Claire North deserves to be much better known than she is. True, she won a World Fantasy Award five years ago, for The Sudden Appearance of Hope (2016, UK), which is, ironically, a science fiction novel; and she won the John W Campbell Memorial Award in 2015 for The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014, UK), her first novel published as Claire North… But I rarely see her mentioned that often, and I do think her name belongs up there in the top rank of current UK genre writers.
To date, North has published nine books, including a collection of three novellas which were originally released separately. She has a new book due out in September this year, the first of a series, if Amazon is to be believed, set in Ancient Greece. It’s on my wishlist. This, by my reckoning, is ten books — all of which have been good, if not excellent— in under a decade, and which should surely be enough to have generated a significant profile in UK science fiction. But, other than her debut, none of her books have appeared on UK sf award shortlists.
Yes, Claire North deserves to be much better known than she is.
Notes from the Burning Age (2021, UK) is typical of her oeuvre — in as much as it’s well-written, high concept, accomplished on detail and research, and yet the story never goes quite where expected. It’s set several generations after some sort of apocalyptic event. Humanity had finally trashed the environment beyond the point it could be saved without significant intervention… and that intervention came in the shape of kakuys, strange creatures spontaneously generated by the Earth, which wiped out the bulk of the world’s population.
Ven is working as a barman in a disreputable bar in Vien, but was once an archivist for the Temple, responsible for translating files found on old hard-disks and determining if their contents are suitable for public consumption. Fiction, social media posts, medical procedures, for example, are fine; but anything to do with weaponry, nuclear fission, or any of the more heinous crimes of the twentieth century earlier, such as the Holocaust, is banned by the Temple. Ven is recruited by the Brotherhood, a political movement, which is pretty much the Nazi Party — even their leader reads like a pastiche of Hitler — and which intends to use recovered technology from the twentieth century to better its members’ lot. But only its upper echelons. The Brotherhood firmly believes in inequality, that some people are simply better than others and so should be rewarded more.
What the Brotherhood — in the person of Georg, the movement’s eminence grise, and the man who has taken Ven under his wing — doesn’t realise is that Ven is a spy for the Temple. The Brotherhood, however, has a spy of its own, who sends it documents on proscribed technology. Ven and his handler concoct a plan to flush out the Brotherhood’s spy, but Ven’s cover is blown before he or she can be identified.
(The identity of the Brotherhood spy remains a mystery for much of the novel’s length, but it’s not difficult work out who it is.)
The Brotherhood “wins” the election, but its subsequent policy of intense industrialisation so poisons the land, it goes to war for, well, “lebensraum”. It consider the kakuys an empty threat. And, to be fair, the novel never quite commits to the kakuys as real. Are the severe environmental consequences simply the fallout from industrial processes? Or are they the kakuys fighting back? At the final battle, at a major archive site, is the severity of the explosion a result of physics and chemistry, or is it the manifestation of a kakuy?
The post-climate crash world North presents is not hugely original, and the politics are clearly based on a combination of 1930s Germany and present-day UK. While there’s notable overlap there, they’re not the same and its overly simplistic to treat 2020s Britain like the Third Reich… Which is not to say that parallels can’t be drawn — and North certainly pulls no punches in that regard.
If North’s novels suffer from a common fault it’s a lack of focus. Her plots have too many things going on at the same time. Here it’s environmentalism, the kakuys, right-wing politics, the identity of the Brotherhood’s spy, and Ven’s personal redemption. It means the story never quite commits to a resolution, but tries for a catch-all ending for everything. Some narrative closures are more effective than others. YMMV, as they say.
But still. This is good stuff. Timely, provocative in the right ways, and very readable. Claire North deserves to be much better known than she is.
