Saturday, 6th of November, 2004

Hoo boy, it's been a long time since I read this one. I knew at the time that I should've written the article right then, but I wasn't allowed to publish the review yet, so I left it.
A starting gesture that seems appropriate, anyway: My man at Allen & Unwin, who distribute Orion and thus Gollancz in Australia, called it a "corker" when he passed it on to me, and oh how right he was!

Jon Courtenay Grimwood started off writing ultra-dark and violent cyberpunk in a series that culminated with redRobe and reMix (briefly reviewed here). He really began to turn into an Important Writer, though, with the Arabesk series (review of the final one here), and a large portion of Stamping Butterflies shares their North African setting. However, Stamping Butterflies is really a different beast altogether from his earlier works, and ought by rights to elevate him to, let's say, Really Important Writer status. It's a tour de force, albeit not quite perfect.

In the Arabesks, each novel's main strand was complemented by a an italicised flashback strand, which slowly revealed important information relevant to the main strand. Stamping Butterflies is made up of at least five separate strands, some sharing characters, each set at different times, and there's a puzzle regarding whether they're even each in the same alternate history or not. For Stamping Butterflies isn't so much an alternate history as a very strange commentary on alternate histories, asking (if never quite explaining) how the future could affect the past.
The alternate history aspect of his previous series was the one thing I was never quite convinced by: he has a habit of including well-known brand names in worlds where the Napoleonic empire continued into the 20th century, or World War I never happened. That just doesn't work, and I find it unsettling. It's odd, then, that the (perhaps) unresolved questions in this novel regarding changing history don't bother me that much.

Grimwood's major talent for me is in character and setting, and it's impressively on show here. There's a beautifully affecting story about the only two punk kids in 1970's Marrakech, living their lives in poverty and oppression. Jake Razor, English punk rocker, and Celia, manager of his band Razor's Edge, come to Marrakech and perhaps precipitate, or perhaps just stumble into, a chain of events that turns their lives upside-down.
The connections between the strands are subtle and multifarious: Meanwhile the Emperor of the 2023 worlds sits and waits for his assassin to arrive, and we read his story of growing up in poverty on Razor's Edge, a habitat that languishes outside the Emperor's worlds… What's in a name?
In the "present day" (near enough), an Arab tramp heads from Paris back to Marrakech where the Darkness in his head causes him to make a fumbling attempt to assassinate the President of the USA (who turns out to be well-educated and rather wise). He is eventually taken into custody and named "Prisoner Zero", and seems to be dreaming of a young Emperor in his Forbidden Citadel, far in the future, waiting for his own assassin. Or his the Emperor dreaming of him?
Somewhere else, a young Chinese man becomes an officer and embarks on the first interstellar space journey – the Chinese getting there before the rest of the world in this timeline. But somewhere, something goes wrong.

It's exciting reading Grimwood doing revisionist near-hard-sf space opera, but what fuels the novel is the beautifully empathetic characterisation. Each of the above characters are drawn with sympathy – indeed, only a few true villains are not given some viewpoint time. So what of the overarching conceit – that the future and the past are linked, and the dreams of a sad, lonely Emperor in his Forbidden City on a mysterious artefact somewhere in outer space can change the future? I'm just not sure. I thought I was reading quite carefully, but I didn't quite end up working out what happened. The thing is, I just couldn't quite work out whether all other the strands of the book were in the past of the future strand, or around the corner in the next universe along. Where, in other words, is the point where the past changes? Near the end, Grimwood plays a strange trick. The two young punk kids in Marrakech have a touching love story that ends in heartbreaking tragedy due to the political and historical pressures that Grimwood is so deft with. But in the last chapter, we see them again, walking off hand in hand. It's a bittersweet scene that sums up Grimwood's genius, and you'll have to read the book in order to see what he's doing.
Me, I'll be re-reading this one sooner than usual, to see if I can make all the pieces hang together perfectly.

As an epilogue, I can't conclude this review without a reference to M John Harrison's Light. Gollancz have chosen to mark each strand with a small icon at the top of each chapter, similarly to Light. Harrison's novel also loops back from future to past, although Light is a closed loop. But I feel there are more parallels to be drawn between these two novels, and I do feel that Grimwood's novel is entirely deserving of being juxtaposed with that recent masterpiece. Both books hinge on their characterisation and setting, and both use just enough cutting-edge science to make them more Al Reynolds than [insert-non-hard-sf-writer-here].
Most of all, both books finish with everything resolved, yet at the same time leaving a lingering sense of mystery – perhaps meta-mystery. And if that's not art, I don't know what is.

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