Book Review of “The Doors of Eden” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is a good novel, but at one point the author succumbs to the temptation to be lazy (perhaps even ignorant) about his political villainy and this is why he misses out on the five star recommendation that he might have got.

It is about parallel worlds, but not necessarily parallel universes because if you travel far enough from Earth after reality has branched, the rest of the universe has not necessarily changed at all. Or, if it has, the changes may be unrelated to any change on Earth.

The novel builds on small ideas to convey bigger ones, which facilitates the suspension of disbelief necessary to its enjoyment. It starts off with a small adventure gone wrong and a mystery, and it also starts off with a pair of young lesbian heroines, which is not a bad thing. (I once wrote a whole series of SF novels about an entire planetary colony of lesbian heroines. Which I wouldn’t get away with doing in the 21^st century as it’s turning out so far.) The parallel worlds theme allows for both adventure and whimsy (there is a world where super-intelligent big cats suborn all other species to their will) and the author has some fun with the attempts of staid MI5 officers to understand the weird. Mystery turns to conspiracy and then existential crisis, for the universe and not just all the parallel Earths. The conspiracy surrounds the character of Daniel Rove, who for most of the novel is convincingly and accurately drawn as a sociopath (and insider-dealing venture-capitalist).

Parties in conflict must be turned, somehow, into a coalition to solve the existential crisis. This happens slightly too easily, really, given how divergent the world views are of people from the alternative worlds. I was disappointed that neither the big cats nor the intelligent bird-man dinosaurs were asked to contribute to the solution. Cat-logic can be brilliant, in its own way.

Despite dealing with parallel Earths, the narrative is mostly sequential until the end is nigh, at which point there are several alternative narratives. There is a good reason for this, though, and it’s not just an attempt to meet an overall “mind-blowing weirdness” target set by a deranged publisher. None of the divergent narratives is a solution to the crisis: the fact that there are divergent narratives is itself the solution, which is not what the coalition of experts solving the crisis want to hear.

It is at this point that the Rove character, hitherto an insider-trader and laissez-faire capitalist, turns into a 21^st century Oswald Mosley, complete with an England-fixation. Of course, in the 21^st century you are not allowed to hate anyone, except racists, so Rove has to have a “racist” placard hung round his neck so the author can decently lynch him.

The real Oswald Mosley was the anti-thesis of a laissez-faire capitalist. He was First Secretary in a Labour Cabinet and he was economically hard left, just like Hitler and Mussolini. The state was to own everything and everyone. He was personally wealthy, but he did not earn any of it, and this is the key to understanding Oswald Mosley. As George Orwell observed of his classmates at Eton, it was extremely common for someone with an expensive education and a socking great trust fund, to be a hard-left socialist. It still is. Most people who have worked for their own bread are sympathetic to the idea that it is a matter of natural justice for people to actually benefit from their own efforts. When you deny that this is so, as Mosley consistently did, and as many Momentum activists do today, then you and the slave-trader become one flesh. Pharaoh, Lenin, Mosley and Hitler were all willing to make people slaves to build their Utopia.

If the Mosley persona is just meant to be shorthand for “appalling racist” then it’s still problematical, because sociopaths are available in both racist and anti-racist versions. The former blatantly try to divide communities to manipulate them, the latter are generally less blatant and this means they actually do more damage, to individual victims and the fabric of society, because their subtle lies can divide brothers and sisters, even husband and wife, in a way that racist lies cannot do.

“The Doors of Eden” is published by Macmillan on the 20^th of August 2020.