Adam Roberts has put out about one book a year since 2000, and I’ve read two of them: The Thing Itself (2015), his masterful science fiction work that is simultaneously “rollicking” and “mostly about Immanuel Kant,” (and which I podcasted about with Joel Cuthbertson and Martyn Wendell Jones last year) and now Purgatory Mount (2021) (which I’ll be talking about today). I’ll be reading his most recent book, The This1, later on this year.
Purgatory Mount is about Otty Baragão, a precocious teenager who lives in Philadelphia about twenty minutes from now and spends her time hiving bees in her backyard and hanging out in a private Internet she’s made with her friends, working on a mysterious project that requires security from prying eyes, both governmental and non-governmental. When the government finds out about Otty’s secret project, they arrest her and her friends, but when the U.S. breaks into fractious civil war, they lose track of Otty in the system, and she is set loose, far from home and with many guns between her and everyone she knows. Can she return to Philadelphia and help her friends while moving through the edges of the conflict? What is her secret project? What is the connection between these things and the neurotoxin that is rendering huge swaths of the American population into dementia patients, unable to function without being plugged into smartphones that act like prosthetic memories?
Except: Purgatory Mount is also the story of the Forward, an incalculably powerful starship crewed by five nigh-immortal “humans” and their livestock (which includes a society of “pygs,” humans without the enhancements given to the Five, whom the pygs view as gods). The Forward has found an impossibly vast alien megastructure on the surface of a faraway planet, the structure of which is reminiscent of the depiction of Purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy. What is the purpose of the structure, and will the discovery of its secrets change the relationship between the pygs and their gods?
There are explicit connections between the two stories, as of course there are, but the Forward material also functions as a framing device and an animating metaphor for the whole project. The book opens with Forward and ends with Forward, but the Baragão portion takes up the bulk of the text, in the middle, and what the two parts do is, they fucking resonate. This sort of thing is catnip to me; inject it directly into my veins, etc.
The book is good, both as surface-level entertainment and as a meditation on the nature of atonement. I’d like to talk more about the second thing but, unfortunately, this is another book that I’m not smart enough to talk about, so I’ll talk more about that instead. (Surprise! Turns out this newsletter is mostly about Bill feeling inadequate.)
Purgatory Mount, like The Thing Itself, is “densely allusive,” as the literary critics might say. It makes references to Dante, yes, but also James Joyce, Greek mythology, The Lord of the Rings, and “You Can Call Me Al,” among many other things. Familiarity with these referents are not required for understanding what happens in the story, thankfully, but they lend the book much of its metaphorical weight.
Take, for instance, the recurring line “The Eagles are coming,” which Roberts puts both in narration in the Forward sections and at least once into Otty’s head during her portion. This works if you have no familiarity with The Lord of the Rings, but it injects the whole proceeding with more gravitas if you are familiar with its context. This is particularly because the line gains a lot of metaphorical ambiguity if you catch any of the other references. The “eagles” at issue might be Tolkien’s eagles, flying in to save the day and annoy tiresome, illiterate YouTubers, but they also might be Prometheus’s eagle, en route to tear out his liver again, or the eagles from the James Joyce2 epigraph at the beginning of the book that will fly out to “pull out [someone’s] eyes” if he doesn’t “apologize,” or maybe Apollo 11’s Eagle, en route to land on an alien world, or maybe the American eagle, here to spread imperialism and chaos3 everywhere it goes all in the name of freedom, or maybe any of a dozen other things.
The whole book is like this. Some references are mostly just there for the pleasurable shock of understanding that reference (as the Paul Simon one probably is), but others feel like keys to the deeper questions the book is asking. They thus aren’t exactly necessary for understanding the text, but how much richer the book is if you are conversant, as Roberts is, in Dante, Joyce, Kierkegaard, and Enid Blyton! The problem, of course, is that I am not conversant in any of these things.
This is not a criticism; Roberts is not obliged to confine his metaphorical references to things that I, specifically, am intimately familiar4 with. But it is a barrier preventing me from talking about the book as intelligently as I’d like. What useful insights can I contribute to discourse around Purgatory Mount when the only Dante I’ve read is the eight pages of Inferno I read in high school?
I am the sort of goober who believes that every unread book is, instead of an opportunity, the sign of a deep, personal failing on my part. (Why should anyone listen to what I have to say about anything? I’ve never even read Turgenev!)
But as I try to remind myself, very few people5 other than Roberts have read every single book in the world. The solution, if I want to be able to talk more intelligently about Purgatory Mount, is not to bemoan my wretched ignorance but rather just to read some Dante. I probably don’t even have to do that; I can, as Otty and her friends often do, start with some “side-googling” and go from there. Thus, Purgatory Mount doesn’t make me feel inferior; instead, it serves as a reading list, a gateway into reading many more things. Then those books, also filled with references to things I don’t understand, will themselves lead me to more cool books to read, and those to more, and on and on until the ending of the Age, when I will die still having read only the tiniest fraction of all the literature in the world, nervelessly clutching a just-started volume of Proust.
Which I understand to be about social media and Hegel. As Phil Christman said, Adam Roberts is the “coolest fucking guy.”
I’m going to have to read Joyce someday if only so that I can better understand Adam Roberts, since Joyce is a major referent in both this book and The Thing Itself. But I don’t want to read Joyce, Adam! Stop making me eat my vegetables!
Happy Fourth of July!
Though he’s welcome to do that; I’d be delighted to read a Roberts novel that draws most heavily on Shirley Jackson, Final Fantasy 7, and Brian Jacques. Give me a haunted house novel that references Sephiroth and Cluny the Scourge, Roberts. Also maybe the book could feature a chubby nerd who meets a very hot bartender/martial artist, and maybe they could fall in love, and maybe it turns out that the nerd is very special and is the key to saving the world? I don’t think this is too much to ask. Do this for me, your humble servant.
Other people who appear to have read every book in the world include David Bentley Hart, Daniel Lavery, B.D. McClay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and my friend Joel Cuthbertson.