I read Flood before reading that Baxter already had a sequel in the works and, to be honest, I couldn’t understand why. Flood, it seemed to me, stood neat and perfectly self-contained whole. Yes the ending was a bit ambiguous, and yes there were clearly plot threads that could still be picked at but none of the seemed essential. The characters I was interested in while reading Flood seemed, to me, to have got to the places they need to go.

 

One of the problems with Ark, therefore, is that Baxter has to introduce us to a whole new set of characters before the story can (literally) take off – and he does it at some length. Ark doesn’t start where Flood stopped, instead it rewinds the clock and leads us through the training, mishaps and misadventures of the crew who will eventually go into space aboard one of the books several arks. It isn’t until around half-way through the novel that we actually catch up to the events at the end of Flood and, to be honest, I was kicking my heals in frustration wanting the story to get on with it while the waters were rising again around the remnants of society. What’s strange here is that the first section of the books seems to go into minute detail about the build up to the take-off but after that the whole book seems weirdly compressed.

 

After take-off Baxter’s story becomes a generation-ship story as the crew struggles to hold their craft and increasingly fractured society together as they travel to a new planetary system. The problem is, for me, is that they crumble too easily, within a few years they have so completely lost their grip that they’re trying to dig their way out of the spacecraft in the belief that it’s a simulation.

 

Perhaps I have more faith in the ability of human beings to hold themselves together in the face of adversity but the collapse of this small community into feudalism and irrationality just seems too quick, too plot convenient and ultimately too unconvincing. It does fundamental damage to Ark both as a standalone novel and, particularly, compared to the meticulously paced Flood.

 

That’s not to say that the book doesn’t contain some truly breathtaking moments – the final chapters, especially the choice made by those still travelling in space – had (on this reader, anyway) a powerful emotional impact. There’s something inevitable, logical and yet utterly inhumane in their choice that almost makes up for everything that’s gone before.

 

With Gardens of the Sun I guessed that a sequel was inevitable when I finished reading The Quiet War – too many of the main characters were left in an unresolved limbo – but, again, I wasn’t that excited by the idea of another volume, even though I thought McAuley did a magnificent job with the first book. I was happy with the sense of indeterminacy about the future. It seemed to me that The Quiet War very neatly captures the indeterminacy of modern conflicts, the shuffling of paper armies, the struggle for control of the agenda and the definition of truth and the positioning that inevitably takes place. I didn’t even mind that the bad guys had appeared to win since it was obvious from the novel that their victory was contingent and against the historical flow.

 

The sequel, Gardens of the Sun lacks much of the moral fuzziness that made The Quiet War so interesting – lines have been drawn, characters have chosen their sides, the war has been won and what’s left is the mopping up.

 

Of course it’s more complicated than that and, in an unlikely act of political/social/military jujitsu the Outers who had been routed at the end of the first novel achieve something dangerously close to the infamous science fiction revolution to come out winners. (It isn’t quite a case of: “I, the wise one, have come to show you the truth you will now all slap your foreheads and wonders why you hadn’t thought of that before while succumbing quietly to my new world order” – but it’s pretty close. )

 

But it’s not really the big picture that bothers me (though I did find it unrealistic), it’s what McAuley does with the characters that bother me.

 

Again, as with Ark, there’s a pile of stuff here I loved. There’s fantastic world-building and, even if the novel sometimes spends too long wandering among every last far-flung piece of rock in the solar system, there are some wonderful descriptive passages of the weird places that circle our sun. And some of the individual story arcs are, I think, pretty impressive. Macy Minot does interesting things, and so does the pilot (whose name escapes me) but I’m not sure everything hangs together as convincingly as it did the first time round. Rather than characters’ stories winding more tightly together toward the key moment of crisis as the do in The Quiet War, here some of them seem to be unspooling away from each other, and that makes the whole thing feel less cohesive.

 

And some of the threads just don’t seem to develop fully.

 

Sri Hong Owen disappears in the middle of the novel – seemingly frustrated in her attempts to understand the work of the great gene-wizard Avernus. Then, at the end, she suddenly reappears as a force capable of changing the course of events in the whole solar system and as something not quite human. The transformation occurs off screen and I wondered why?

 

The spy begins on a quest to find his true love, wanders around, is disappointed, goes to jail, discovers he’s dying, travels to a jail on the moon, does some fighting, dies. I found this thread particularly baffling as I wasn’t at all sure how it was contributing to the larger story and it didn’t go anywhere.

 

But it’s Loc Ifrahim’s path that most irritated me. In the beginning he continues to try and scam his way up the greasy pole, falls in love, loses his love, appears on the path to redemption and then his character is just chucked away.

 

At the end of the novel McAuley reveals the strange fate of Sri Hong Owen and her ultimate – ultimately solipsistic – plan for the eternal life amongst the stars. It seems to me that Loc Ifrahim – given his history with Sri, his previous attempts to manoeuvre her and her work for his advantage and his hard-won foot on the path to some sort of redemption – would have been the perfect pair of eyes to see that final scene through. But we don’t – instead McAuley uses her gene-enhanced son (a character who barely appears until the last quarter of Gardens of the Sun) and who has little real resonance for the reader.

 

It seems to me to be a mistake – and, I think, a revealing one. I’m not sure, by the end of the second volume, McAuley is still interested in the characters that have been with him since The Quiet War. In fact, I’m not sure if he isn’t a little bored of them. Which might be why the last half of Gardens of the Sun sees the introduction of so many new characters and the sidelining (or killing) of most of the original characters who were carried over from the first volume. And, if McAuley doesn’t really care about them, why should we?

 

So two novels that I wanted to like more than I did, two second halves that aren’t quite up to the quality of their excellent predecessors, but also two books that, in parts, feature astonishingly good writing.

 

These sequels certainly aren’t bad enough to sour your memory of the first book, but neither are the essential reading.