Blue Book Balloon reviews "Lake of Darkness"

 

In Lake of Darkness, what goes wrong is slightly mysterious. It may be a threat from an Ancient Evil which meddling scientists have unleashed from its prison (cue a great deal of speculation about who or what would be capable of constructing this prison and the paradoxes it builds into the universe). Or it may be that the evil has been loose and ac time for aeons. Or it may be that both things are true, with the evil (possibly not the right term, really) representing a part of humanity that the Utopia has suppressed. We are reminded that there are laws of balance and conservation in the Universe and that therefore, at least in the long run, certain things may be impossible - such as firewalling off areas of experience and motivation. Or, putting it another way, some things may be certain, such as human traits and behaviours surviving.

As presented to the reader, this paradox is framed in terms of the event horizon of a black hole. A couple of futuristic ships arrive, capable of FTL travel, to investigate black hole QV Tel but madness and obsession will soon destroy their crews. There is a great deal of debate, both among the characters of this novel and from the narrator (or narrators - the way the book represents how it is being told is twisty, reminding me of Tolkien in its insistence that it is being translated - but from what and to what and by whom is unclear) about whether it might be possible to communicate with whatever life might exist within a black hole. This apparently abstract point of physics, indeed, motivates characters to extremes, up to and beyond murder. (I enjoyed the way in which Roberts uses his apparently consensual society to show an individual with aberrant views can impose this on the wider culture - the grounding in consensus meaning that there are no real checks in place. It all reminded me of a version of social media gone septic. Sorry, gone even more septic).

This question engages real, unresolved issues of physics but it also, I think, represents the gist of the book. The existence of black holes poses a puzzle whose solution allows for real choices in the design of the universe - it's left deliberately uncertain whether it is this fact that drives a succession of characters in this story to defy, indeed trample, the norms of their civilisation, or whether they have indeed been affected by some kind of serial taint that derives from the black hole itself and is being communicated through society, thereby posing a deep contradiction.

This is a novel of ideas, that debate about the nature of reality coming over as more solid that the rather insipid characters who fail to face up to its consequences. And, just to be clear, by "insipid" I don't mean these are badly or weakly drawn characters, I think Roberts depicts them just as he intends to, they are insipid members of an insipid society which has forgotten things about itself that it ought to to have help on to.

Overall, a riveting and strange book, alive with alternatives and a haunting sense of the past and the future debating with each other.

The full review is here.