Ian Tregillis’ Something More Than Night is one of those books that manages to be both clever and
exciting — you want to pause to admire all the brilliant ideas he’s tossing
around, but you have to keep turning pages to see how it’ll turn out. This tale
of angels is so brilliant, you might even forgive its nonsensical twist.
Very minor spoilers ahead…
The official description of Tregillis’ novel sounds
intriguing enough: a Raymond Chandler-style murder mystery set in Thomas
Aquinas’ version of Heaven. But the actual book is something quite a bit more
ambitious, and a bit less pastichey, than that description implies. There is
the Raymond Chandler aspect, but there’s also a lot else going on.
In Something More Than
Night, the Angel Gabriel is murdered, and his burning remains are falling
to Earth as the novel begins. A low-level grifter angel named Bayliss is tasked
with finding a quick replacement for Gabriel, to plug the hole in the firmament
left by Gabriel’s death. And that needs to be a human who’s converted into an
angel. So Bayliss goes to find a human who won’t rock the boat when he joins
the Heavenly Choir — but instead of the docile Martin, Bayliss accidentally
gets Martin’s troublesome sister, Molly.
Soon Molly is getting mixed up in all sorts of trouble —
including problems with whoever killed Gabriel. The dead angel was the guardian
of the Jericho Trumpet, a device of unthinkable cosmic power, and now the
Trumpet is missing and a bunch of Heaven’s major players want to get their mitts
on it. Meanwhile, there are other mysteries inside mysteries, all of them
pointing to a strange conspiracy.
The book is told from two viewpoints: Molly’s
straightforward third-person POV, as she adjusts to becoming an angel and
dealing with the Pleroma, the plane where angels live outside of the mortal
realm; and Bayliss’ Chandleresque first person narration, in which Bayliss is a
gumshoe who starts thinking of Molly as his client and uses old-timey slang to
describe everything. Bayliss’ parts of the narrative are entirely shaped like
an old pulp detective novel, to the point where all of the cosmic events of the
story are reshaped into a hard-luck story of a sad sack who’s in over his head.
The juxtaposition of the two kinds of narrative — Molly
dealing with the anguish and dislocation of losing her humanity and becoming a
strange immortal super-being, and Bayliss, getting knocked around by Cherubic
bruisers and nabbed by the angelic cops — creates something that’s thrilling
as well as poignant. Both of these angels are out of their depth in ways that
ratchet up the tension and create a nifty kind of suspense. Especially after
Molly makes one or two crucial mistakes, and Bayliss gets himself into some
brawls he can’t win.
What makes Something
More Than Night more than just a noir parody crossed with a cool story of
angelic politics is the amount of cleverness jam-packed into the
world-building, which winds up crossing over with the intricate plotting in a
nifty way. Without giving too much away, Tregillis has come up with a whole
cosmology that has a lot in common with Aquinas but is also its own thing,
complete with an origin of the universe and the nature of existence.
Plus despite its fantasy trappings, Something More Than Night turns out to be very much rooted in
science — Tregillis is a physicist, and he comes up with a strange science of
angel existence, rooted in quantum chromodynamics and other ideas of particle
physics. Some of the most dazzling leaps of prose come when Tregillis
intermingles Bayliss’ detective-novel slang or Molly’s grounded perspective
with the radical physics of the universe.
In Tregillis’ cosmology, angels existed before this
universe, but were tethered to this mortal plane by something they call
METATRON, or the voice of God. The proximity of so many angels intersecting in
one plane creates the consensus view of reality that we humans take for
granted, which they call the Mantle of Ontological Consistency, or MOC — so
the only reason why the laws of physics work and are consistent is because of
these angels.
There’s a lot more in the worldbuilding department, too.
It’s the near future, and there’s been some kind of space war, and the
atmosphere is full of deadly debris and humans can no longer go into space or
deploy satellites. And the oceans have basically died off due to acidification
and plankton death, and the whole planet is dying.
The whole thing almost feels like it was written by Mike
Carey, with an assist from Stephen Baxter, which is high praise.
Alas, the book’s final reveal seriously marred my otherwise
stratospheric opinion of the novel, and I see it made a lot of other readers on
Goodreads unhappy. I won’t give away what this final twist is, only that it
didn’t entirely ruin the book or anything. I still love the clever
worldbuilding and the characters — and the final twist, such as it is, does wind
up making sense and illuminating the novel’s themes. But it sits weirdly and
leaves you wondering if Tregillis had written himself into a corner or
something.
Still, even with a somewhat disappointing final surprise,
this is still one of my favorite books I’ve read lately and I still wound up
being happy with the ending overall. Tregillis creates an ambitious tale of
celestial conspiracy, with both huge ideas and an intimate scale, thanks to
some really strong writing and some brilliant world-building. This is a book
that will keep you reading late at night, and then leave you with really
intense, weird dreams.
