The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The world has been lost,” or has it? Fifteen-year-old Koli is living in the village Mythen Rood, a “big” community of two hundred people, existing precariously in a sea of inimical flora and fauna, including overly large and intelligent boars, wild dogs, rats, mole snakes, and needles (cats crossed with Giger aliens), as well as mobile, quick-growing, entangling, and blood-drinking trees and choker seeds. Not to mention lurking bands of shunned men (cannibals) and “old tech” rogue drones that fly in at any moment, tell people to disperse, and then laser them if they fail to comply. Koli’s family trade is woodsmithing, but instead of cutting trees, they must catch them and cure the resulting lumber by soaking it in poison for a month so it will not come back to life. Luckily for Koli’s illiterate people, they have four helpful items of old tech--a cutter, a fire snake, a bolt gun, and a database--to help protect their village. The post-apocalypse world of M. R. Carey’s The Book of Koli (2020) is gripingly weird and hostile, and the explanation for it is suitably politically correct. The warning themes of much post-apocalypse fiction are present: environmental degradation, global warming, animal extinction, genetic manipulation, war and its tools, and the venal politicians who know what’s coming but take no action about it. We are responsible for Koli’s world. Koli’s pressing problem is that a single family, the Vennastins, dominates the old tech, serving as “Ramparts” (guardians) and running the village. On “testing days,” young villagers who come of age try to “wake” some old tech and thus join the Ramparts, which is what Koli has set his sights on doing so he can impress Spinner, the girl he loves. But the old tech only seems to wake for Vennastins. And Koli’s testing day is coming. His callow desire (“In some respects I was as shallow as a puddle”) initiates the plot, which introduces him to a “cute” Sony DreamSleeve media player called Monono Arawe, who teaches him about his village, his world, and his self. Through the old tech in the story, Carey gets us asking questions like, What is tech for? Weapons? Entertainment? Who gets tech (and hence power)? And what is sentience? Brown-skinned like the father he never met, Koli is an appealing protagonist-narrator, thoughtful, sensitive, ambitious, and honest. He realizes that we will be judging him, because he's going to tell us many things he experienced and did, not all of them good. Koli is telling his story after the events occurred and gaining and losing many names, which enables him to drop foreshadowing bombs here and there, like “And only three weeks later the gates of Mythen Rood closed on me for the last time. But I'll get to that later.” As in Russel Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980) but to a lesser extent, Koli’s voice has a taut poetic quality and grammatical features that estrange our English: “The world isn't nothing next to the stories we tell ourselves. It bends to any shape we want it to. I seen this moment in my thoughts a thousand times before my testing day finally come, and there wasn't one of those times where the tech didn't wake for me.” Koli and his people simplify past tense verb endings (e.g., “I growed up a mite wild” and “I feeled my way”) and say things like “onliest.” Like in other works of post-apocalypse fiction, this one refers to things the narrator is ignorant about, but we understand, estranging us from our everyday world while elliptically reminding us of it. Ignorant of our world, Koli describes things like tanks, trains, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and the like. There are many other estranging features of Koli’s culture, like how they refer to the Christian god as “the dead god” (“Good success in a bad labor sets you down a dangerous path, so the dead god said one time before they killed him”) and worship a severe post-Christian legendary figure called Dandrake, or dread the sun shining because it wakes the dangerous trees, or think that the Parley Men in London are heroic knights, or believe that Phoenix was a place that was repeatedly burnt and rebuilt, etc. There are fine supporting characters: old Ursala from Elsewhere, who travels around among the villages in the British valley where Mythen Rood sits, passing along news, doctoring anyone in need of healing, and assessing the likelihood of in/fertile marriages, all with the aid of her “drudge,” a kind of weaponized robot medic pack mule; Cup from a shunned men cult, a trans girl with a chip on her shoulder and an affinity for capable violence; and above all the cute, sarcastic, and perky Monono, who, being a piece of old tech, is closer to our time and speaks in our own idiom (e.g., “I'm just going to lie down in my coffin like a sexy vampire”) and tosses out allusions to “The Lady Called Gaga,” Metallica, Pokémon, hobbits and orcs, Jedi, Archimedes, Tokyo, and more, and develops into much more than a media player for Koli and the reader. The audiobook reader Theo Solomon has a pleasing voice and manner. He does not overdramatize voices of different characters and different genders, but just reads everything with intelligence, sympathy, and understanding. (And he does a prime creepy cult leader.) Like other post-apocalypse novels like Davy (1964), Riddley Walker, and A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World (2019), here the young first-person narrator protagonist recounts leaving his familiar home as part of his growth towards greater understanding of his world and identity. (“You and me, dopey boy, against the world,” cheers Monono.) After an interlude with a religious cult, Koli decides to start working towards trying to save the human species by linking up too small and increasingly inbred and infertile communities in England and probably by making old tech available to a greater number of people. But this is very much the first book in a trilogy. There are moments of plot contrivance, as when Carey has (or does not have) Monono’s energy run out or has her “sleep” instead of warning Koli of some threat. But I liked Koli so much that I immediately went on to listen to the second book in the trilogy. View all my reviews
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