Author: Richard Harland
Cover Artist: David Altheim
Publisher: Penguin
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date: 2000
This is a highly original fantasy from Australian author Richard Harland. It’s a young adult novel that tells of a war between the forces of Heaven and earth.
The book begins with the People. They’re a tribe of the primitive folk called Residuals. Ostensibly, they’re allies of the brutal Humen, but they’re really just fodder for the Humen war machine. Every year a Selector comes and recruits a suitable candidate for military service and they’re never seen again.
Because the Selectors take only the best and brightest, the tribe has experienced a dumbing down over the generations, and are now very conservative and stolid.
But Ferren is different from the other members of the tribe. While they huddle together in fear under a blanket during the nightly battles, he peeks from the edge at the shape of wings through the clouds, stabs of red light striking the sky from below, and the globular vehicles of the Celestial hosts.
One night he sees a crash-landing globe. It contains the angel Miriael (Fourteenth Angel of Observance). Normally, a crashed angel would expire from contact with the material world, but she survives and becomes physical when Ferren finds her and feeds her.
Ferren’s innocent secret meetings with the priggish angel come to a disastrous end when they are discovered by the chief’s daughter, Zonda. Zonda likes Ferren, but betrays him, forcing him to flee. When the Selectors come she tells them of Miriael.
Ferren, thinking Miriael has been captured, heads along the Humen overbridge highway to find their Camp and rescue her. But Miriael has instead been imprisoned by the People …
Miriael and Zonda are probably the most interesting characters, as each grows over the course of the book. Miriael comes to delight in her new physicality and gains empathy for the Residuals, and Zonda matures from being a crude and spiteful girl.
The book is set a thousand years in the future, and Harland outlines the future history in a timeline at the start of the book. He’s created a scenario that encompasses heaven and earth and really captures your imagination.
A team of scientists in the 21st century discover a way to reanimate the dead, which drags souls back from the afterlife. Using information gleaned from the reanimated, Earth launches a team of ‘psychonauts’ who profane the fields of heaven.
They are expelled and Heaven closed itself to new souls from earth, fearing spies. This causes the dead to rise, which throws human civilisation into chaos.
When the situation recovers, human emissaries secretly affix a kind of hook to the underside of heaven, which is dragged down into the material and temporal plane.
Hundreds of thousands of mortal tourists fly up to experience the delights of the newly visible heaven, causing huge sections to collapse onto earth, incinerating Europe and Asia. The Supreme Trinity withdraws into the highest sphere of heaven in grief, sealing itself off.
Heaven is reorganised with a War Council taking charge of its defence. On earth the sinister Doctors come to rule, creating the new, soulless race of Humen. The ensuing war lasts for centuries.
Harland’s book is written in a series of ultra-short chapters, or vignettes, with just a handful of pages each. It’s written simply, but vividly. I strongly recommend it! It reminds me somehow of Terry Gilliam’s fantastic movies …
The book isn’t religious (or anti-religious, like Philip Pullman’s work), but has a humanist message, and moments of insight into human nature. The Residuals have to find a place for themselves, and a sense of self-worth, in the middle-ground between the sacred and the profane.
