Overhead the sky was an immense funnel of sapphire and purple, fantasticated whorls of coral cloud marking the descent of the sun like baroque vapour trails.”īy the end, Shakespeare’s Caliban has defeated Prospero and the tempest is free to cascade water back into the corpse of London, washing away the stain of Strangman’s ‘Lord of the Flies’. “The blood and copper bronzes of the afternoon giving way to deep violets and indigo. It is rich, eloquent, bold, erudite… it is from a time where stories showed you what the world looked like, where the action was secondary to the belief. The powerful descriptive narrative is what holds the isolationist science-fiction theme of this novel up. “Beautiful and serene from his balcony a few minutes earlier, Kerans realised that the lagoon was nothing more than a garbage-filled swamp.” With a nightmare comes pain and death, and it is this that Strangman brings as he seeks to “drown Neptune in an even more magical and potent sea.”
A leader ruling through both voodoo-istic charisma and a psychotic understanding of leadership through fear, his draining of the lagoon allows the group to investigate the sewer that is London all the while fighting both inner demons and the caiman predators. It is a drama that is breathed life by the appearance of the Dr No-esque figure of Strangman, a man on the verge of his own insanity with his band of ‘pirates’. Once he has decided not to join Riggs, who has been ordered to leave their solitary scientific existence, he stays with his casual partner, Beatrice Dahl whilst she becomes “a mad queen in a horror drama”. His decision to stay is linked to a uterine dream-state that is best explained by the concept of DNA memories, dormant but increasingly active in a human cerebral cortex forced to respond to the massive change in climate. The story is centred on the biologist, Kerans, who chooses to stay in the lagoon that is a London swamped under rising sea levels on an Earth that is sixty of more degrees hotter than the temperate environment of the modern reader. It is an orgiastic feast of adjectives that lend to the chronic introversion of the main characters. The prose style is symptomatic of the earlier novels of Eric Ambler, the descriptive passages dig further back into the brilliance of Jules Verne. It is a novel where every word seeks to counter the titular sea where the “colossal fireball” that is the sun makes certain that “the water would seem to burn”. This science fiction novel may be over fifty years old but it retains its neurotic potency even today with the descent into archeo-psychic madness of its few protagonists during fateful months in the Triassic neo-world of a submerged London.
0 kommentar(er)
