Review - Kéthani, by Eric Brown

As I said in earlier posts, the Solaris anthologies of original stories are being of great help to us readers, reviewers and writers alike as a showcase where we can get up to speed with what´s going on in SF and Fantasy right now.
It was on The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction that I first read an Eric Brown story. Since then I also read and reviewed here Helix, and I´m looking forward to read his latest book, Necropath.

But the very first story I read by him was The Farewell Party. A nice story, revolving around a group of friends who decide to commit suicide together to be reborn in an alien world, touched me as a very moving narrative. I even got sad at the end, even knowing that all would end well for them - or was it? Be that as it may, I loved that story. So, not long after, when I learned that this story was in fact one of the stories of the fix-up novel Kéthani, I became very interested in reading the book.

And I wasn´t disappointed. Kéthani is composed of nine stories, all intermingled by small interludes written by the protagonist, Dr. Khalid Azzam. He is one of the first witnesses of mankind´s first contact, with the benevolent Kéthani, a race from Delta Pavonis that come not to occupy and invade Earth, but has come to stay anyway, and bringing a gift that would change their lives forever.

The stories comprise a period of twenty years, along which daily life slowly allows itself to continue, though not in the same way it did before. When the story of the book begins, Khalid is in his mid-twenties, finishing his internship at Bradley General Hospital in West Yorkshire, and is committed to Zara, who he´s going to marry in eighteen months.

Each story is told by the POV of one of the characters, most of them narrated in first person (with the exception of the first story, The Ferryman, which I don´t know if it was purposefully done, maybe because of the protagonist, a very reclusive man; on the other hand, the fifth story, The Touch of Angels, also told in the third person, have nothing of the sort).

Kéthani opens with a Prelude called The Coming of the Kéthani, where we witness the sudden arrival of one of the thousand of alien towers that appears all over the world, through the eyes of Khalid, Zara, and some other people with whom he had chatted a few times in The Fleece, the local pub, like Richard Lincoln and Jeff Morrow. All of them along, with others, will play important parts in the following stories.

The first story, Ferryman, tells the story of big and shy Richard Lincoln, a man who went to work for the Kéthani taking the bodies of the recently deceased to the Station where they will be sent to space and resurrected. But not everyone can be taken to the Onward Stations. Only people who have agreed in putting implants can be brought back to life - and this raises all sorts of issues regarding from some sort of alien manipulation to religious matters (people who won´t let themselves be implanted). Lincoln decided to have one; his wife, Barbara, didn´t; this, and his silence, caused their divorce. Later, when she dies, this will make all the difference - or will it?

The second story, Onward Station, presents us to Jeffrey Morrow, a Film Studies teacher in the local school, and his tragic losses. His wife died in an accident one month before the Kéthani came, and now, two years later, he can´t forgive the universe, so to speak, for what happened. Suddenly, without warning, he falls in love with Claudine Hainault, an eighteen-year-old student. But their relationship is full of bliss and pain - much more pain than bliss. Things already start in a sort of downward spiral when her alcoholic mother dies. The end is tragic, both for Claudine and for Jeffrey.

The third story takes place five years after the coming of the Kéthani, and The Kéthani Inheritance tells the story of Benjamin Knightly, who was visiting his father, in a nursing home, when he meets Elisabeth Carstairs, whose mother is also ill.
They start seeing each other until Benjamin manages to invite her for dinner. From this point on, things start running smoothly, and they become lovers. But their relationship is not easy at all, because she is implanted, and he isn´t. When his father dies, Benjamin´s world falls apart, because his old man was implanted, so he will come back in six months, liks every resurrected human, "renewed, younger, full of life". He will come back to a Benjamin who was already prepared to die, and who isn´t still sure he doesn´t want to, much to Elizabeth´s dismay.

Thursday´s Child, the next story, is about the sufferings of Daniel Chester, another ferryman, whose eight-year-old daughter isn´t implanted because of the religious convictions of his ex-wife. By that time, people at the stations are discovering that many humans are using fake implants so they can´t be harassed by the real implantees. Things go pretty awful for him when his daughter is diagnosed with leukemia. But, when Chester´s ex-wife finally gives in and allows the implantation process -- yes, you can pretty much imagine what happens then. Or not, because there´s a clever plot twist in the end.

Ten years after the arrival of the Kéthani, Khalid and Zara´s marriage is not going well, and, in The Touch of Angels, a new member of the pub gang, detective doug Standish, must solve a rather delicate murder case. Sarah Roberts, a colleague of Richard Lincoln, is found dead at her home. Thing is, there´s no sign of breaking in; the killer must have been an acquaintance of the victim. And there´s more: Sarah´s implant is dead. And it wasn´t a fake one.

The Touch of Angels is the longest piece of the book, and it´s one of the most interesting, because it doesn´t involve matters of religion and who´s getting their implants or not: the heart of the matter here is that we have never seen the Kéthani until now, and humankind doesn´t even know what they look like. But apparently they are already among us, disguised as humans. And that´s where things really start to get interesting.

The six story, The Wisdom of the Dead, is told in the first person by Richard Lincoln (which makes null and void my petty theory above on the matter of the change of narrative voice). The story, unlike the other so far, begins at The Fleece, where Khalid is announcing to his friends that he and Zara are separating. First, she leaves him, but after a while she wants a divorce to marry another man. Khalid confronts her new lover, beats the crap out of him -- and soon after that he is murdered.

The police can´t find the murderer, but these things doesn´t have the same importance they had once - for Khalid was implanted, and he returns to Earth six months later, as almost all resurrected humans choose to do. And, as all of them, he refuses to tell anyone what happened in this period among the Kéthani - but we came to know what happened to him upon the moment of his death.

The seventh story, A Heritage of Stars, shows a new regular of The Fleece, Stuart Kingsley, lecturer in medieval French at Leeds University, who falls in love with Sam, a barmaid in the pub. One year after they marry, Sam confronts him, wanting to know why does he love her, if she is so uneducated, and she feels so inadequate to a man of his standing. He doesn´t feel to same, and he does everything to assuage her fears. A few days after attending the returning ceremony of a friend of Stuart´s who had died of a heart attack six months earlier, he and Sam have a talk about love. Sam is concerned about what is going to happen when they die and return - if this process will kill their love in the end. Stuart does his best to reassure her again - but right after that, he dies in a car crash.

He spents the next six months with the Kéthani - six months which he can´t quite recall qhen he gets back to Earth. But, when he does, he finds out that Sam commited suicide two days after his death. So she will get back two days after his return. Obviously, when she returns, it becomes clear to Stuart that things will never be the same again for the couple - if they can still live as a couple, that is.

Matthew´s Passion, the eighth story, is the only one written with another author. Told by Brown with Tony Ballantyne, the story presents another new character, musician Andy Souter, who joins the gang of The Fleece thirteen years after the coming of the Kéthani. Andy meets a man called Matthew Renbourn in the pub; a priest at St. Luke´s Church, Matthew is considered "an exceptional man" by Andy, not only because he is also a musician, though an amateur, but because he is implanted, despite being a priest.

Excited by Matthew´s good humor and love for music, Andy joins the church orchestra. But not everything is going well in Matthew´s life, because we soon learn that he feels that he´s being followed by strange beings he can only see in the edge of his vision. When he tells that to his friends at The Fleece, they remember the Sarah Roberts episode and all the talk about if she was a Kéthani emissary or not after all. But most of them dismiss the possibility that Matthew is seeing Kéthans, attributing is to stress-related hallucinations.

Slowly but steadily, Matthew starts to crack. His suffering (Andy calls it his passion) becomes his undoing. One day, he simply doesn´t appear to the orchestra rehearsal. Andy goes at his place to check on him, and finds him dead, apparently by natural causes. He seems peaceful.

When he returns, he seems indeed a changed man, much more in peace with himself and the world around him. One day, he calls Andy to his home and explains him what really happened when he died. He tells his friend that one of the Kéthans appeared and, without saying a word, touched his heart, so that he could pass on the his next phase - namely, to spread the word of God to the stars. He was given the option of returning to Earth or going among the stars, to explore the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. And he accepts it.

The next story, A Choice of Eternities, takes place two years after Matthew returned to the stars, with an interesting version of the already much explored theme of "to die or not to die": Dr. Khalid visits a certain Mrs. Emmett, a widow whose only child, thirty-year old David, is mentally impaired. Mrs. Emmett is a very religious woman, and won´t hear a word about having herself implanted - but Khalid is there to convince her to let David be implanted. Otherwise, he will die of lung cancer in a few months. The question is, will the time among the Kéthani and the resurrection change David fundamentally? And, if it doesn´t, how can he survive his mother, who won´t be around for him?

The answer is rather obvious: David returns a changed man, with no mental impairment at all. And his mother died before his return, so she will never see what the Kéthani did for him.

The last story, The Farewell Party, wraps it all up, reuniting the old and new members of The Fleece twenty years after the Kéthani arrived for a series of meetings with a writer called Gregory Merrall, a man who convinces them all to kill themselves in order to join the crescent group of humans who are going to the stars.

A question made in one of the first stories is: "But why had the Kéthani made their offer to humankind?" There is no answer to that. Never.

Kéthani reminded me briefly of Damon Knight´s Why Do Birds. There are no answers as to the aliens purposes - which can be a relatively easy McGuffin (though, in the case of Knight´s novel, I´ve been waiting for a possible sequel (which in all probability would be called "Suddenly Appear") until his death, and he, alas, came with none.)

In the case of Kéthani, though, after a second reading I´m inclined to say that no sequel is necessary. Even though the stories are interesting for the human aspect, and there is a general lack of information about the real purpose of the alien race, after reading halfway through the book you need to pause and take a break, for after some time almost all the stories start looking pretty much like each other, and that makes no justice to Brown´s work. Maybe we aren´t used to merciful aliens and happy endings after all.