Exaltations

by Richard Garfinkle

Peter Refton is a hunter of human lives. Across a score and more of Earths he has caught and captured the most fascinating and pivotal people. The knight who reformed Charlemagne's army. The bureaucrat who oversaw China's expansion and control. The inspirerer of wisdom in a million seekers of understanding. Peter Refton is that most dangerous of hunters: the biographer. He has made trophy-stories of so many, and boldly carries their lives around from world to world. Then one day, a story comes to hunt his life. Now, caught between worlds and aided by a knight, an ancestress, a sorceress and twin warriors, Peter Refton is on a Quest to -- To free himself from the coils of the most voracious of stories: the Quest. To fight the Quest itself and those who told the story onto him.

Genres: Fantasy

270 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2009

About the author

Richard Garfinkle grew up in New York and now lives in Chicago with his wife and children. His first novel, Celestial Matters, won the Compton Crook award for best first science fiction novel of 1996. Garfinkle was twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. He has written numerous fiction and nonfiction works on his interests of history, science, imagination, and the preternatural.

More information can be found at www.richardgarfinkle.com.

Garfinkle's blog is "Overdue Considerations,"

Reviews

[Frida Fantastic (book blogger) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is so meta that anything else you thought was meta would seem banal in comparison. A writer (Peter Refton) and the people who he had written biographies about are on a quest to fight Grandfather Quest, because Quest ensnared them as characters in his story. Grandfather Quest isn’t the only metaphysical character in this book, it includes heavy-hitters like Time and Fate—and all intrigue and plot their way to directing the story unfolding before the reader’s eyes. There are multiple narrators, stories absorb each other, and the scenes fly through time and space with settings that are historical, mythological, and metaphysical.

This book’s ambitious premise is commendable, and I also really enjoy reading experimental narratives. One of the reasons why I read speculative fiction is to push the boundaries of how I perceive reality-as-it-currently-is. With this book, I was expecting to look at stories and storytelling under a different light.

Exaltations has an epic worldview to match its impressive scope. I liked how it made little distinction between mythological, historical, and biographical stories because over time, they really do become the same thing. The inclusion of mythologies and persons outside of the Western world added a breadth and depth to its vision. The Chinese ancestress and the celestial bureaucracy that she belongs to are especially well-conceived, and there are plenty of allusions to stories from other cultures including Indian, Scandinavian, and Greek.

I have mixed feelings about this book. The ideas, characters, and settings in of themselves are interesting–but I’m not as thrilled with how they were written. Exaltations is full of riddles and power-wrestling between characters both physical and metaphysical, which by itself could be fascinating—but it wasn’t engaging for the most part.

The characters are interesting (even the metaphysical ones), but they all seemed so static and invulnerable. It’s sort of like they could be outmaneuvered in the one scene, but none of that mattered, because they could be reconstituted in anew in the next. That would be fine if the focus wasn’t on how they were trying to struggle out of story A or story B, but that struggle is the focus and the cause for all the action. The characters live on in an eternal limbo of changing scenes without any of the events changing them as characters. My favourite scene was when Fate created a different reality where their individual conflicts ended up badly for them, and I wish there were more scenes like this where the power of abstract forces could be felt on the individual level. Again this could be subjective as I tend to like character-driven fiction, but I thought that in order to explore how stories affect human experiences, the cause and effect is best shown and not merely talked about.

There are many sections where the bodiless story-characters discuss riddles and Big Concepts. They outline unique spatial models to visualize the relationships between ideas, stories, and lives, but they didn’t get me to think about those concepts differently. I was really hoping to have my ideas challenged, but instead I felt like I mostly read wordplay.

There are brilliant scenes and ideas, and I highlighted a number of passages to further ruminate over, but I can’t say I was satisfied with the entire experience. I love the subject matter, the characters, and the concept of reading a story that’s being fought over by different writers… but ultimately I didn’t connect much with most of the scenes in the book itself. I’m perfectly willing to entertain the idea that I just didn’t “get it” or had the wrong approach with this read, and so I’m settling for a somewhat non-committal three stars.

If you find the book’s description interesting, liked the sample, and aren’t afraid of an experimental narrative full of scenes where bodiless speakers discuss Big Ideas with the Important Concepts capitalized—then give it a go. I’m interested to see what others think of this book, and I hope that they will find it more engaging than I did.

Note: a free review copy was provided by the author

[Alessandra]

My husband wrote this, so I can't be objective, sorry. I love the meta-levels, but please check out other people's reviews for a better perspective.