Subject: Postview: "Secret Harmonies" by Paul J McAuley

From: [email-masked] (p-m agapow)
Date: 15 Oct 1998 10:10:44 -0400

"Secret Harmonies" by Paul J McAuley
		A Postview, copyright 1998 P-M Agapow

Elysium is a lush and welcoming world, colonised by a steady stream of
settlers via STL starships from Earth.  But there are tensions: the
original colonists hold the reins of power, throttling back the
expansionist designs of the newer arrivals.  The behaviour of the
primitive natives hints at unseen powers.  Secret alliances jostle the
population.  Then without warning, the flow of colonists stops and
civilisation starts to break down ...

I'll recommend anything by Paul J McAuley - not everything he writes is
great, but it is always entertaining and very readable.  "Secret
Harmonies" left me fairly ambivalent however.  This is not because it's a
bad book, but because it does not quite achieve what it sets out to do.

A point one might make about McAuley's previous novels is that they tend
to be of the Big Flashy Idea variety: daVinci kickstarts the Industrial
Revolution ("Pasquales Angel"), cosmic engineering ("Eternal Light"),
rogue androids as fey folk ("Fairyland").  There is nothing wrong with
this, but it feels with "Secret Harmonies" as if he is trying to get away
from this mode and into a more low-key and sophisticated setting and plot.
Thus we have political machinations and tangled personal relationships
driving the plot.  Elysium isn't just a plot setting, it's believable as a
place that people live and work.

But darn it, I want to know more about the aliens.
 
When humans enter the aboriginal villages on Elysium, the natives freeze
up, staying locked up until interlopers depart or their nervous systems
burn out.  Elysium is certainly a strange place, perhaps not as exotic or
full as other fictional counterparts like Dune, Medea or the Ringworld but
it is a place that functions on its own rules.  This SFnal part of the
book and the political side struggle with each other, not quite having
enough room to develop fully and not quite integrating with each other.
While the book shouldn't be longer, there is a sense that there is more to
tell. Parts of the story felt abbreviated or rushed.

A book shouldn't be condemned for expectations, but neither should one be
praised for ambition.  "Secret Harmonies" isn't bad, but doesn't
completely gel.  Nonetheless I still look forward to McAuley's next work.
[**/ok] and the movie you see when you can't get into the movie you want
to see on the Sid and Nancy scale.

%A Paul J McAuley
%T Secret Harmonies (aka Of The Fall)
%I Vista
%C London
%D 1997
%P 333pp
%G ISBN 0-575-60371-0
%O paperback, Aus$13.95

Paul-Michael Agapow ([email-masked]), Dept. Biology, Imperial College
"We were too young, we lived too fast and had too much technology ..."