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Paradox: Book 1 of the Nulapeiron Sequence
by Paradox: Book 1 of the Nulapeiron Sequence
by John Meaney
(1st US edition: Pyr, 406 pages, hardback, $25.00, published March
2005. First published in the UK, 2000.)
Review by John Toon
.jpg) Disaster
befalls market stallholder's son Tom Corcorigan early in his life. Gerard
d'Ovraison, a dignitary passing through his lower-level ghetto, takes
a liking to his mother and carries her away; his father soon dies broken-hearted.
At the same time Tom is given a data-crystal by a fugitive woman who
turns out to be a Pilot, an outlawed band of space travellers. She's
later shot while fleeing the militia, and Tom is left to unlock the
data-crystal's secrets. He resolves to hunt d'Ovraison up through the
strata of the subterranean world of Nulapeiron and make him pay for
destroying the Corcorigan household, a mission in which the data-crystal
will play a crucial part. But there's a catch: d'Ovraison is an Oracle,
a seer of the future and a member of the ruling class, and he's already
foreseen a leisurely old age and painless death for himself. Even if
Tom can somehow cheat destiny, killing d'Ovraison and defying his prophecy
will mean the overtoppling of a social order built on people's secure
belief in the Oracles.
There's something about Paradox that puts me in mind of the
Bonzo Dog Band's song "Bad Blood", as one-armed amputee Tom Corcorigan
treks up through the strata of Nulapeiron in search of the no-good,
two-bit Oracle who ruined his life. "I could've been a doctor, or an
architect!" wails Bonzo Dog's hero when his quest is over. Tom's made
a damn sight more of his life, becoming a maths whiz, a one-handed martial
arts master, a Lord and the reluctant brains behind a revolution in
his pursuit of d'Ovraison; and yet at the end, even though he's achieved
so much, there's still the strange sense that it's all slipped away
from him and he's screwed up his life in the name of revenge.
In fact, I couldn't help but feel that much of Tom's greatness was
thrust upon him, and that he brought a lot of his woes on himself. His
social (and literal) climbing serves a purpose, to bring him closer
to d'Ovraison, and the fact that it raises him from slum nobody to court
servant to Lord along the way seems entirely incidental -- particularly
the transition to court servant, which occurs at Tom's trial in a way
that I found highly unconvincing. "D'you know, what we really need around
the demesne is a one-armed ex-criminal manservant. I sentence this young
man to check in with my housekeeper, just as soon as his arm's been
cut off."
On the bringing-his-woes-on-himself side of things, I found it extraordinary
that he didn't protest his wrongful conviction for theft, given the
harsh penalty involved. It seems like too forced a way of showing us
how gosh-darned stoic our hero is. Similarly, when he rises to the rank
of Lord, Tom refuses to have his arm grown back surgically and continues
to keep the injury that marks him out (wrongly!) as a criminal, because
he's so gosh-darned stoic. Yes, it's interesting to have a one-armed
hero, and a one-armed action hero at that, but it strikes me as a little
gratuitous that he should remain one-armed when some simple surgery
and the return of his left hand would make it a damn sight easier for
him to achieve his revenge (two-handed climbing's somewhat easier than
one-handed, and the illegal data-crystal is hidden in a pendant that
has to be opened with a left-handed gesture). Surely nobody's that single-minded?
While I'm dwelling on the negative, it's not clear to me what purpose
the Karyn's Tale part of the book serves. I mean, it's all well and
good to get some background on the Pilots, but it doesn't seem to affect
the main body of the novel at all -- just provides contrasting interludes
to Tom's story. It feels like a short story or a novella that's been
cut up and used to bulk out the novel. Perhaps it'll become more significant
in the second and/or third books in the series.
So, Paradox has its faults. But it also has some fantastic prose,
packed tight with short, punchy sentences and well-described action.
It has three-dimensional characters a-plenty, and complex personal dilemmas
for Tom. It's intelligent in a gripping sort of way, and it doesn't
infodump. There's a fair amount of advanced maths discussed in this
book, and although much of it went straight over my head I didn't really
mind, because the story kept pulling me along all the same. It's a story
I'd be quite prepared to read more of.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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