Against the backdrop of a thawed Antarctica, prison guard Austral, herself a former offender and a genetically-modified “huskie”, gazumps her criminal accomplices and kidnaps the niece of a visiting dignitary. Partly to protect her, and partly to negotiate passage off Antarctica with the girl’s uncle, with whom Austral shares a family connection. The novel then follows the pair’s adventures as they cross the Antarctic Peninsula avoiding recapture while meeting up with the assorted people who now make the post-glacial habitat their home.
I really thought that I’d enjoy this novel more. It’s set in the less-explored space of accommodated climate change, it has a rather unexpected take on geoengineering, and presents an arguably positive approach, that of the “Ecopoets”, to adaptation to a warmed world. Of which, it’s a nice idea to present geoengineering as something that just didn’t work fast enough rather than being “Morally Unconscionable”, and I really liked that the novel’s “environmentalists” have worked with the grain of climate change to green Antarctica, and to do so through genetic engineering. And in marrying all this with a narrative fed by a modified human, as well as a wider backdrop of the corporate betrayal of both huskies and Antarctica, I thought it would be more successful than it is. Instead, it’s too much of an episodic “road trip”, where the sequential hook-ups seem a lazy way to explore the world. And where one never quite buys the conceit that the protagonist would be able to escape detection so well.
So, while it’s very nicely ambitious (so far, so McAuley), but just not as narratively satisfying as I’m used to with him.
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