Subject: Paul Park: COELESTIS

From: [email-masked] (Gareth Rees)
Date: Sun, 28 Aug 1994 23:21:57 GMT

Coelestis by Paul Park
		     A book review by Gareth Rees
		  Copyright (c) 1994 by Gareth Rees

     Paul Park's first novel, "Soldiers of Paradise", made an impact
on me because of a certain ungentle quality in the writing and because
of the amazing sparseness of the physical and psychical landscapes
Park was portraying.  I read the book feeling entirely divorced from
anything concrete or real, floating in some kind of literary absence,
and emerged from it somewhat dizzy and disoriented.  While I still
find it hard to say whether "Soldiers of Paradise" was good or bad
when evaluated on the more usual grounds of character, plot and so on,
reading it was a sufficiently unusual experience that I've followed
Park avidly ever since.

     The sequels, "Sugar Rain" and "The Cult of Loving Kindness",
outstayed their welcome, not really capturing the stark unreality of
"Soldiers of Paradise" and not amounting otherwise to more than poor
attempts to emulate the 'great cycle of years' experience of Aldiss'
"Helliconia" trilogy, in which which the richness of the landscapes is
essential.

     So it's a pleasant surprise to pick up "Coelestis" and find Paul
Park back on form again.  The new novel deploys itself with a more
cunning grasp of structure than the previous books, and the effect is
very powerful.

     "Coelestis" takes place on an unnames planet colonised by humans
for some hundreds of years.  The planet is inhabited by a race of
intelligent aliens, or rather by two races.  The 'Aboriginals' have
been domesticated by the human settlers - given plastic surgery to
give the human facial features and given complex drugs to make them
think like humans.  The other race, the 'Demons', which had some kind
of telepathic control over the Aboriginals, has been wiped out.
Historical details are sketchy, but it seems that before the arrival
of humans, the Aboriginals and Demons had done nothing but lie around
in caves in some sort of DreamTime; no-one knows for sure, and no-one
cares very much.  But the arrival of humans precipitated the natives
into action (probably essentially copycat action): the Demons asserted
their control, built a great empire and grand architectural projects
at the cost of the lives of millions of Aboriginals, and waged a war
against humans before being defeated and wiped out.  By the time of
"Coelestis", this is distant history and considered good reason for
the Aboriginals to hate the Demons and be grateful to their human
saviours - and to overlook the fact that apart from a lucky few, most
of them live in poverty or are servants to humans.

     The novel is narrated from the viewpoints of two outsiders,
Katherine Styreme and Simon Mayaram.  Katherine is a wealthy
Aboriginal; extensive surgery has made it difficult to tell that she's
not human.  She's a talented concert pianist.  Simon is an assistant
to the planet's Consul, and is a recent immigrant from Earth.  Both
are captured by a group of Aboriginal freedom fighters, and are
imprisoned together.  Katherine is deprived the drugs she requires to
continue to think like a human, and gradually her perceptions,
thoughts and consciousness revet to that of her race.  Simon has
fallen in love with her and can't understand that alien being with
alien concerns that Katherine is gradually becoming.  all he can think
of is to get her to safety and to restore to her the drugs that will
her turn her back into the woman he fell in love with.

     The change is Katherine's perceptions is very subtly described.
The barely restrained violence of Park's prose, the concentration on
very tiny details that never seem to add up to a rich or coherent
scene but instead suggest a disjointed sequence of saccades across an
image whose form never becomes quite clear, is perfect for the
evocation of a mode of perception based on symbolic apprehension of
the concrete and which pre-supposes some eternal static fabric
underlying reality to which humans have no perceptual access (though
some external signs evoke this static fabric - the planet keeps one
face towards the sun so that every landscape feature casts a static
shadow, unchanged by day or night).  This is as good an approach to
the description of alien perception as I've seen.

     So in one sense Park is using a very standard science fictional
technique here - Katherine and Simon are the classic outsiders that
give the reader a familiar viewpoint and a way in to an invented
world.  Bu his use of the technique is disconcertingly tricksy: both
characters start out by appearing to be familiar guides to the
unfamiliar, but gradually our perceptions of them change and they
become strange to us.  Katherine I've described, but Simon too turns
out to be strange.  He is recently arrived from Earth and speaks a
language called 'English', but Earth turns out to be unrecognisably
crowded, anarchic and poverty-stricken, and 'English' turns out to be
an unrecognisable descendant of our language in which numbers
substitute for emotional content.  The more we find out about Simon's
background the more unfamiliar he is to us.  It is as if we are led
into unfamiliar territory by apparently reliable guides only to
realise that the territory is deeply familiar (it is Australia under
European rule - or Africa or America), and that the guides are the
aliens.

%A Park, Paul 
%T Coelestis
%I Gollancz
%C London UK
%D 1993