The Edge Online - Reviews: Julian May

Magnificat
Julian May
Voyager hardback, 448 pages, £15.99
Review by Dave Wiseman (1996)

At long last, after a wait of 14 years since the publication of The Many-Coloured Land (first in the ten book sequence it finally brings to an end): Magnificat, the conclusion of the Galactic Milieu Trilogy, final volume of the series including The Saga of the Exiles, A Pliocene Companion (that’s that pink one), Intervention: The Surveillance and Intervention: The Metaconcert (the two books published in the UK in the single volume Intervention) and of course Jack the Bodiless and Diamond Mask. I make it about 3500-4000 pages; the word ‛epic’ doesn’t do it justice.

If you’ve been reading SF/fantasy since the early 1980s, then you must be familiar with The Saga of the Exiles. Whatever happened to those books? Everybody had at least one. They were turning up in junk shops for years, you saw them everywhere, people were always reading them on the tube, in their lunch hour. People would wait for the new one each year. I was lucky enough to be able to discover them when they’d all been out for a while.

A fact which makes the lack of coverage of Magnificat all the curiouser. Maybe when you keep people waiting this long you lose their attention. Whatever, as far as I’m concerned, anyone that tells a story as well as Julian May deserves our indulgence.

Julian May has been a devotee of science fiction for a long time. The Galactic Milieu Trilogy and its prequel, Intervention, is, in many ways, an old fashioned SF epic, a semi-space opera/future history of Earth’s premier metapsychic (possessed of higher mental powers of which telepathy is only the beginning) family, the Remillards. Spanning 170 years, from the birth of the books’ narrator, Rogatien Remillard, it’s a magnificent good vs evil saga with fallible, powerful-vulnerable heroes and transcendent, redeemable, even heroic villains, finally curving back to the Pliocene quartet containing the redemption of the principal villain Marc. There are no one dimensional characters. Even those with walk-on parts are brilliantly drawn in detailed, data-filled but human blocks of prose. Lumps of scientific and future-historical data are downloaded in a similar manner.

In any other writer this would be a weakness, but not with May – every unusual storytelling trick works to near perfection. The one real weakness is a big one, smack in the middle of the plot of the Milieu Trilogy – we all know who the multiple-personality with the subconscious, psychotic alter-ego is almost right away, it’s so obvious – but the story is so good, who cares. The good-evil struggle reaches its purest expression in the conflict between the brothers Jack and Marc, a conflict foreshadowed and echoed many times throughout Intervention-Milieu.

A sprawling escapist saga in the tradition of the Lensman series, the Foundation books . . . only a million times more literary – it’s a positive literary pleasure, in fact, full of quotations and echoes, character and passion and relevance. Impossible to do more than scratch at it in a short review such as this, and fully-deserving of the feature article I didn’t have time to deliver. Entertaining, engaging, intelligent and full of ideas. Quite derivative – May acknowledges her debt to Olaf Stapledon within the books – yet totally original. I recommend you read them all.