After the Catastrophe, those who took to bomb shelters to survive formed cities like Recoletta where they continued to live underground. The dark city — it’s mostly lit by gaslight — is rather heavily segregated: the aristocrats live in an autonomous, secure district called the Vineyard; around it are less “affluent” or prosperous districts, with factory workers, who live in the outermost zones, only rarely getting permission to intrude into the interior. It’s all governed by a supposedly benevolent, authoritarian Council. The Council has banned books and keeps strict control over the flow of information; it also oversees a number of separate and warring Departments (as in any other bureaucracy!)
This is the framework for Carrie Patel’s novel The Buried Life, and already you can see that the diversity of plot strains will make it difficult to categorize. Angry Robot Books (that’s right), a Random House imprint, blandly suggests filing it under “Fantasy,” but this doesn’t tell you the half — all science fiction is fantasy, at least when it appears. (And isn’t the “fantasy” category full of books about medieval societies a thousand years in the future, with knights on horseback and ladies with reticules?)
The idea of some cataclysm that destroys civilization as we know it is a common one: think of the Mad Max movies and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The underground living arrangements suggest H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (as well as George Lucas’s ambitious THX 1138); so does the class segregation, only here it’s social rather than nutritional. There are hints of noir in some of the dimly lit settings, suggested by the cover art of the paperback edition. (Some online reviews have evoked steampunk, inaccurately: save for the gas lamps, there are no Industrial Revolution-style gizmos here.) The authoritarian, though Byzantine, power structure and the restricted flow of information harken back to the Father of All Dystopian Novels, George Orwell’s 1984. (That last frequently gets lumped in with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — much as Bruckner frequently gets lumped in with Mahler — but I found the Huxley altogether more clinical, less involving. Brave New World Revisited, basically a collection of Huxley’s philosophical musings, can be safely skipped.)
Ironically, the dystopian framework remains just that, a framework, through most of the plot. Inspector Liesl Malone, of the Recoletta Municipal Police, is called upon following the murder of a renowned historian from the Directorate of Preservation. (One riddle for her to solve: Despite broken glass and other signs of a break-in, a key was dropped near the site, indicating that the operation was intentional, rather than a random robbery.) While Malone and her novice assistant, Rafi Sundar, attempt to investigate — and get a bit of a runaround, on an unauthorized visit, from the Directorate itself — another notable, a Master Architect, is murdered. Connections are quickly made between the two, and with some further mayhem. Also getting involved is Jane Lin, who launders and repairs fine clothing for the “whitenails,” as they’re called, and therefore gets special access to their residential precincts; after being assaulted at the site of the second murder, she agrees to help Inspector Malone.
The plotting is intricate, but blessedly straightforward, so you can always keep track of developments, at least in the moment of reading. (They might fade afterward, as they did with me — but with me that almost always happens.) The dystopian framework suddenly becomes relevant in the home stretch, which takes Inspector Malone above ground, to the ruins of Washington, DC, and to the former Library of Congress. (The Catastrophe was clearly some sort of war, destructive though not necessarily nuclear.) The ending — not quite a “resolution” — while unexpected, avoids any nagging sense of having left a few strands untied.
I’d not been familiar with Ms. Patel’s writing, which takes in a few deft, indirect observations. When Malone, conscripting Jane, tells her to “think of this as a promotion,” “Jane decided that this wasn’t the time to ask if it came with a pay raise” (p. 169). When Malone is exploring the sewers and needs to pick a lock, “She rummaged in her pocket and found a few unofficial tools of the trade” (p. 211). One character’s reluctance to admit he had been at “The Gearbox” (p. 238), tells us exactly what sort of bar it was. And, in the Epilogue, a pair of game trappers hear something “that was too talkative to be an injured deer” (p. 352). I’m wondering: did Ms. Patel name the coroner “Dr. Brin” (p. 100 ff.) in tribute to fellow sci-fi author David Brin, or was this just an accident?
There is one glaring solecism of usage, when a rope is described as “taught as a bowstring” (p. 342 — ouch!). Otherwise, the writing falters at just two points in the plot. When Malone herself is thrown into prison (p. 280), I read the detailed description of her cell and thought, “Where’s the toilet?” — not a cell I’d look forward to inhabiting. And the getaway instructions she receives a few pages later, from someone on the other side of the cell door, struck me as rather Baroque: Malone escapes, but I don’t know that I could have!
But these are small flaws in the grand scheme of things. My Google search suggested that this book has sprouted a series — at any rate, some sites list it as “Book One” — so it’ll be worth checking out whatever sequels have appeared, or will appear. Thumbs-up all over the place. Cheers.
Stephen Francis Vasta 