{"id":2780,"date":"2015-10-18T02:08:14","date_gmt":"2015-10-18T01:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=2780"},"modified":"2020-04-22T02:39:43","modified_gmt":"2020-04-22T01:39:43","slug":"review-dark-star-by-oliver-langmead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=2780","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: DARK STAR BY OLIVER LANGMEAD"},"content":{"rendered":"

Untold riches and global celebrity? Whatever it was that possessed Oliver Langmead to write Dark Star<\/em>, we must hope that it was neither of the above. Because who, in their right mind, writes a science fiction\/noir detective story (and it is very noir, almost pitch black) in the form of an epic poem? And who, in their right mind, buys such a book?<\/p>\n

Reader, I have no answers to any of these questions. Indeed Dark Star<\/em> is a riddle I have totally failed to solve. In many respects it is a very conventional novel. Its science fictional part \u2013 a human pioneer society gradually devolving on a strange planet – is every bit as familiar as its detective elements \u2013 a burnt out cop caught in a web of corruption that\u2019s far above his pay grade. The setting is pleasingly peculiar \u2013 the story take place on Vox, a city on a world that circles a star that emits no light. Darkness presses in on all sides and this has created a society where light has become a conspicuous sign of wealth and privilege. There is an underclass, condemned to perpetual darkness, who are desperate, vaguely threatening, but ultimately helpless. This weirdness, however, is undercut by familiarity \u2013 the streets our protagonists (Virgil and Dante \u2013 I know, right?) walk are not alien, they have been worn smooth by the shoe leather of ten thousand hard-boiled shamuses who passed this way before. This rubbing together of the strangeness of place and the conventional familiarity of the detectives’ milieu\u00a0\u2013 corrupt colleagues, dodgy dealing city officials and unworldly scientists \u2013 results in a whole that is an uneasy and not always satisfying compromise.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that the entire piece is entirely unsuccessful. Langmead plays with his light and dark world to conjure some occasionally startling images. If it’s not quite the chiaroscuro of the old masters, it is still often effective. The impact of the Prometheus drug is neatly imagined. And the moment of (literal) revelation at the story\u2019s climax is a built around a series of affecting scenes.<\/p>\n

\"Dog,<\/a>
Dog, dressed as Chewbacca. Don’t do this to the ancestor of once proud wolves.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But then you have the form. I\u2019ll confess my heart sank at the idea of two hundred pages of science fictional poetry. It seemed as ill-judged a decision as taking a perfectly respectable dog and dressing it up as Chewbacca. The first time you see a picture it seems cute, even mildly amusing. Then you look into the eyes of the dog \u2013 whether it is the smallest pug or some monstrous wolfhound \u2013 and you see pain and humiliation. And you remember, for a moment, that this poor, damned, thing had lupine ancestors roaming the steppes and terrorising every creature they met. It doesn\u2019t matter how good the Chewbacca costume is, once you\u2019ve looked into that puppy\u2019s eyes it\u2019s always going to change how you feel about the picture. So it is with this poem. At first it seems like a good trick, cute, even a bit funny. Then you look into its pages\u00a0and you wonder if perhaps the proud ancestors of this beast might not look on what is being done to its progeny and feel a touch… miffed? Or at least slightly disappointed? Dark Star<\/em> never\u00a0quite overcomes the sense that the burdens of the past weigh heavily on its slim spine. The book isn\u2019t quite squashed by these burdens but it does bend under the weight of never entirely triumphing in any of its constituent parts \u2013 and, particularly, I was never convinced by its poetry.<\/p>\n

Indeed, one of the disappointments of Dark Star<\/em> is that Langmead doesn\u2019t make quite enough of his bold choice of form and doesn\u2019t engage directly enough with the poetic traditions it invokes. Too often the words can zip by without making the impact that I hoped they would. It\u2019s not that Dark Star<\/em> is thoughtlessly written, but it\u2019s too smoothed off \u2013 the words don\u2019t poke the reader in the eye as often as they should. Too much of the weirdness of Dark Star<\/em> is invested in the setting and not enough in the language. The text does not have\u00a0the repetition or formulaic structures that my (limited) experience of epic poems led me to expect. Ultimately, Dark Star<\/em>, a two-hundred- page poem just isn\u2019t poetic enough, often enough.<\/p>\n

All that said, it\u2019s hard to be unkind to a book written with such preposterous ambition. Just having the idea, and the courage to make the idea real, gives author Langmead a significant degree of leeway. Honestly, how many two hundred page science fiction poems do you expect to be presented with in\u00a0a single lifetime?\u00a0As a detective story Dark Star<\/em> is a reasonably engaging, unlikely tale and as a work of science fiction it\u2019s got an interesting and imaginative setting. As a work of epic poetry it was neither quite epic nor quite poetic enough for me but, if Dark Star<\/em> is no Iliad<\/em> or Beowulf<\/em> then Langmead is hardly the first author to fall short of that mark.<\/p>\n

Dark Star<\/em> by Oliver Langmead
\n(Unsung Stories, 2015)
\nA shorter version of this review was
\noriginally published in VECTOR<\/em> 281 (2015)<\/strong><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Untold riches and global celebrity? Whatever it was that possessed Oliver Langmead to write Dark Star, we must hope that it was neither of the above. Because who, in their right mind, writes a science fiction\/noir detective story (and it is very noir, almost pitch black) in the form of an epic poem? And who, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[15,10],"tags":[127,69,73,47,43,46],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27AP7-IQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2780"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2780"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2790,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2780\/revisions\/2790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}