'Wellington Thorneycroft is content picking pockets, taking Ambrosia, screwing prostitutes, and simply surviving in the hellish, walled City. But everything changes when he spots a spectral woman who wordlessly conveys the message: We’ll escape together. Suddenly, Thorneycroft’s life is turned upside down as he’s pulled along a circuitous path to an unknowable freedom: a path marked by violence, sex, and metaphysical dread.'
The City, a vast and unnamed place filled with the downtrodden and the dispossessed is the setting for Mark Richardson's novel, The Sun Casts No Shadow, a story that plays with reality and takes the reader on an odd journey into the unknowable.
Wellington Thorneycroft is an orphan, having grown up being told that the best life he can hope for is to become one of the depressed and faceless workers in The Factory, the massive facility at the heart of The City that belches out smoke and hides the sky for all those who live within the massive walls of the only place many of them will ever know. Deciding that he wants something else for himself he becomes a pickpocket, robbing other citizens of The City, spending his ill earned money of drink, drugs, and sex.
Wellington his mostly happy with this life, content enough to go through the motions of living in a place he can never hope to escape from. But one day this is all changed when he sees the vision of a beautiful woman, a woman who seems able to speak words directly into his head, telling him 'We'll escape together'.
This woman becomes an obsession for Wellington, and he begins to search for her in every crowd, every sleazy bar. When he finds a woman who looks similar to her Wellington begins to visit her at the club she works at everyday, and they eventually form a relationship, one that leads Wellington to begin working for one of the biggest, and most dangerous criminals in The City. Now his life begins to change, he has a girlfriend, he has money, connections, power. He begins to forget about the woman from his vision; but when a job goes wrong Wellington not only learns that the woman really does exist, but his entire life spirals out of control and he'll be forced to choose if he really does want to escape with her or not.
The world of The Sun Casts No Shadow is a strange one, and for a lot of the time it feels like a pretty bleak science fiction story, taking readers to some strange future city where humanity is existing within its walls. People have forgotten what's outside of their city, content to live, work, and die inside their massive prison, due in part to the mood altering drugs that run freely. It feels dystopian, and borderline apocalyptic; but it's not until we begin to learn more that we see hints that there might be something else to this world, something fantastical. Mark Richardson weaves elements of fantasy and the supernatural into the narrative in subtle ways, and you begin to question exactly what type of story this is and the unexplained becomes more and more commonplace.
Wellington is a great antagonist to explore this world with. At first he seems as hopeless as everyone else, having long ago given himself over to living out his days in relative squalor inside The City. He doesn't question what lies beyond the walls, what goes on inside the factory, or if there could be something better. He's as much a victim as everyone else there, ground down by a lifetime of hopelessness. Over the course of the book, however, he beings to see that there might be more to the world than he knows. He begins to question what might be possible, and he starts to hope for a better fate for himself.
Instead of being inspiring, this hope feels so tragic. Wellington seems to be the only person who can see that The City isn't a good thing, that people need to dream of more, and the fact that he's alone in this is so sad at times. Part of me wished that he'd have been able to convince others of what he came to learn over the course of the book, that he might be the start of bigger and better things for everyone, that his refusal to live as part of this system would be a catalyst for change and betterment. Sadly, much like in the real world a single person is often not enough to foment any real change, and the book feels more like a tragedy than anything else.
The way the book manages to walk this fine line between hope and tragedy is honestly very impressive, and it skips between moments that feel like fantasy and grim darkness without skipping a beat, but it all works so well together. Richardson does a lot of world-building, yet leaves out enough detail that you're not quite sure what could really be going on, or what could be possible. It feels incredibly grounded at times, and so dreamlike the next. I feel like the story shouldn't work, that there's so many factors that should clash against each other and stop it from making sense, yet it all seems to perfect together.
I'm not sure if there's a good way of describing The Sun Casts No Shadow without it sounding like an odd, jumbled mess, but it's so not that. It's a book of contradictions and opposites that make a cohesive whole where it feels like anything is possible, yet you come to feel like there was only the one way the story could possibly have ended. It's a book that is so hard to describe, but so easy to recommend. So do yourself a favour and go and give it a read as soon as you can.
No comments:
Post a Comment