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Using a mythical universe to understand and explain morality in the real world.
(This review is based on a purchased copy)
This novel has been described as “incomprehensible.” Actually, it’s just that comprehension is more than slightly uncomfortable for many when it comes, so they instinctively shy away from it.
When used properly, the mythical universe is a way of simplifying the environment in order to make a complicated (or simply uncomfortable) issue clear enough. The universe in this novel is physically highly simplified, so that only the ethereal plane may be infinite and politics are reduced to moral and immoral, so that intellectual constructs of political ideology cannot be used to camouflage or justify immoral choices. The author seizes and burns a goodly number of intellectual comfort-blankets by doing this.
The details of the simplified universe start with an ethereal “Home” of safety and beauty, where entities may even safely take a rest from fully existing, should they so chose. No-one will stop them from becoming more real if that is what they want or need. To get from there to the physical “World of The Hearths” one has to fall down a “Cathode Well.” The operative word is fall, but there’s an implication of a negative charge dragging particles downwards, too. Each of several “Hearths” (large communal dwellings) has a “Generator Well” ostensibly to maintain the building’s structural integrity, but actually these descend to the third level of existence, which is the “Abyss” a lake of fire. The population of each Hearth is no more than one or two hundred “Inhabitants” so the whole population of the World of the Hearths can only be in the low thousands. The world of the Hearths also has a prison “The Tannery” which is a place of utter misery and eventual execution. “Ministers” have an “Assembly Hall,” from where (although they do not know this) the Abyss can be accessed directly. All of these locations are many hours drive away from each other (there are cars, but only for Ministers and their Guards), and the journey by car is through vast fields of crops; as if the World of The Hearths could easily provide for countless numbers of people, even though it is only permitted to support a small number.
Under the impression that they are running all this, Ministers from all the Hearths attend secret meetings, where they are manipulated by an entity called “Sate.” Every so often all the ministers vanish and fresh ministers are elected. The Abyss contains the souls of countless inhabitants of the Hearths, who have some hope of rescue being innocent victims, and many former ministers, who are not innocent and have no hope of rescue. To escape from the Abyss one has to ascend, not to the Assembly Hall, but to the ethereal Home. This is not easy and it can only be accomplished by a peer of Sate, who would have to risk personal extinction and the loss of all hope for all other souls, in order to fight Sate in his own home ground of the Abyss to set others free.
There is technology in the World of the Hearths, but it is only available to Ministers and Guards for purposes approved of by Sate. And the Ministers have to gather, when summoned, at the Assembly Hall, the existence of which, never mind the location, is hidden from the ordinary Inhabitants.
In our more complicated real world, we might be graciously permitted to pay for and use technology, and we might even be told when our leaders assemble for secret meetings, but we do not get to chose or even know about ALL the purposes which our technical devices perform at our expense, and we’re certainly not welcome to visit a certain Alpine location when our leaders are in their version of the Assembly Hall. There is no Abyss under that place, but a fifty-mile particle collider is planned…
The Hidden Face by M.I. Verras is published by “Palmetto” and available for Kindle from Amazon. See:
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