Paul Park

Right, then, the final volume in Park's quartet about Greater Roumania. Park has been compared to a lot of other writers over the course of these four books, but one other springs to mind: Michael Swanwick, specifically his anti-pastoral fairy tale, The Iron Dragon's Daughter. These stories share a common approach to fantasy in which they refuse to deliver or indulge in the traditional consolations of the fantasy genre. So when Miranda turns out to be a Princess in a magical world where she show more wields a terrifying magical power and has friends and allies and dangerous enemies, none of these things count as a blessing. Her home is destroyed, revealed as a magical illusion then ripped away, taking her adoptive parents with her. Her royal blood marks her out not as a figure of real power and influence but at best a ragged guerilla figurehead, or a political chess-piece in a morally and politically complex world in the throes of burgeoning modernity where royalty is rapidly becoming an empty symbol of the past.

Her powers work best in the Hidden World where she is the White Tyger, but even this is mostly the power to kill and destroy dispassionately, and as she realises herself, killing a few bad people here and there solves very few of the larger problems her country is confronted with. Her friends are altered and changed in profound and subtle ways. Her allies are powerless, superstitious gypsies or secretive, untrustworthy, jealous old women with ambiguous agendas. Her enemies include everyone powerful enough to damage or destroy her country. There is no clear path or plan for her to follow, no easy way to make things better and save her home or her friends. She makes many mistakes at terrible costs. This is not the rousing tale of a plucky modern princess rallying the peasants of a Ruritanian backwoods against an evil pretender to the throne.

In The Hidden World her mistake is to have the tourmaline stolen by the ghost of the mad baroness, stranding Miranda in the hidden world and allowing the baroness to possess bodies, including hers, in the real world. Dreadful, increasingly mechanised trench warfare rages on the border against the Turks and the Russians and a madman and murderer rules in Budapest. Is there anything she can do to save herself, her friends and her country? Answers do not come easy, and the ending is sad, lonely and uncertain, but concludes the quartet in a deeply satisfying manner. The four books mark a brave, thoughtful, beautiful addition to the fantasy canon and I recommend them unreservedly. show less

I came to Paul Park's Celestis after reading his more recent Roumania series. Although Roumania is portal fantasy and Celestis is exoplanetary science fiction, they share a great deal in style and content--and neither sits placidly within its genre.

Park has clearly worked out a terrestrial future for background to this book, but Celestis is the site of the tale, and Earth is far away. Readers get little exposure to it, except via fragmentary memories and remarks of the diplomat Simon, who is show more part of the most recent (and possibly last) cohort of terrestrial emigrants. There is a subjugated species of indigenous humanoids, and another native race acknowledged to be more intelligent than humans but now largely exterminated after generations of human settlement and conflict.

Reviewers are generally quick to remark the political dimensions of this novel, but I think it is far more than a parable of colonialist decline. The religious features are conspicuous, with Christianity figuring notably in the cultivated mentality of the semi-protagonist Katharine, who is an assimilated aboriginal. (I suspect that her name is deliberately spelled to evoke "Cathar" i.e. Albigensian heresy.) The priest Martin Cohen (another allusive moniker) is a key character, if not exactly an admirable one. The differences in the native sensorium create an explicit multiplication of experiential worlds connected by symbols.

Despite its large themes, the book's action takes place on a very personal level. There is a fair amount of sex and violence, all of it suitably disturbing and difficult. Almost every interaction is fraught with misunderstanding, much of it willful. I was less than twenty pages from the end, and I said to myself, "This can't end well." Indeed, while a screen adaptation might superficially present the final tableau as "happy," any attentive reader should be left with a profound uneasiness. Questions of "fact" about events in the story may prove insoluble, not least because of irreconcilable perspectives, and the ending throws this feature into almost painful relief. show less

Park has had an interesting and varied career. He debuted with a complex sf trilogy set on a world with extremely long seasons and with a somewhat meandering plot. His next novel was postcolonial science fiction, and remains one of my favourite genre novels. He then wrote a pair of Biblical fantasies, followed by a straight-up, but very literary, portal fantasy set in a Romanian empire. Although Park moves effortlessly between fantasy and science fiction, he has always worked at the literary show more end of both genres. But there has, in recent years, come an increasing narrative playfulness apparent in his fiction. His last novel was, among other things, about the Forgotten Realms novel he wrote under a pseudonym, the history of his family, an art installation he wrote a text for, and, in part, his writing career. A City Made of Words is more of the same. It’s a collection of short stories, most previously published, and an “interview”, and it’s more of the meta-fiction Park has been writing of late. He is one of my favourite writers, and has been for many years, and while for some that – being a favourite writer – means a consistent delivery of exactly the same stuff the reader likes, for me Park is a favourite writer because he is forever changing what he produces. The meta-fiction is not just a progression from earlier works, it’s built on earlier works and it’s extremely cleverly done. I suspect my opinion will be shared by few people but I consider Paul Park one of the best US science fiction writers currently being published. show less

The final volume of four in Paul Park's Roumania series affords many outcomes and resolutions, but readers of the earlier books will not be surprised that it avoids a tidy ending. My Other Reader remarked my unusual facial expression while I was reading the antepenultimate chapter "The Exorcism," and I guess I really did find it sort of horrifying. A lot of characters die in these books, but given the nature of the magic here, their deaths in no way remove them as agents from the continuing show more story. Where a traditional fantasy might have its protagonist's aims clarified and streamlined over the course of its telling, this one just becomes more crowded with possible motivations and relationships.

As in what has come before, the characters here are highly imperfect, alluring, and surprising. Fascist strongman Victor Bocu steps into the limelight as a villain, and Chloe Adira with her household complicates Peter's story. The setting remains original and provocative. Its manifold European war draws on more advanced African technologies. The alchemical legacies of the conjurors Newton and Kepler guide the coven attempting to engineer national and international destinies.

The arc of the four books seems to be something like this: In A Princess of Roumania the three apparent teenagers are displaced from somewhere like our Massachusetts into the "real" world where Roumania is. In The Tourmaline, their "real" adult personalities are ascendant, and they become embroiled in the political and sorcerous intrigues of Roumania itself. In The White Tyger they acquire more confidence and begin to integrate their Masachusetts memories with their resumed life histories in Roumania, and that integration reaches its fruition in The Hidden World. The completion of the arc is very remote from a happily-ever-after, and the aims of these books clearly differ from most of what dresses as fantasy literature. show less