Friday, January 28, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Actual Star by Monica Byrne

 





The Actual Star is a novel by Monica Byrne, which I've seen show up on a few "best SF/F books of the year" lists.  It's a story based in three time periods - each a thousand years apart, with the first being set in Ancient Maya Civilization cerca 1012, the second being set around the modern day in 2012, and third being set in a distant future in 3012, with the story rotating between the three timelines every chapter.  The book is clearly the result of a lot of research into Ancient Maya Civilization and other topics and languages, as made clear by the very impressive author's note prior to the beginning of the story, and it does show, with the author not only featuring the Ancient Civilization as a setting, but also incorporates various languages as best as she can, ranging from recognizable Spanish to various creoles.  

Unfortunately, The Actual Star very much did not work for me, with its three timelines not really going anywhere that interested me, the story's messages seeming often muddled and then not really working in the ending.  The three storylines do coalesce in the end - more literally than I expected - but the way they do didn't really work, with several of those storylines featuring late act twists that seemed counterproductive to the messages/stories being told.  There are some interesting ideas here about progress, utopia, and the risk in trying to better the world by breaking the rules without moving backwards to the worse times that required those rules to begin with, as well as about families found and blood, but they really are not served by the ending, which just sort of gives up on it all.  

Trigger Warning: Self-Harm (Cutting).  Also Incest.  Euthanasia of a Dying individual.  

-----------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
The Maya city of Tzoyna, 1012:  Years after their royal parents disappeared, Ajul and Ixul, twin brother and sister, stand ready to be crowned as rulers of their people, with a ceremony featuring their sacred ball game and the sacrifice of captives.  But when they each see a Jaguar, a messenger of a god, which maims their younger sister, it becomes clear that events will proceed in ways neither of them could have foreseen....

Minnesota, U.S. and Cayo, Belize, 2012: 19 year old Leah Oliveri has been searching for meaning for her whole life, with cutting and sex providing some answers, but not enough.  To find more, she heads to the place her father was born, Cayo, and meets two twin brothers, Xander and Javier, who have jobs as guides for tourists to a once sacred Maya cave.  There, in the cave, and between the two of them - Xavier cold, angry and future-looking, Javier, warm, social, and nostalgic - she starts to feel like she's about to find what she's looking for.....

Around the World, 3012: As the world finishes recovering from climate change, a sofist Niloux DeCayo, proposes that the religion and ways that have guided them through it, that Xibalba is a physical place that one can slip through by following the old ways of Leah Oliveri, are no longer needed and that a new path is needed.  The proposal unleashes a firestorm, and soon Niloux and another person, Tanaaj DeCayo, find themselves leading large groups of people in a conflict over the value of the old ways and how things should move forward.....
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Stories that take place alternating between different generational timelines can play out in a couple different ways.  The most common, and what you might expect from the Actual Star, since it seems like it's going that direction, is a story where the unfolding of the past storylines eventually changes the context of the future one, such that it changes your understanding and leads to a satisfying finish.  The less common, and the one The Actual Star actually goes with, is the one featuring literal or metaphorical reincarnation - where each generation follows similar themes until a final resolution in the final generation tends to resolve the recurring conflict in a different and more satisfying way (or not, sometimes).  

What is that conflict in The Actual Star?  Well, generally it features a pair of characters - Ajul and Ixul in 1012, Xander and Javier in 2012, and Niloux and Tanaaj in 3012 - with conflicting views on life and the world, even if they don't always realize it.  For Ajul and Ixul, supposed reincarnations of the legendary Hero Twins, you have Ajul as the one who loves the rituals and rules, even if those rules and rituals will result in his own death, while Ixul believes that they need to be bold and brash and fight against those rules for a better outcome, even as she uses them at times when they still serve a purpose.  For Xander and Javier, you have Xander who is miserable and scientific and desperately wanting to research things for the future, if only he could get a visa to a country with an actual college, while for Javier you have someone content but passionate about the past and recreating that history.  For Niloux and Tanaaj, you similarly have Niloux, the woman* who feels that the rules from Saint Leah are preventing genuine exploration and finding a new path and are no longer needed, while you have Tanaaj, the woman so devoted to the rules that she's willing to do anything to save them, even as she has one small act of breaking those rules she keeps close to her heart.  And in each of these three situations, you have a third party - the younger sister in 1012, Leah in 2012, and a surprise one in 3012 - that brings it all together.  

*In the 3012 timeline, every individual is a hermaphrodite with both sets of sex organs, but goes by she/her, so I'll refer to them as women.*  

So you have an interesting dynamic here of conflict that can recur over and over...except The Actual Star goes absolutely nowhere with it in the end.  Each of the past and present storylines end in disaster and death in ways that well, isn't particularly interesting or enlightening in one way or the other - with the present storyline essentially sacrificing part of the interesting aspects of that story, how each brother interacts with the dreaming Leah, by having a twist as to Leah that is just utterly baffling in how it undercuts everyone's agency out from under them for no reason.  And then the future storyline just drops that whole conflict to instead I guess focus on a story about love and family connections and uh, destiny I guess?  

Like it's not all out of thin air, especially as with Leah's storyline as she has sex in different ways with both brothers and searches for something going forward in them and the cave that she can hold onto, and with the love between the siblings in the Maya storyline.  But it's just so muddled with the questions of the path going forwards that it's really just hard to care about it, and it's just far less interesting than the other ideas here.  

And really that's my issue with the Actual Star, is that it's a book with a lot of concepts and then no idea what it wants to do with them or to say anything about them.  For example the future somehow takes Leah's writing and creates a whole religion and way of life out of them that just never makes sense as coming to pass, but even if you get past that, it doesn't actually DO anything with those ideas - a world where all humans are hermaphrodites (using always she/her) and wander the world as a way of life choosing certain paths and cultures to study/emulate peacefully, without blood familial ties to everyone so that no one winds up pursuing a greedy selfish path that destroyed the world once before, except that some people are deciding to put down roots and choose alternate pronouns in defiance of it all...this is interesting stuff and it goes nowhere, with the book more interested in a spiritual reincarnation thing that just.....is there.  The same is also true of the book's sex scenes, which often go on for pages (there's a multiple page long 1012-timeline bit on one character giving the other an enema which just has no purpose) for no purpose whatsoever.  And again, the book's twists either just take away from its prior message or just make no sense.  

Obviously others feel very differently than me about this book, as evidenced by it making a bunch of best of lists and having the blurbs it does.  But I just kept waiting for a clear message to come out of the timelines, or interesting questions, and instead the book decided to tie things up in a literary way that just seemed to me to cancel everything out for no reason.  So yeah, major miss for me on this one.  

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