Midnight Lamp

It’s the end of the world. The environment is crashing, the markets are in freefall, populations are on the move, social disorder and anarchy are breaking out all over. Who do you want in charge? Who’ll ride in to save the day? Politicians? Action heroes? Or rock stars? Rock stars? Good answer. Welcome to the world of Dissolution Summer. The United Kingdom has broken apart and Europe is spiralling into chaos. In Bold As Love, an unlikely Triumvirate of activist rock stars emerged to shepherd England through a series off all-too plausible crises: waif-like witch Fiorinda, wild-boy punk coder Sage ‘Aoxomoxoa’ Pender and dictator-in-waiting Ax Preston. In Castles Made of Sand, our three heroes confront the new realities of their show more own unorthodox relationship and a world where technological advance and magic have become intermingled.
The current volume sees the trio, ousted from power, bumming and birdwatching on a beach in Mexico, recovering from their traumatic battle with Fiorinda’s appalling father, Rufus O’Niall. Sought out at the behest of the President, they are brought to Hollywood under the pretext of helping promote a film recounting their exploits in England. In reality, the three are hunting for the emergent ‘Fat Boy,’ a human magical weapon powered by an unholy union of scientific research into human fusion consciousness and radical Celtic eco-warriors who practice human sacrifice. Fiorinda is the key to finding the magician, but her fragile psyche is giving way to full-blown schizophrenia, a condition that could lead her straight into the clutches of their enemies.
It’s odd that something with a premise that sounds like a rather cuddly fantasy adventure thriller with heroes straight out of a Hanna Barbra cartoon – magic rock stars team up to fight evil, crime! With lovable cartoon animal! - should succeed so well in being real. First of all, any vestige of wish-fulfilment has been ruthlessly burned away. Sure, in one sense it’s about flamboyant pop-stars wielding music, magic and science to save the world, but in another way it’s nothing like that at all. The world is never saved. Dictator Ax negotiates half-measures, compromises and sellouts and still barely manages to hold things together. Magic, though rare, is hated and feared for excellent reasons. Very often, the only thing that remains constant is their music. Jones keeps her world fully grounded in science, managing to incorporate magic as a function of the world’s breakdown into irrational conflict and superstition. There are no easy answers or straightforward solutions, just tiny, incremental bits of good in the face of a massive landslide of bad. It helps enormously that Jones is an incredibly good writer, who never lets melodrama infect her style or language. She dissects the group dynamics of her three protagonists with the same cool, level tone of voice she uses to depict an assault on a group of Celtic fringe lunatics barricaded in a ghost town.
With two more books to go, this series has gone from compelling to riveting to incandescent. Fiorinda, Sage and Ax are real enough to step off the page, so much so, in fact, that in the first book it’s difficult to keep track of the large cast of supporting characters. Their conflicts, dilemmas and suffering become our own, as do their joys and epiphanies. The grim realities of a future where all our barricades finally gave way is immediate and, frankly, terrifying. We’d better pray that Ax, Fiorinda and Sage are there to save us. Otherwise we’ll just have to bloody well do it ourselves. show less

A particularly enjoyable Gwyneth Jones book - her books are always intelligent and thought-provoking, but not necessarily a comfortable read. However this, while challenging in many respects, had me loving her central characters immediately, and following their story was a pleasure. Now I need to go back and read the first two books in the series, to understand their backstory properly!

The one I like least of the five linked books - but it comes good at the end, where Fiorinda's captive-princess bit turns out to have been a bit more complicated than that, and the hidden-villain turns out to be the person I wasn't expecting first time round (though I did remember who it was on re-read; still not obviously signalled in advance). I think it's partly the California setting I like less than the grimy, gritty England of the other books - an England in turmoil economic and social, with new ways of being and living being invented all around.