Paul’s latest is another book (there’s been a few lately) that begins and makes the reader think they’re reading one type of novel before veering off into a very different story.
The novel is separated into two books. When I started the first one, I thought it was a story straight out of Fantasy. With its talk of notaries and supplicants, it felt almost Dickensian, a point compounded by the fact that our hero Pilgrim Saltmire is a secretary to Master Able, recently deceased, but also a scholar and a curator of books.
When Pilgrim goes in search of an ancient map that is taken from him, one that hints of a world where the feral bears may have had cities in the past and a connection to the strange alien ogres, the more modern wider world beyond Pilgrim’s town of Highwater Reach reveals itself to be somewhat steampunkish, with train travel, printing presses and balloons.
It is only as this journey progresses that I realised that it was something more than this story of animals with human traits at first suggested. The tribes whose lives we quickly become immersed in do not seem like something from science fiction at all, instead reading rather like Tolkien’s Hobbits in terms of a bucolic lifestyle (although I’d be tempted to suggest Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara rather than Tolkien), with a Victorian-style manner.
Paul manages to do that clever thing of telling stories from non-human perspectives and yet still embody human characteristics – a thirst for knowledge and understanding, love, friendship, envy, and even bureaucracy! – all of which make the characters quite endearing. At times the lifestyle of these creatures is more enviable than that of the humans, managing a lifestyle on the whole mainly without violence and in keeping with the nature of their planet. It is also interesting how much the species imitate human nature – there’s a wry look at cult religion and paranoid conspiracy theories that also feels strangely appropriate to us humans, as too the revelation of an Invisible College, run by females who wish to enable the emancipation of women. Injustice exists in different yet recognisable ways here too.
It is in the second part of the book that Paul’s long game is revealed. There is a change in style and tone in this latter part of the novel. If I had to compare Beyond the Burn Line here, too, then Part Two is rather like Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, or Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia, in its descriptions of an evolving, uplifted society and their connection to other species.
We still have a continuing search for the ancient map, but this quest is with the next generation, beyond Pilgrim. Here we see ‘ogres’ working alongside Pilgrim’s descendants in order to recover the lost map. Goodwill Saltmire, Pilgrim’s nephew, and the ogre Ysbel Moonsdaughter hope to find the answer to a mystery, but in their travels discover that there is more to the map and their world than they realised. We discover the origins of Pilgrim’s people, their relationship to humans and their past, as well as the origins of Mother, the deity who they worship, and their relationship with the feral bears, who they generally kill on sight.
By the end a much bigger story is revealed, and the consequences of this discovery are played out to an interesting conclusion. The background to this world and the creatures upon it are revealed, and the story’s science-fictional element is made clear.
In summary then, as with the best of Paul’s work, Beyond the Burn Line is inventive and smart, engaging and logical. As a reader I found myself caring a great deal about what happens to Pilgrim, his descendants, and their world, until by the end when the story was done, I was sad to find it finished.
Beyond the Burn Line shows us what a skilled writer can do. Imaginative, intelligent world building, with a far-future setting that allows our characters, whilst different, to exhibit endearingly human traits. It is going to be one of my books of the year, I think.
Beyond the Burn Line by Paul McAuley
Published by Gollancz, September 2022
464 pages
ISBN: 978-139 9603 713
Review by Mark Yon
