CBR Bingo: ‘N’
I really enjoyed Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August when I read it last year, but, for whatever reason, I didn’t realize that she’d also written other books. I’ve been somewhat struggling to find appropriate books to review for the CBR Bingo “letter” squares, so when I saw Notes from the Burning Age on a recent trip to my local used bookstore, it both fit the ‘N’ square and looked intriguing.
Set in a future where the effects of climate change have been very eventful, the story is told from the perspective of Ven, a young man who previously worked for the “Temple”, a quasi-religious organization that works to prevent humanity from waking the spirits responsible for the “Burning Age” – a time of great climate crisis. They do this by controlling the media from the past (mostly from our present-day world), labelling problematic knowledge (e.g., information on how to create nuclear weapons, combustion engines, eugenics, etc.) as heresy, and preventing the access and spread of heretical materials. After leaving the Temple, Ven becomes involved with a radical group that wants him to translate material to further their human-centric agenda.
I really loved this, for multiple reasons. Ven is a fascinating character, who isn’t really an unreliable narrator as much as a purposefully deceitful one, which makes for some great plot twists.
The setting and the political structures that are set up also made me question and ponder previously held viewpoints (which I think is a sign of a great story!). Throughout my life, I’ve generally been a person who supports the freedom and availability of all kinds of knowledge and information, but there’s been a few books that I’ve read recently (this, along with Mark Lawrence’s The Book That Broke the World and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time), that have challenged my perspectives somewhat. The theme of hiding information that is so dangerous that we, as a society, never want anyone to use is a fascinating thing to explore (if a bit of a pessimistic view on human nature).
It’s likely a book that’s going to stay in my brain for a while.