Cage of Souls (Novel) Adam Tchaikovsky

 I've been on an Adam Tchaikovsky binge lately.  His novels are big and his plots are complicated but the stories zing along and are overflowing with interesting ideas. Cage of Souls is not a successor to the two Children of ... novels that I read recently but some themes are common to all three: the possibilities of hyper-accelerated evolution (whether or not caused by human intervention); the effects of a lack of continuity in  culture; an Earth that is gradually becoming uninhabitable.

We meet Stefan Advani as he is being hauled off from the last remaining city in the world to a floating prison in the jungle where the climate in enervating, the rules harsh, the vegetation exotic and the  bizarre animal life mostly dangerous.  Put like that his situation is not so very different from the one that my great-grandfather encountered  in the middle of the nineteenth century when the British government transported him to Tasmania. (Strictly speaking, I suppose, it might have been the Irish government but I doubt that the constitutional subtleties made much difference to him.)

The prisoners and guards are, to carry the analogy with my ancestor a bit further, a bizarre collection of maniacs,  desperadoes, jacks-in-office  and ordinary people swept along by social currents that are too strong for them.

Stefan's narrative of his time in prison is interspersed with flashbacks to  his early life and misadventures which provide a good idea  of the civilisation into which he was born. We are given a wealth of detail about the constitutional, academic, industrial and recreational life of the City of Shadrapar but that detail is so well integrated in the story that there is no hint of dryness in it.  

The basic definition  given in  E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel  has stuck in my mind since I was quite young: "Yes - oh dear yes - the novel tells a story." A book may do many other things as well but if it doesn't tell a story it isn't a novel. Novels that deal in ideas run a particular risk of becoming so caught up in  their own cleverness that they forget to keep answering the reader's constant question "What happened next?" I've so far read three of Adam Tchaikovsky's novels and he's never yet fallen into that trap.