It felt seamless, like it was written in a day, maybe two, coming out whole and smooth and perfect on the very first try.Īnd even when North was done and Notes reached its explosive conclusion, I just wasn't ready to leave. In Notes North has created a world that works, that lives and breathes and suffers and dies, and populated it with characters who are all flawed, all broken, and struggling to make something better. Cycles within cycles, all of them brilliant, horrifying, cool.īut I swear, the thing that hooked me so deep was the simple presence of it all. It begins as an idyllic homage to A Canticle For Leibowitz, becomes a Cold War mole-hunting LeCarre pastiche and ends in an Ayn Rand-vs-Margaret Atwood philosophical cage match. ![]() But more than that, it is a top-tier spy story, a very physical war story, a mature love story, unromantic in the way that it doesn't lie or add glitter to anything. It is about the terrible cost of disposability, the burden of secrets, the power of faith and recycling. As a whole, Notes is a novel of cycles, of transitions. North has created a world that works, that lives and breathes and suffers and dies, and populated it with characters who are all flawed, all broken, and struggling to make something better.Įverything after is a dance: Ven and Georg and Yue, trying to start a war, trying to prevent one, trying to protect the world, trying to free it. And Ven, a former translator, is exactly who he needs to make sense of what he's being given and to determine which files are real and which are forgeries. Georg has a spy inside the Council who passes him data deemed heretical by the priests of the Temple. He wants, ultimately, to kill the Kakuy and free mankind. One night at the bar, Ven is approached by Georg, a leader of the Brotherhood, who want a return to humanity's primacy and the knowledge of all those things that doomed us in the first place: strip mining, eugenics, sub-prime mortgages and atomic bombs. Becomes an aide to one of the most powerful members of the Council - the political class trying to hold the ruined world together. Ven learns dead languages and becomes a translator of Burning Age documents and data, is booted from the priesthood for stealing heretical information and selling it, ends up disgraced, working as a bartender in a dive bar in one of the few cities left on earth. In the midst of the conflagration, one of them (Ven) sees the Kakuy of the forest. An accident that consumes the forest surrounding a village. In North's pure and early Eden, there is a fire. The Kakuy are the boogeymen of the past, the warning tended to by a quasi-priestly order that now collects and curates information from the Burning Age, deciding what knowledge will benefit humanity and what is forbidden, how to keep a balance between man and nature. It exists in the ruin of the past - in landfills and trash middens, in hard drives and server farms that survived fire and flood and devastation, in a precious few vaults of Burning Age data. See, information from the Burning Age is spotty at best. ![]() ![]() Oh, and also? They might not actually exist. They are enormous monsters that embody their element, existing only to remove the infection of human avarice from the systems of the world. They are not gods, but a kind of secular defense mechanism: Careless of right or wrong, faith or agnosticism, deaf to pleas, blind to sacrifice. ![]() The Kakuy - spirits of everything from an entire forest or ocean to a single tree - rise and wipe humanity away. The period of human history when we decided that the earth and everything on it was a resource that could be exploited without consequence, mastered by men and machines and nations that became increasingly insular and increasingly desperate as those resources began to run dry.Īt some point, the earth rebels. North (the spaceships-and-dystopias pen name of the scarily prolific Catherine Webb) opens amid disaster - three children on an Edenic summer afternoon, playing amid the sacred trees, carefully tended shrines, solar panels and compression batteries of a world that has delicately scratched its way back from the brink. Because it is a mess, skillfully rendered, with a recognizable past (our own) and a believable present witnessed primarily by three characters who aren't just living through it, but actively shaping it. Who doesn't want to abandon a nightmare? But Notes is compelling because it is beautiful.
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