Book Review: The Many-Coloured Land

The Many-Coloured Land: First book (of 4) in the Saga of the Exiles by Julian May.

I first read this book many years ago - probably not long after it was first published (1982), as I remember having to wait for the later books to come out. I also remember not noticing until quite some time later that a further trilogy - the Galactic Milieu - was out, and avidly reading those too.

Today I completed re-reading this first exposure to the Galactic Milieu, the Pliocene Epoch, the Tanu and the Firvulag on account of it being my choice for July's book in our book club. Unusually for me I've not reread it in the intervening 25 years and starting it again, this time in the knowledge that I'd recommended it to thirty-odd people almost none of whom are science fiction fans, I found quite a daunting prospect. Even more so after the first thirty pages.

Many-Coloured Land is one of those books that has to introduce very many key characters quickly before the story can really start, and May achieves this by providing short vignettes into the characters' back-stories, basically to set up why they've decided to turn their collective back on the 22nd century: a universe in which Earth has joined the Galactic Milieu of races, and at least some of its inhabitants have achieved "metapsychic operancy" (i.e. they have mind powers). But overloaded onto these vignettes is a host of detail on May's universe itself, the new races mankind has come into contact with, new technologies, the time gate, the colonised worlds, revised political structures. It's not exactly rare for science fiction novels to have to do this (think Dune!) but when you're reading it with the constant hope that a group of non-sci-fi-loving friends will enjoy it, these things stand out as making the opening chapters of the book...well...somewhat less than appealing.

It's been brought home to me several times recently how some of the best fiction around simply breaks the rules. In this case the "rule" I'm talking about is the received wisdom that you have to have hooked your audience within the first page - two at most. Now OK, if you assume May's target audience is SF readers and she's not interested whether anyone outside the genre picks it up, there's no problem. But rereading this novel after such a long time - it almost put me off from continuing, and I'm a lifelong fan of the genre and I already know I love this book!

Maybe those "rules" only apply to general fiction, where something has to be done to make the books stand out from the crowd. Maybe genre fiction isn't so tied to the opening. If you like horror, or crime, or SF, you can trust that you'll get to the gory/illegal/spacey stuff eventually so you're more inclined to put up with an inauspicious start. I don't know. All I know is it was tough going for the first 30-50 pages.

But then it took off.

May assembles a raggedy bunch of ne'er-do-wells and misfits and shoots them 6 million years into Earth's past into a well-researched epoch that should be just about perfect for humans to live an idyllic rural life. Temperate weather, lots of plant and animal life, rich fertile soils and no (or very few) dangerous animals about. Only it's not perfect, because it's been colonised by an exotic race - the Tanu - who have technologically enhanced mind powers and who have all but enslaved the humans who have been arriving via the time gate for the past forty or so years.

The subject of mind power is the one thing that makes this story irresistible for me. Since right back when I first read "The Not-Men" I've been enthralled by the idea of mental power. May assigns some new names and clear definitions to the various powers and divides them into five classes - creativity, coercion, farsensing, psychokinesis and redaction - but all the expected powers are there and with them the associated problems: rogue users, latency, unbalanced powers, operants with only one power, demi-god-like characters with all five at full strength (which back in the Milieu world would have given them coveted "grand master" or even "paramount" status). But actually in this first book the metapsychic facet of the story is really only there as a backdrop. It's part of the wordwork. For the most part, the eight central characters are either latent or weakly operant, and only two of them are gifted with the Tanu "torcs" that allow their latent powers to be amplified to full operancy.

Far from relying on dazzling displays of mental pyrotechnics, May uses the presence of the powers in subtle ways, sometimes to help the story along, sometimes to introduce conflict. The heart of the story is, as it always must be, in the overcoming of adversity by characters you are led to care about. And the build up of action and reaction with ever bolder and more unexpected barriers to the goals of the story. In a complete reversal of the galloping overload of the first few chapters, later in the book May deftly introduces new elements to the story - the Firvulag, the Ship, the Grand Combat, the Hunt, the presence of Madam Guderian, the Howlers - all threads in her tapestry and even teasing hints of stories to come in the passing references to Diamond Mask and Jack the Bodiless - stories that would not actually come to print for another ten years but which clearly had already been planned in the author's mind.

My initial trepidation allayed after the first 50 pages, I thoroughly enjoyed becoming reacquainted with this tale and I will definitely pick up the remaining three books of the Saga of the Exiles, as well as the later Intervention and the Galactic Milieu Trilogy as soon as time allows. It remains to be seen what the rest of the club made of my choice!