The Fall of Koli by M.R. Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “How will we know when to stop?” The Fall of Koli (2021), the third volume of M. C. Carey’s Rampart Trilogy, begins with the fifteen-year-old first-person narrator Koli briefly introducing himself, Koli Faceless (exiled from his home village Mythen Rood), and his three female companions, Ursala (wise old scientist/healer), Cup (feisty transgender girl), and Monono Arawe (uniquely “untethered” AI) and bringing us up to speed on their situation. The three flesh and blood mortals are on a quest to find a way to unite the scattered and hostile communities of post-apocalypse England so as to improve the increasingly compromised gene pool and save humanity from extinction, while Monono (the “virtual girl” who’s neither dead nor alive but Something Else) wants to find out what and who she can become. Their journey is apparently about to end unhappily, as their swamped boat is about to sink before the wall of Sword of Albion, a gargantuan (150,000 ton), well-equipped old time “unfinished war” warship they’d desperately hoped had what they all needed. Meanwhile, back home in the village of Mythen Rood, Koli’s first love Spinner, her husband Jon, her friends Challenger (a partially sentient old time tank) and Elaine (the uploaded consciousness of an old time soldier), and their two hundred fellow villagers must prepare for the impending invasion of the large, disciplined, well-armed, and fanatically loyal army of the Half-Ax Peacemaker, who wants to punish the smaller community by killing everyone in it, taking their modest number of old tech items, and sewing its ground with salt. As the novel develops those two plot strands (narrated in first person by Koli and Spinner in alternating chunks of chapters), it will reveal that Sword of Albion is not what it was expected to be, introduce some appalling new characters (e.g., snide Stanley Banner and his good cop bad cop parents Lorraine and Paul and Berrobis Bradeshin, Marshal-general of Half-Ax) and a horrifying new old threat to the world, interestingly develop the relationships between Koli and Monono, Cup and Ursala, and Spinner and her Vennastin husband and in-laws, and explore themes about storytelling, consciousness, gender, life, identity, love, power, technology, nature, and more. The many popular culture references from our time that Monono uses give us the pleasure of the familiar in a strange context even as they go right over Koli’s head: David Bowie, Marcel Marceau, Boys from Brazil, Cone of Silence, Stepford Wives, Leonard Cohen, “You Don’t Own Me,” etc. Stanley and his parents (also knowledgeable about the “old times”) drop other cultural references, like Blanche Dubois, Calamity Jane, Saint Francis, Noah’s Ark, Excalibur, and Disneyland. Carey probably overuses the old tech to do Whatever He Wants for His Plot, as in arbitrarily varying the gestation times by which different old tech weapons renew their ammunition reserves, ranging from instantly to weeks, or making it too hard for the Mythen Rood folk to figure out how to use two captured enemy weapons (when to help they have a database and a sentient tank and a very handy Jon), or rendering Monono as a deus ex (AI) machina too freely and potently. I also reckon that Half-Ax would send their whole army rather than small parties a wee bit sooner than they end up doing. Other flaws. He makes it possible for us to figure out the purpose of Sword of Albion and Stanley Banner way before Koli, Cup, Ursala, or even Monono figure it out. He also occasionally succumbs to lame lines like, Monono’s “Nothing, nada, zip, with a side order of zilch,” and overuses the metaphor of people chewing things over in their minds too often via both Spinner and Koli (e.g., “Lorraine chewed a mite harder”), which makes them sound too much like the same voice talking. Finally, I think that the three different audiobook readers are too many and, in the case of the Monono voice, jarring. Especially because in the first book, the second one, and most of this one up to this point Theo Solomon reads Monono’s voice as distinctive and full of perky charm, so when suddenly we hear a posh, educated, RP British English female voice speaking for Monono, even though audiobook reader Hanako Footman is fine, doesn’t sound right. Furthermore, when Monono is narrating, she says lines spoken by Elaine sounding like a southern woman, whereas when Spinner narrates (read by Saffron Coomber), her Elaine sounds African American. All this difference in voice and English and accent, etc. makes immersion in the story difficult. Speaking of Theo Solomon, his base narration voice for Koli is rather monotonous and slow, almost sounding bored with his labor, though he does great voices for the other characters, especially Monono. The novel tells a suspenseful, page turning story, develops compelling characters, depicts a convincing post-apocalypse world, and urges us to balance our relationship with the natural world and to develop and use technology more thoughtfully and carefully, to avoid fascism, and to view the body as “just a shadow” that needn’t determine our identities, especially our gender. The psychology of Ursala wanting to change Cup physically into a girl to apologize for being reluctant to help her at first and Cup fearing being cut into and wanting to delay the operation is moving. I won’t spoil the remarkable ending of the novel, in which the promise of the title is fulfilled in a moving and fitting way. And the third volume does (mostly) satisfyingly conclude the trilogy. Fans of post-apocalypse fiction like Davy (1964), Riddley Walker (1980), A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World (2019), etc., should like this trilogy a lot. View all my reviews
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