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Passarola Rising
by Azhar Abidi
(Viking, CAN$29.00, 244 pages; hardcover, published in February 2006.)
 For
centuries before humanity successfully took the skies, visionaries of
many stripes imagined, designed, and sometimes even built flying machines.
One such dreamer was Father Bartolomeu Lourenço. In 1709, 73
years before the Montgolfier hot-air balloon debuted, he demonstrated
his flying machine, a sort of hybrid glider/balloon (the exact design
is lost to history), for the king of Portugal. Alas, his invention drew
the censorious attention of the Inquisition. Bartolomeu fled to Spain,
where he died several years later, never to resume his experiments with
flight.
That's history. But what if Bartolomeu had pursued his dreams under
the king's protection?
Azhar Abidi, in his first novel, Passarola Rising, explores
that alternate-history scenario.
Abidi's novel is engagingly narrated by Bartolomeu's younger brother,
Alexandre, who worships his brilliant older sibling and dedicates his
life to accompanying him in his larger-than-life adventures. Even in
this parallel history, the Inquisition eventually targets Bartolomeu;
he escapes with the aid of his airship, the Passarola.
Drawing on the fantastic voyage genre popularized by Jules Verne, Abidi
creates a wonderful and poignant adventure story. The brothers explore
the Earth aboard the Passarola, and Abidi evocatively portrays the eighteenth
century as a vista of alien landscapes -- worlds lost to history, or
in the process of being lost.
The brothers' close bond anchors this beautiful novel of exploration,
history, politics, wonder, and speculation, but what really makes it
soar is its celebration of the power of imagination.
Originally published, in slightly different form, in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 18 March 2006.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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