he first thing to understand about The Book of Confluence, a
three-volume novel which has now been completed, is that author Paul J. McAuley
means every word of it. Confluence is one single novel published in
three separate volumes, and must be read as one single novel. The
separate parts are Child of the River (1997), Ancients of Days (1998) and Shrine of Stars (1999), but they should now be folded in the mind into one thing.
There would be about as much point starting Confluence in the
middle as there would be to start Gene Wolfe's The Book of the
New Sun with volume three. (Anyone wishing to test this might go to volume one, Chapter 10, "The Curators of the City of the Dead," and read it with exceeding care.)
The second thing to understand about this marvelously sustained
cosmogonic romance of the far future--where whole galaxies engage in
Stapledonian dances at the behest of the trans-human Preservers, who have
created the world of Confluence in order to seed the latter days of the
universe with life--is that the reference to Gene Wolfe was not
accidental. McAuley has not just written a deeply felt and
original story; he has also, wickedly and lovingly and intricately, created in The Book of Confluence an homage to the whole Wolfe oeuvre.
Echoes of the Whorl
Take Confluence itself. Created aeons earlier by the Preservers,
before they fled our time and space through a vast black hole, Confluence
is a flat platform shaped rather like a ruler, 1,000 kilometers wide,
20,000 kilometers long; a ruler with a keel, in the heart of which vast
engines throb when awakened. It wobbles in its orbit around a
Preserver-shaped sun in order to bring day and night to its inhabitants.
Avatars or partials or aspects of the original Preservers, or their
servants, until recently, had communicated through "windows" with the
thousands of separate species of human-shaped beings who inhabit this
planet-sized ruler. Recently, these windows--they might be described as
access points to some unimaginably evolved cyberspace--have begun
to fail, through war or for other reasons.
Any readers of Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun will hear in
Confluence a constant trickling of echoes of the Whorl, the generation
starship that, in Wolfe's epic, has reached the end of its
journey and has begun to misfunction. They will recognize linkages not only
because of the windows, or the long shape, or the gradual loss of functions (the Great River which waters Confluence has begun to recede), or the thousands of breeding colonies which inhabit each vast artifact, or the time abysses out of which godlike voices come. They will also recognize a perhaps more profound linkage: in both series, almost every named character (there are a lot of them) obsessively and reverently debates the nature of the world,
the gods, their own destinies; and in both series, the world is conceived
to be a long Gnostic Word of its Makers. In the beginning was the Word.
God, or the Preservers, utter the world.
What McAuley may have understood for himself, but which he
expresses, punningly, in terms of homage to a past book imbricated in its
own past books, is that any SF novel set in the far future--whether he
writes it, or Wolfe, or Michael Moorcock, or Dan Simmons, or (salute the
father) Jack Vance--must treat the past as an immensity that lies
too deep for tears, a region where geography and geology have become one book.
And he has understood that great epics of the far future, like
those written by Wolfe et al., only partly concern themselves with the
decipherment of the past; they are also about salvation.
It's my own guess that Wolfe's ongoing Book of the Short Sun
will move toward
salvation; and it's certainly the case that the closest fit between
McAuley and the fathering Wolfe lies in the nature and ultimate function
of the two authors' choice of protagonists, both of whom are gradually
discovered to be hard gods of transfiguration.
Draught and dismemberment
Yama (short for Yamamanama) in The Book of Confluence and
Pater Silk in The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short
Sun share much; but it is, perhaps inevitably, Severian from The Book
of the New Sun who most implacably shadows Yama's quest, from the great
capital city of Ys downriver to the vast ravening war and back again, to
find out his true parentage, his true family, his true powers (which are
symbolized by various iconic trinkets he gathers on the way, but
which are ultimately as ephemeral as any of the emblems Severian does not actually need en route to godhood), his enemies true and false, his redemptive death and rebirth, his bringing of salvation (or obedience to the deep will of the Preservers) to Confluence, not by flood as in The
Urth of the New Sun, but by draught and dismemberment.
We meet Yama on the first page of the first volume, as an infant
floating down the Great River with his dead mother (or so she seems). He
is plucked from these bulrushes by the Aedile of the local city, raised,
kidnapped, rescued, etc., all in that first volume. In Chapter 10 (see
above) he meets an elderly couple who succor him, give him more advice.
He attracts followers without asking that they surrender their lives to
him; but he takes them, and their lives. At the end of this volume, he
escapes with these companions through a vast closing gate (c.f. the last
pages of The Shadow of the Torturer) into a new world: Ys.
In the second volume, he undergoes various ordeals in vast Ys,
pursued by implacable foes whose need of him is more theological than
practical; he continues his search for the origins of his
bloodline and of Confluence itself downriver, past his old home, further and further into regions of dreadful turmoil. He is haunted by an aspect who appears through shrine windows; his ability to mentally control machines
(especially ancient ones) grows. He also learns that part of his godly
function is to infect the blood of indigens (races not yet touchable by
the Preservers' long-buried nanomachines, whose function it is to jostle
genes and change species, perhaps for the better) by having them drink of
his blood (resemblances to the climax of Dan Simmons's Hyperion
sequence are evident but not profound). He is kidnapped again and again.
The last volume, Shrine of Stars,
carries Yama, now terribly scarred and profoundly weary, down the Great
River and over the edge of the world (resemblances to Terry Pratchett's
Discworld are obvious but superficial), where the perspective expands
vertiginously: we plunge through wormholes, travel via sentient
ships half as old as time, return to Confluence in order to bring final salvation to its thousands of species.
In our blood
The pleasures of the text itself are too numerous to count: the
Vancian archipelago-hopping, each new "island" a new species; the sensory
impact of the writing; the profligacy of life of Confluence, to which
McAuley gives far more than lip service.
And in the end, there is another joy, one which was hinted at
throughout all three volumes. In a final swerve from father Wolfe--a
swerve which distinguishes these two great series, but does so without
insult to the earlier (and ultimately harsher and greater) epic of
destiny--McAuley makes it clear that he means what he has in fact been
saying throughout. Severian may be something like a god, a long magical
Word uttered by the Increate; but Yama, who is something like a god, is a
long magical Word uttered by other human beings.
Confluence is secular and means it.
Severian frightens us (me, anyway). Yama is in our blood.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has
been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at
the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
