(courtesy Hachette Australia)
After watching far too many books sit trapped in my To Be Read (TBR) pile for years and years, I decided it was high time a month was devoted to rescuing them from the reading void and diving into their promising stories. So, for October, each book review will be a novel long neglected but never forgotten, finally read as the author and published intended …
Humanity has a dark, DARK heart.
That will hardly be a revelation to anyone even remotely schooled in the hellish recesses of history or the murky hypocrisy of the current day, but it’s a theme that emerges again and again in the masterfully written first instalment of Benjamin Percy’s The Comet Cycle trilogy, The Ninth Metal.
In this near-future world, the Earth has escaped annihilation at the hands of a comet named Cain, after its astronomic discoverer, its only brush with planetary mortality a substantial meteor shower that not only provides the mother of all atmospheric light shows, but which delivers to the town of Nightfall, Minnesota, a rustbelt mining town well on its way to urban oblivion, a bounty which forever changes it.
It’s not alone; the entire planet is grappling with some fairly impactful changes from the comet’s trailing detritus, much of what we understand about its biology, chemistry, physics and so much else, thrown into the blender and blitzed into a new configuration that humanity, hardly famed for its ability to handle the new and the unknown that well, is not dealing with at all well.
She used to be a cashier at Farm and Fleet. She used to be married to an ex-con collecting unemployment. And now? Now she’s a drug lord or a pope or an amulet. Sitting on a billion dollars of metal. How can that be? How can the whole world suddenly feel like that? The before and after irreconcilable. It’s as though all the memories have crumbled to ash and sifted away and now there is only metal, metal, metal.
That’s the curious part of who we are.
We are endlessly curious, taking the gifts of evolution like intuition, blinding intelligence and inventive insight and doing some impressively cool civilisational things with them, but a lamentably large slab of us are also prone to a risk-averse conservatism, sheltering in the dubious surrounds of sclerotic religion and entrenched unthinking belief.
An unsettling large number of us are also not very nice, The Ninth Metal, something that comes to the dramatic fore in The Ninth Metal which refers to a curiously alien compound which hits the town of Nightfall in huge quantity, a metal with properties that capture and expend energy is some fairly amazing ways.
It has the capacity to change human society for the better, ending energy want and a whole host of other ills, but instead, it sets off a tsunami of greed and goldrush-fever mania, and at the heart of this darkly unedifying chaos sits the Frontier family who have found new wealth and influence thanks to Comet Cain’s revolutionary bounty.
The thing is, they are hardly the givers of all good and wonderfully philanthropic things; well, not deep down anyway.
On the surface, they are building schools, hospitals and even a multi-million dollar police station, and making Nightfall a better, more community-minded place to be, and they promote their generosity with a vengeance, making it clear they are the unassailable saviours and pillars of a boom town reborn.
But deep down, there is darkness, great abiding and catastrophically abiding darkness, and while some good souls like newly-minted policewoman Stacie try to do the right thing and keep a light burning in the darkness, it seems they are a small flickering flame in the midst of a black void from which there is no escaping.
(courtesy Amazon.com (c) Benjamin Percy)
John Frontier, heir apparent to the family fortune and a man with a curious link to the glowing blue properties of the newest metal on Earth, has tried to escape, to make his own way in a world far removed from the machinations of his father and his murderously devious sister.
But as The Ninth Metal opens, John is hurtling back on a technological transport wonder called the Bullet, a train which runs on ninth metal tracks, drawing its back from them, and speeding its passengers to a town which is not only laying waste to the forest and lake-clad environment around it, but to the hopes and dreams and humanity of many of the people who call it home.
It’s a town with so much to offer, but for a returning prodigal son like John, or for his high school crush, Jenna, caught in a violent marriage and a wrong-side-of-the-tracks life, or fifteen-year-old Hawkin, trapped in a facility where he is less human than scientific specimen, it is more lowlight than high, a place where injustice and the darker angels of humanity are allowed free vein in the pursuit of riches and influence.
As a morality tale, with some seriously impressive sci-fi trimmings, The Ninth Metal is brilliantly done, with Percy crafting an immersively dramatic tale that goes big and cinematically epic without ever once sacrificing a meaty emotional intimacy.
This is big D drama with some incisively nuanced observations about humanity at its heart, and it captures you completely, driven by characters who want the world but might lose everything in their pursuit of it.
John’s face hardens. He slams his hand against the steering wheel.
‘What do you stand for?’ she says. This isn’t the sort of peace-brokering she imagined doing when she signed on to become a cop. But it is justice nonetheless. The rules have changed. She is changing with them. ‘What are you going to do next?’
What distinguishes The Ninth Metal is now well Percy weaves in some pithily affecting messaging without once bogging down the story.
The novel fairly zings along, moving effortlessly between the past and the present, building and building its narrative in ways that seriously rattle anyone’s sense of wellbeing, but which for the emphasis on the dark desires that linger in human hearts, also acknowledges that great good can dwell there too.
That even in the face of force and violence and a powerful status quo that will do anything to protect itself, good people will step up and take a stand and refuse to let the darkness overpower the light.
This is not idealistic posturing by any means; throughout The Ninth Metal, the characters who do step up for good have to sacrifice lot with Percy making it clear that doing the right thing is not consequence-free.
But, and this is important in this superlatively well-told novel, it is still important to do and in the great tussle between good and evil in the grand morality play that is The Ninth Metal, worth doing even if it costs you the world because how can you ultimately live with yourself if you are given much and do nothing of any real value with it?