I’ve always found Peter F Hamilton to be at his best
when he cross-pollinates the space opera with other genres. The settlers in ‘The
Reality Dysfunction’, like something out of a John Ford movie, or the
reincarnation of Al Capone in ‘The Neutronium Alchemist’, lending ideas-driven
sci-fi the vibe of a 1940s Warner Brothers gangster movie.
In his new stand-alone novel ‘Great North Road’,
Hamilton gives over almost half the narrative to a police procedural. It’s a
style of writing he’s used before and to good effect, in the excellent novella ‘Watching
Trees Grow’ and the sections of his Commonwealth Saga that feature the
emotionally aloof but intuitively brilliant Paula Myo.
In ‘Great North Road’, the detective shenanigans are
intercut with a military-scientific mission into the uncharted depths of a
planet semi-colonised as a paradise resort for the über-rich. The deeper these
gung-ho types penetrate into dense jungle, the more dangerous the mission
becomes. Something is picking them off one by one.
Yup, we’re in ‘Predator’ territory. Hamilton spins out
these sequences for all they’re worth and the further into the novel’s 1,080
pages you plunge, the more derivative it seems. What prevents this element of
the narrative from being a wholesale rip-off is the presence of Angela Tramelo,
one of Hamilton’s more intriguing female leads.
First introduced serving a life sentence for a mass
murder – her defence, quite understandably ridiculed, was that an alien did it –
Angela is pardoned with the caveat that she join the expedition as an advisor
when it transpires that an identical murder has occurred. Boasting the
incredibly watertight alibi that she was in prison at the time, Angela’s story
is given new credence.
Hamilton sketches in Angela’s backstory teasingly,
leaving the big reveals until the last hundred or so pages. Other characters
are rendered equally lovingly, but just as many remain ciphers. Hamilton’s
adolescent fixation with ludicrously rendered soft-core sex scenes carries over
from his other door-stoppers – likewise his fixation with hardware. But the
sheer intensity of the storytelling speaks for itself. ‘Great North Road’ might
look gargantuan enough to require annual leave just to finish the first
chapter, but you’ll be surprised how quickly a thousand pages speed by.
