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Book Review: Lagoonfire
Mar. 5th, 2021 02:06 pmI’ve been awaiting Francesca Forrest’s Lagoonfire, the sequel to The Inconvenient God, with an eagerness that might have sunk a lesser work; but Lagoonfire rose handily to the occasion.
There are two aspects of Lagoonfire (and, more widely, the world of the Polity) that I particularly like. The first is what you might call the soft-focus dystopian aspect of the Polity. The more we learn about the Polity, the sketchier it seems, but at the same time, we don’t quite know just how deep that sketchiness goes. When Sweeting runs afoul of Civil Order and ends up in an interrogation, the reader is just as uncertain as Sweeting herself. Just how dangerous is this conversation? Is Sweeting in danger of being sent to the gulag for the next twenty years, or is she just going to get a stern talking-to?
I particularly enjoyed it when Sweeting and her interrogator start throwing dueling Thought Orthodoxy maxims at each other. Clearly the point of anything called “Thought Orthodoxy” is to uphold the power structure, yet it’s clear that a maxim that supports the government in one context can undermine it in another. It’s a lovely example of the slipperiness of language - the human ability to repeat the same sentence so that it means totally different things.
This portrayal of the Polity is so effective because it’s got so much more going on than just oppression. The country feels rich and lived in and full of regular human beings, who do things like go to art exhibits and sell food at roadside kiosks and gather in the park to drink fruit juices with their friends, who happen to be previously decommissioned deities.
So maybe regular is not quite the right word in that particular case.
The deities in this world are my other favorite thing about this story. After meeting a deity on the verge of being decommissioned in The Inconvenient God, I loved getting the chance to meet some actual decommissioned deities in this story, and I loved the fact that in some ways they do just feel like regular elderly people (meeting in the park, ragging on each other other a board game)... but they are also clearly very, very old, much older than even the oldest elderly human could be. Even about the ones who are really and truly decommissioned and have no unusual powers anymore, a sense of the numinous lingers.
And, of course, not all of the gods have been decommissioned quite as well as they should have been - hence the story.
There are two aspects of Lagoonfire (and, more widely, the world of the Polity) that I particularly like. The first is what you might call the soft-focus dystopian aspect of the Polity. The more we learn about the Polity, the sketchier it seems, but at the same time, we don’t quite know just how deep that sketchiness goes. When Sweeting runs afoul of Civil Order and ends up in an interrogation, the reader is just as uncertain as Sweeting herself. Just how dangerous is this conversation? Is Sweeting in danger of being sent to the gulag for the next twenty years, or is she just going to get a stern talking-to?
I particularly enjoyed it when Sweeting and her interrogator start throwing dueling Thought Orthodoxy maxims at each other. Clearly the point of anything called “Thought Orthodoxy” is to uphold the power structure, yet it’s clear that a maxim that supports the government in one context can undermine it in another. It’s a lovely example of the slipperiness of language - the human ability to repeat the same sentence so that it means totally different things.
This portrayal of the Polity is so effective because it’s got so much more going on than just oppression. The country feels rich and lived in and full of regular human beings, who do things like go to art exhibits and sell food at roadside kiosks and gather in the park to drink fruit juices with their friends, who happen to be previously decommissioned deities.
So maybe regular is not quite the right word in that particular case.
The deities in this world are my other favorite thing about this story. After meeting a deity on the verge of being decommissioned in The Inconvenient God, I loved getting the chance to meet some actual decommissioned deities in this story, and I loved the fact that in some ways they do just feel like regular elderly people (meeting in the park, ragging on each other other a board game)... but they are also clearly very, very old, much older than even the oldest elderly human could be. Even about the ones who are really and truly decommissioned and have no unusual powers anymore, a sense of the numinous lingers.
And, of course, not all of the gods have been decommissioned quite as well as they should have been - hence the story.
