Purgatory Mount

A retelling of Dante's Inferno. I think this book suffers most from its own grandiose ideas. Really we have two separate stories - the first part and last part of the story deal with a space expedition which visits the titular mount. The middle part of the book, which comprises the majority of the actual story deals with the ideas of personal liberty in a dystopian future America. There is little to nothing linking these two parts together which is a bit jarring and there is a massive difference in style and enjoyability of the different sections.

Lets start with the good. The central part of the novel is by far the strongest. Here we have the story of a group of friends who have stolen some technology and hidden it on their own private network, amid a backdrop of a failing American state with open insurrection and uber surveillance. The themes of personal liberty and privacy are delved into in an interesting way, through the background of interrogation and multiple different actors trying to gain control of the information being held. This is gritty and dark stuff with an impressive world building and a wonderful sense of dystopian darkness.

The technology being hidden forms the loose bridge to the remaining part of the novel. This section unfortunately gets lost in its own grandiosity. Who are these beings? Why are they doing what they are doing? It all becomes quite messy and incomprehensible and lost in its own mythologizing. There are some interesting tidbits on the meaning of humanity and personhood but the jarring sense of disconnect from everything else just made it confusing. I struggled to understand the point of this and it ended up massively detracting from the rest of the story

This is a complex novel, that combines two very different stories which on casual inspection appear to have very little to do with each other. Or do they?

The title should clue you in that the novel takes some inspiration from Dante's classic poem, but it also becomes clear early on that it is also in dialogue with classic SFF - there's speculation about space elevators followed a few pages later by a namecheck for Arthur C Clarke, gullible misheard as Gully Foyle, and a frequent refrain of “the eagles are coming”. This idea of the past being inherent in the modern is also expressed in the preoccupation with original sin, memory and atonement that saturates the book. It's also interesting that of the two story strands, the one set earlier in the timeline has a distinctly YA feel, while the later is slower, more philosophical and more adult (to use a poor but easy term). You could tease out something here about how we grow from youth to age, and go back once more to the idea that our past defines our now - without being too spoilery, the reason why characters in the later strand are in the positions they are is embedded in the earlier story.

I might be making it sound very dry here, but it's worth noting that for all the philosophical musing of one strand and the convulsive violence and upheaval of the other, the novel is told with a lightness of touch and a delight in wordplay and puns that make it a very smooth read. There are frustrations - certain mysteries are left dangling - but overall this is very readable and very thought-provoking. Recommended.