Glimmering
Elizabeth Hand
Voyager, pbk, 415+xivpp, £5.99
Review by Steve Jeffery
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and Jack Finnegan is dying, his fall from HIV into full-blown AIDS mirroring the decay of the world outside, the rambling family mansion encroached by both the rising flood of the Hudson river and the campfires of the fellahin squatters, and the declining fortunes of the small family literary magazine. Overhead the sky is glimmering, a brilliant, scintillating whirl of colour that heralds the last collapse of the ozone layer. It is the last days of 1999, and nobody holds out much hope for the new millennium.
Only Jack’s former lover, Leonard, is in his element, travelling the world on assignments to record the extinction of species and cultures in his role as a mori artist, a recording angel for the end of the world. The millennial Christian cultists have their day too, and in Trip Marlowe, a young singer, find the perfect vehicle and VR icon for their evangelical message. Trip’s fast rise to fame, however, soon threatens to run out of control as the unworldly Trip becomes, literally, the object of a cynical and addictive media manipulation.
Their stories, culminating in an almost quintessentially Hand apocalyptic set piece in Times Square on the eve of the Millennium, are linked by a number of intermediary characters and sub-plots. Apart from the info-dump of the Prologue, this bringing together is the only really shaky point of the novel, in a couple of key meetings between characters that, although not untypical of the genre, strain coincidence.
Hand, again, plays with an array of cultural and mythological resonances that marked Winterlong and Waking the Moon, getting more assured of her control with each novel, although you wonder, perhaps, if Glimmering hasn’t been released a year or eighteen months too early.