2004;
527 pages. Book #1 (out of 4) in the Destiny’s Children series. New Author? : No. Genre : Historical Fiction; Drama; Mystery; a
smidgen of Science Fiction. Laurels:
Nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2004. Overall Rating : 8*/10.
It’s a somber occasion for George Poole. His father has just died, and he’s the only
one in the family left in England to return home and see to the estate. Not that there’s much of an inheritance to
split with the one other living relative, his older sister, Gina, who’s happily
married and raising a family way over in Florida.
But at least his boyhood chum, Peter McLachlan, is around to help go
through dad’s few earthly possessions.
Peter’s kind of a weirdo, being heavily into SETI and other far-out
groups who look for anomalies in outer space, to say nothing of
extraterrestrials. But it’ll be good to
have someone there to help dispose of the family keepsakes.
So
it is quite to George’s surprise to learn he has a sister he’s never heard
about. A twin sister, no less. Taken away (or more accurately, given away)
soon after birth, and placed in some sort of religious order in Rome.
Say,
wasn’t there some sort of family legend about one of George’s
many-times-great-grandmother (and wasn’t her name Regina?) also being involved
with a religious order? But that was 15 centuries ago, back in the days right after the Roman Legions abandoned
England. Surely there’s no connection,
right?
Hmmm.
What’s To Like...
Coalescent
is yet another ambitious effort by Stephen Baxter, with four storylines and
genres involving untold millennia cleverly interwoven into an overarching Poole
family saga. There’s a present-day
story, one of Intrigue, that follows George’s efforts to locate his long-lost
twin sister. There’s a Historical Fiction account of the legendary Regina. There’s a Drama plotline involving a girl
named Lucia, who wants out of her present-day situation in Rome. And late in the novel, there’s a very small
Science Fiction thread that takes place far in the future.
Personally,
my favorite thread was Regina’s story, as all of Western Europe, and England
especially, fall into the Dark Ages after the collapse of the Roman
Empire. Stephen Baxter’s attention to
detail in this is impressive, and I liked that he went with gritty realism, as
opposed to some King Arthur type of fantasy tale. I enjoyed learning about the
“Wall Walk”, some nominal contact with Druids, and even a brief mention of an
ancient religion near and dear to my heart – Mithraism.
Life
was tough in those first years after the fall of Rome. So if frequent cussing isn’t your cup of tea,
or you find things like rape, oral sex, slavery, homosexuality, and ritual
procreation offensive, you might want to skip this book.
The
unifying theme to the book is Baxter’s hypothesis that societies – be they
insects, mammals, or even humans – when placed in extremely stressful and
existence-threatening conditions, will adapt a “hive mentality”, where everyone
has a predetermined role that needs no explaining, and does it without fail or
question. The individual members of such
a society won’t even be aware of this collective mentality, they will just
naturally coalesce into it, hence the
book’s title. The three favorite maxims
within the Order are “Ignorance is Strength”;
“Listen to your Sisters”, and (most
importantly) “Sisters matter more than
Daughters”.
The ending ties these disparate storylines together, with a twist or
two to keep you on your toes. This is a
standalone novel, but several loose threads remain afterward (most notably, the Kuiper Belt Anomaly),
which presumably pave the way for the sequel and the rest of the series.
Kewlest New Word...
Eusocial (adj.)
: of an animal species (usually insects) showing an advanced level of social
organization, in which a single female or caste produces the offspring and
non-reproductive individual cooperate in caring for the young.
Others : Extirpating
(v.); Intaglio
(n.).
Excerpts...
Rosa leaned
forward and said softly, “Mamma- Mamma-“
Maria looked up
blearily, her eyes rheumy grey pebbles.
“What, what? Who’s that? Oh, it’s you, Rosa Poole.” She glanced down at her book irritably, tried
to focus, then closed the book with a sigh.
“Oh, never mind. I always thought
old age would at least give me time to read.
But by the time I’ve got to the bottom of the page I’ve forgotten what
was at the top …” She leered at Lucia,
showing a toothless mouth. “What an
irony – eh?” (pg. 232)
“No
Renaissance. There would have been no
need for it. But there would have been
none of the famous Anglo-Saxon tradition of individual liberty and
self-determination. No Magna Carta, no
parliaments. If the Romans had gone to
the Americas they wouldn’t have practiced genocide against the natives, as we
did. That wasn’t the Roman way. They’d have assimilated, acculturated, built
their aqueducts and bathhouses and roads, the apparatus of their civilizing
system. The indigenous nations, in North
and South America, would have survived as new Roman provinces. It would have a richer world, maybe more
advanced in some ways.”
“But no
Declaration of Independence. And no
abolition of slavery, either.” (pg.
416)
“Honesty doesn’t excuse
ignorance. But it helps.” (pg. 504)
For
all its lofty aspirations, Coalescent
doesn’t quite …um… coalesce into a smooth,
seamless story. First and foremost, the pacing
is uneven. The initial storyline,
George’s search for his sister, moves much too slow, and takes a hundred+ page
sabbatical in the middle of the book while waiting for the Lucia thread to
catch up. The Regina storyline ends
early – well, she had to die sometime – and is sustained only by some sparse, interesting,
but ultimately unrelated temporal updates about the Order’s activities. And the futuristic plotline is woefully short, sparsely developed, and seems to exist
only to give a glimpse of the sequels.
To boot,
there simply isn’t much Science Fiction here, and those who read Stephen Baxter
novels for that genre are going to be disappointed. OTOH, those, like me, whose favorite Baxter
book is Evolution (reviewed here) will
find one or more story threads in this book to be quite interesting.
These
would be some serious drawbacks, if it were not for Stephen Baxter being one
heckuva an accomplished writer. Hey, he kept
me interested in the Drama storyline, and that’s not a genre that I'm particularly fond of.
Overall, I found Coalescent to be a
good, but not great effort by Baxter.
This may change depending of how well I like the sequel, Exultant, which sits within my Kindle, waiting to be
read.
8 Stars. Add
½ star if the phrase “Kuiper Belt Anomaly”
piques your science-fiction interest. I
have a feeling it plays an integral part in the rest of the books in this
series.
