(courtesy Penguins Books Australia)
A preview of this novel was provided by Angry Robot Books in return for a free and fair review.
Plunging into any fictional book is an act of active and engaged imagination.
It can’t not be; here you have a story that recounts events that have never happened in the real world – though when you are in the depths of the narrative, it feels so real you could reach out and touch it; it’s one of the joys of reading a novel – in a place and time dreamed by an author who is pulling characters and events out of the creative ether and to not be wondrously lost in all kinds of imaginative magic is all but impossible.
Still, for all of the universality of this truism, there are some novels that are so boundlessly rich in speculative brilliance, so richly imbued with audacious leaps into the unknown and so fantastically imaginative that all you can do is sit back in awe and soak up the thrill of entering an all-encompassing world and immersively enthralling story.
Such a novel is Khan Wong’s Down in the Sea of Angels, a supremely clever book that takes us effortlessly over the span of two centuries between the seemingly disparate but ingeniously connected stories of three people in an ever changing, always evolving San Francisco, California.
It is these three people, who never actually interact with each other, despite the novel’s quite magically real underpinnings, that give Down in the Sea of Angels such an affecting and emotionally weighty impact, with each of their stories addressing the novels hefty themes of “enslavement, exploitation, and environmental collapse.”
‘I just want to make something that’s as meaningful as it is “elegant and groundbreaking in its fashion-forward lines”. They exchange a look and bust out laughing over their favorite [sic] quite from a review of their last major product launch, the Groov mp3 player. There’s a lot of pompous language in the world of design review.
‘I get that, but you should enjoy the now moment too.’
‘How very zen of you. I’ll keep that in mind.’
Set in the years 1906, 2006 and 2106, Down in the Sea of Angels is an ambitiously clever, queer-centric sci-fi/fantasy novel which goes for some fairly epic moments while successfully retaining an air of intimate humanity, the kind which leavens out any blockbuster storyline with some much-needed and wholly accessible groundedness.
The first character we meet is Li Nuan, a sixteen-year old woman sex-trafficked from China who is caught in an invidious situation; she has nowhere to go in a country far removed from that of her father who sold her into slavery to clear his debts, but cannot stay in a home where she is variously a maid, a sex worker and the object of lecherous attention by her owner’s leering son.
Hers is a dark and terrible world, full of similarly enslaved people at various levels of responsibility who, rather than joining together in some sort of collective union to support each other, instead turn upon each other to gain what leverage and advantage they can.
Her only hope for freedom are the activist Christians up on the hill, but even they have their own weightily imposed agenda and true freedom for Li Nuan doesn’t come until the cataclysmic earthquake of 1906 levels the city, and the young woman, escaping with a jade teacup which becomes pivotal in later events, finally gains some agency in a life long shorn of it.
Moving forward a century and we meet Nathan, a talented designer of consumer electronic goods who is at the top of his professional game, close to a bunch of wildly amazing friends with whom he attends the Burning Man Festival every year, and a boyfriend who loves and adores him and whom he loves and adores right back.
Nathan has the world pretty much at his feet in 2006, a time where everything seems possible, until he discovers an unsavoury truth about the company he works for’s chief and most lucrative client, one so terrible that he seriously reconsiders whether he continue in his current mode of employment.
At the same time as this seismic shift in his life is underway, he begins to have strange visions every time he touches the family’s heirloom jade teacup which has been in his family for a century and which eventually ends up in the care of Maida Sun, a psionic individual living in a post-apocalyptic 2106 who works in what’s called the Golden Gate Cultural Recovery Project and who, simply by touching an object can divine (in a process known as “scanning”), in graphically visual detail, its entire history.
This is critical in a world recovering from the mid-21st century collapse of nation states, economies and the environment where a great deal of knowledge was lost, and from which a more egalitarian society emerged, at least on the Californian coast.
She holds the key to recovering a lost world, and while few people want to return to the ruinous excesses of the defunct Anthropocene age, there is a need to know what happened, if only only the great near-world ending mistakes of the world aren’t repeated.
I [Maida] knew from the moment I started at the Academy that wasn’t how [criminal investigation] I want to use my ability. That one time scanning a murder weapon was enough for me. No, I was more interested in how people lived than how they died.
Quite how Maida and a lot of other people come to possess psychic abilities must be left to the reading of the extraordinary brilliance that is Down in the Sea of Angels, but suffice to say, Maida is the lynchpin of this story as her work uncovers a nefarious political plot that seeks to take away the rights of anyone with psionic abilities and to have them used to revive a system that came close to wiping humanity off the face of the earth.
This titanic struggle forms the core of the narrative and it is brilliantly compelling in so many epic and intimately personal ways, but unlike other novels that dance between different characters in wholly different timelines, each of the three core eras is every bit as arrestingly engaging as the other, all connected in ways that are breathtakingly imaginative but so groundedly real all the same time.
Down in the Sea of Angels is an immensely wonderful novel, a fantasy/sci-fi opus that goes big and broad and stratospherically high with its ambitious storytelling and evocatively important themes, but which also feel so richly character-centric that while the plot could consume your attention, it is the characters who fiercely and compellingly drive the narrative who are the true drawcards, their wholly disparate lives connected in some fairly amazing ways, interwined to an end that, two centuries from where the first character lives, changes an already transformed world even further while elevating the better angels of our nature and society where they need to be if we are to survive and thrive as a race that includes everyone and exists for the betterment and profession of all.