A Son of the Rock

riverrun, 2023, 315 p.

Allan’s writing has always been idiosyncratic, never straightforward. While skirting the borders of Science Fiction, though absolutely acknowledging the genre’s existence, often tipping over into Fantasy, there has usually been something that sets it apart. It has never quite been full-on SF. Perhaps this is as it should be. Her writing has all the qualities the reader of literary fiction would expect and any writer would want to broaden her possible readership. So much the better then from that point of view if any Science-Fictional allusion can be taken as just that, or a manifestation of a character’s state of mind.

Such is the case here. Frank Landau imagines the Earth is engaged in an interstellar war and he is in training to be a supersoldier in that war. A friend of his is convinced that the next war will be fought against aliens, single-celled organisms and viral pathogens, biological contaminants that have been introduced into Earth’s eco-system without our realising. Which might already be here. Frank is also an enthusiast for music, especially of Bach. Indeed a fair bit of the book is given up to considerations of the merits of various recordings of differing, not necessarily classical, musical pieces – not a feature of your average SF novel it has to be said.

To give some flavour of these musings on music consider this, “I don’t think he (Bach) discovered tonality. I think tonality discovered him. Either that or he was given it. Tonality is like code – a complex programme that is all the more ingenious because it’s universally applicable. Everyone understands tonal counterpoint the moment they hear it. It’s as if the human brain is hard-wired to receive it.”

But the novel is more complicated than the above suggests. Of course it is. It’s by Nina Allan.

Frank may be the book’s driving force but the main narrative is actually concerned with Private Investigator Robin’s search for him after she is contracted to do so by his girl-friend Rachel Gabon when he disappears after meeting up in The Netherlands with a group known as LAvventura, a group whose obsession is The Tower, a 1950s SF novel as by John C Sylvester.

This book, no more than a novella really, is given us in its entirety as one of Conquest’s twelve sections, two others of which constitute a,) a review of The Tower by one Edmond De Groote, a LAvventura luminary, and b,) another review (by De Groote’s acquaintance, Jeanne-Marie Vanderlien,) of a concert at the Concertgebouw. Each of these is of course written in a different register to the rest of Conquest and each is entirely complete in itself. I note here that any dialogue in Conquest is not punctuated as such.

The plot of The Tower is important to Frank’s world view. In the future, Earth has won a gruelling war against an extraterrestrial civilisation. As a monument to human resilience and his own awesomeness, an egotistical billionaire plans to build an enormous residential tower out of a unique kind of rock mined from the alien homeworld. The rock is black and gives off a curious warmth. But what if it is also alive?

Which is fine – and arguably necessary to Allan’s creation. My problem with it is that it doesn’t actually read like a 1950s SF novella. But I suspect it’s not meant to.

LAvventura take The Tower to be an accurate prophecy of an actual forthcoming war among the stars. This is, of course, known to terrestrial governments, who have developed the secret supersoldier programme to deal with it and are probably quietly eliminating people who find out too much.

Robin’s search for Frank takes her to Scarborough to research the of a journalist who’d contacted Frank’s brother Michael about his disappearance but who died the day after the interview. There she discovers Edmund de Groote’s involvement with Frank.

There is a Scottish flavour to the book too. Ex-cop Robin’s memories of the speech of her former Chief Inspector Alec Dunbar, a man with a past to hide, and Robin’s trip to Tain, in Ross-shire, where the train’s journey through the landscape is described.

Robin has the perception that “my entire career has been focused on the dividing line between delusion and genius, which a lot of the time is barely a line at all,” and at one point begins “thinking about a story in which a private detective sets out to discover the truth behind the disappearance of a man who believes Earth stands on the brink of an interstellar war. I ask myself what might happen if the detective becomes convinced the war is real,” which prompts thoughts that maybe the book is about to disappear up its own fundament.

Then a late twist reveals Robin’s heretofore obscure and unsuspected parentage – this is perhaps another elaboration too far – before we are presented with alternative endings.

Robin is an engaging protagonist and Conquest is an accomplished and exceedingly well-written book with many strings to its bow. But is it hedging its bets?

Pedant’s corner:- cul-de-sacs (culs de sac,) “Nunc Dimitis” (Nunc Dimittis.) “De Groote” (Okay, it was the beginning of a sentence but the man’s surname was de Groote, not De Groote.)