PURGATORY MOUNT
Will peak your interest
No relation to Peggy – it’s the new book by Adam Roberts.
RELEASED 4 FEBRUARY
336 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Adam Roberts
Publisher Gollancz
Within genre fiction especially, there are writers who refine the same book for most of their careers. This should not be read as a criticism, but as a way of pointing out how other novelists prefer to mix things up, even to write wildly different books.
Adam Roberts falls into the latter category. Over the past decade, he’s turned his hand to everything from The Black Prince, based on an outline by Anthony Burgess, to the philosophical SF of The Thing Itself, to cinemainspired, noirish cyberpunk.
There is, however, one strong link between these books: Roberts hangs his novels on strong central ideas. You’d be tempted to say “high concept”, if that didn’t bring forth the notion of Michael Bay making single-line movie pitches. That would be unfair because, whereas Hollywood largely worries about confusing audiences, Roberts’s novels are often unconventionally structured.
Purgatory Mount, for all it riffs on the structure of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, is a case in point. It begins aboard a starship headed for the uninhabited planet V538 Aurigae, where a giant conical mountain reaches high above the atmosphere. Who could have built such a structure, which calls to mind the mountain in Dante’s epic poem? For the five-strong crew, this is a mystery worth travelling a century to investigate, especially as each is a godlike creature able to experience time at different rates – so that 100 years is neither here nor there. It’s a hard SF scenario that Roberts brings vividly to life – which is no mean feat in itself.
Having introduced this narrative, Roberts then abandons it until the final section of the novel. Instead, having fun with the recent vogue for end-times fiction, he shows us a near-future USA in a state of civilisational collapse, where a neurotoxin has left many people reliant on smartphones to augment their memories.
Ottoline Barragao hasn’t known any other kind of life, so she acts as kids do: making the best of things by playing out, hanging about and, like you do, building a private digital network with her mates. It’s this network that will land Barragao and co in trouble, as it attracts the interest of different groups that will go to extreme lengths to penetrate it.
The two stories are linked, but Roberts prefers within the novel itself not to make this explicit. Rather, it has an afterword where he breaks the fourth wall to dole out some reassuring smidgeons of plot information. Readers of early drafts of Purgatory Mount, he reveals, worried the connection between the novel’s two narratives wasn’t clear enough.
As a reader, this authorial intervention is helpful, but was Roberts’s decision to leave it until the last wise? Yes: principally because Purgatory Mount is a science fiction novel that aspires to do many of the things we associate with literary fiction – and succeeds in doing them quite brilliantly, yet without sacrificing the excitement and narrative drive of genre.
As Roberts also notes in his afterword, this is a novel that explores primal sin, atonement, memory and the relationship between parents and children. To that, as we learn how the starship isn’t just populated by gods but “pygs” with lives far closer to those of contemporary humankind, we might also add that it’s about responsibility and the use of power. Were it less oblique, Purgatory Mount would risk being too obvious and far, far less haunting.
In early drafts, the crew were named after the five wizards of Middle-earth… but a rights situation forced a change.
It’s about responsibility and the use of power