Light by M John Harrison

This is one of the trickiest books I’ve read in a long time and I struggled to understand it. However I was utterly compelled to keep going with it. It’s a science fiction novel in three strands. In the twentieth century we have Michael Kearney, a physicist who is investigating singularity (which I have no idea about) and his ex wife Anna. Hundreds of years in the future we have two people who are living on planets that are part of the Kefahuchi Tract, which is a singularity. I looked this up and found this: ‘In the center of a black hole is a gravitational singularity, a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space, where density and gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.’ First we have Ed Chianese, a ‘twink’ ie someone who lives their lives in a virtual reality tank, who was once an ace space ‘surfer’ and then there is Seria Mau who is a female who allowed her body to be fused with her spaceship and has become a freelance assassin. Kearney is on the run from a creature called the Shrander which he believes he can only keep at bay if he murders women. Ed is deeply in debt and on the run from his creditors until he is recruited to join a circus as a soothsayer. Seria is trying to find the meaning of a box that she has obtained. So the story moves from one strand to the other. Surprisingly, although I spent a lot of time frustrated because I couldn’t understand the science behind what was happening, it was the detail – the mathematics (an entity which runs the ship) and shadow operators, and cultivars and the ‘new men’ with their gangly limbs and red hair and the genetically engineered rickshaw girls and the ‘tailor’ who is a genetic engineer and all the other wonderful invented creatures, and the development of the characters - that make this such compelling reading. I think the more you read this book the more you get out of it. There are threads of imagery that run through it, and once you are confident enough to forget to worry about the science, then you can immerse yourself in this fabulous detail and also in the wonderful imagery on Harrison’s writing. And in the end, all is explained – and though I wasn’t sure what that explanation entirely meant, a book as rich as this has left me thinking about all its other aspects instead