(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Arriving at the third book in any series is a thing of quiet and fulfilling joy.
You have had two books to be introduced and get to know the main characters, to be come familiarised with the world in which they love and to understand the narrative beats that drive the stories that bring them warmly and compellingly to life.
And now in the third instalment you can simply let loose, as the author does, and simply soak it all up, fully cognisant of people and place and ready to sink into a narrative that has the freedom to go wherever it wants, and take its characters to some complex and interesting places.
It’s precisely what Malka Older does in the catchily titled The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses which hurtles, in the gentlest and most poetically nuanced way possible into a far-ish future where humanity has fled a dying and polluted Earth for the gaseous sanctuary of Jupiter aka Giant and its moons.
Using cutting-edge technology, much of it developed to meet an urgent need to construct a home on a planet without familiar ground and atmosphere, a society has developed on vast, floating platform where farms and cities exist and universities and even parks form some semblance of the lost world left some 900 million km behind.
It is in this new world that Inspector Mossa, a high ranking detective in the organisation that keeps law and order, and Pleiti, an academic at Giant’s leading university, Valdegeld, are trying to keep a fraught relationship going as a series of adverse events seek to both draw them together and keep them apart.
That is, I regret it now; but when I probe the gallimaufry of blurred memories from that night I can still feel the potency of the ungovernable impulse that demanded I place my palms on her bony shoulders, the elation of pouring my strength into the shove, of feeling her weight and solidity shocked backwards by my hand.
Now two mysteries in, and reunited years after they studied together at the same university at which Pleiti works as a Classicist, scouring old works of literature and non-fiction tomes to find out what Earth was once like with a view to recreating its ecosystems once again, the two women are trying to find their way back to the passionate relationship they once enjoyed.
But as The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses opens, whatever promise the first two instalments The Mimicking of Known Successes and The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles offered the two quite divergent sapphic lovers is proving more than a little fraught and hard to recapture.
Mossa has withdrawn, quite literally, to her home in Sembla, and when Pleiti goes to see her, makes it clear she simply wants her friend and lover to leave her alone.
Quite why that is must be left to the reading because it is central to the plot’s quite substantial emotional centre, but suffice to say, Pleiti is feeling quite and alone and rejected as she takes up an offer from an old uni friend, Petanj, to come to the university of Stortellen where she is stationed, and find out who is behind a series of terrible, intimidatory incidents that have befallen her leading light academic cousin, Vilette who is on the cusp of introducing a groundbreaking piece of tech that could change life on Giant completely.
Pleiti is no detective, and she knows it, but driven by the need to do something to help her friend and her cousin, she does her best to investigate as Mossa would and try to get to the bottom of a case that quickly goes from troubling to frightening before heading straight to deadly.
Events quickly overtake Pleiti, who, though she asks many of the right questions, and successfully begins to put some pieces of the puzzle together, cannot match Mossa’s ability to seek out, deduce and arrive at a firm conclusion.
Still she gives it her best shot, and much of what drives The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses is Pleiti attempting to be a good friend as she nurses a broken heart of sorts.
Much like the first two novellas in the finely wrought series that boasts beautifully realised characters, astonishingly fast but completely enthralling world-building and use of language that is intriguingly and poetic in equal measure, the steampunk futurist glories of The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses rest on the way in which Older uses the stories as much to explore the human condition and the vagaries of civilisational existence while offering a perfectly wrought whodunnit.
There is a great deal of satisfaction to be had in simply soaking it all up, and while there are no doubt some readers who will find a great deal of satisfaction in connecting the dots and working out whodunnit, just as many will be content to simply and contentedly exist in Pleiti and Mossa’s world.
There was a grinding sound as we docked; Mossa waited for the safety light to ignite, then yanked the crank around. The lock thunked; we pushed the door in concert, and it opened into chaos.
There is undoubtedly a cosiness to The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses which stands in stark contrast to the some of the base human emotions and dark intent that drives the plot of the novella.
But that is the joy of cosy mysteries; for all the dark uncertainty and what-ifs swirling around you, there is a hearty degree of loveliness to be had from being in a world where lovers have each other’s backs and friends and cousins will do what they can for each other.
And while that sense of enveloping found family is shaky at best for much of The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses, it is still present in some form so that even when some great surprises emerge and quite awful thing are said and done, and you have to wonder about how terrible people can be to each other, you are always reminded that that connection which underlies this whole series is still very much in place.
It makes sense – even the most sure and loved-up of relationships shake and tremble at times, as limited perspectives clash and hearts run hard and messily up against each other, and The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses thrives in that uncertainty because at its heart it knows that love, as justice always assuredly does in these tales, will find a way and that what looked lost will be found and that life, in defiance of all the terrible things that can make it up, will favour the better angels of its make-up and emerge with head held high, truth firmly upheld and love in the ascendancy once again.
Now, if we can just have fourth instalment sometime next year please …