharazin, a senior member of the Infomancy, finds himself in a difficult position: having loved Tralane from afar for years, he is tempted to surpress his knowledge of her behaviour despite the extreme difficulty of holding anything back from his masters' telepathic abilities.

The Huntingores — Tralane and her teenage daughters Minnabar and Isabeau — play a pivotal role in the event of the book, with each coming to the fore at an appropriate moment to provide a point of view to the reader. Tralane is a classic brilliant but focused technologist, intensely engaged in her own research and area of expertise but deeply chaotic when it comes to every other aspect of her life; her role as head of household seems to consist of little more than balancing the budget, although she doesn't seem to have been particularly successful at this given that she has been forced to take Minister Alide's dirty little side job to keep her head above water. The two younger Huntingores, whose actions and motivations seem largely opaque to their mother, are both on the cusp of adulthood, finally putting aside the interests of their younger years — partying and socialising in Minna's case and extreme ascetic philosophy in Issa's — in favour of an engagement with engineering and politics and the outside world.

Meanwhile the city around the central family has been stirred up into a state of desperate excitement by the arrival of Tzaban, a Karoo from the south who has come despite the war against his people to train the military. While Tzaban's existence only touches peripherally on the Huntingores in the early stages, his role in events is revealed to the reader both from his own rather alien viewpoint and that of a series of secondary characters — a cast which includes General Fadurant Borze, in charge of both the war and of Glimshard's defences, and Empress Shamuit Torada, with Zharazin Mazhd helping to bind the story threads together.

In these sections, there is a great deal of concern about quite why Tzaban has chosen to travel to the city of his enemies and quite what message he is trying — and, more of ten than not, failing — to get across to his adversaries. We also get quite a lot of the mechanics of the Empress' rule, from her role as part of a gestalt entity to her ability to manipulate the emotions and reactions of those around her, and see those around her including her bodyguards and the mysterious Night Parlumi, who seems to be a considerable power behind the throne.

After a meandering first half, Glorious Angels begins to pick up pace when all the principal characters attend a ball held in honour of the Empress' birthday. The party atmosphere is unexpectedly tense, with Tralane and Tzaban due to depart the next morning for the war zone, with the Empress brooding over a public announcement, and with Mazhd and his superiors worried that the event might be used as cover for a coup. The party goes badly, sending the main characters off in different directions. Tzaban and a very sleep-deprived Tralane find themselves on the road to the war zone, more or less as planned; while Minnabar finds herself on an unexpected journey to a very different destination. Isabeau and Zharazin, following the wishes of Tralane and the Empress, remain in Glimshard where Issa has assumed the role of Chief Engineer.

Arriving in the war zone, Tralane finds herself cast into a nightmare of primeval violence. When she and Tzaban finally make it to the site of the archaeological dig that lies at the heart of the conflict, they descend into the vast and inexplicable structure in search of answers that seem tantalisingly close. Within the pit they encounter an earlier team of engineers sent by Glimshard, all of whom are in a state of terrified exhaustion, constantly expecting to fall victim to a group of marauding Karoo who have also entered the structure.

Finally as the plot starts to pick up, and especially as Tralane and Tzaban arrive at the dig, it finally becomes clear whether the story is going and that there may actually be answers to some of the questions floated in the first half. We also finally get a really clear view of what it means to be Karoo and get a chance to the see the horror of the war up close and personal — the Karoo's habit of eating their enemies in order to absorb their memories is particularly disturbing — and quite why the first group of engineers sent to explore the site have been quite so traumatised.

While not without problems, especially in the pacing, and hard to recommend unequivocally, Glorious Angels imagines a fascinating world and, in the Huntingore family, possesses a likeable set of leads.