Jack the Bodiless – Julian May
We seem to have been reading Julian May for ever. This is partly because her Saga of the Exiles and Galactic Milieu series run to quite a number of books and partly because each of those books is long in its own right. Also, the world she has created in their pages is on an operatic scale and mightily absorbing.
This includes both her speculative-fiction take on the future of an earth whose inhabitants have become psychically operant and joined with five other ‘exotic’ (or alien) races who have achieved the same, and the fate of those denizens of that world who manage to travel back aeons back into Earth’s prehistoric past. Only things don’t happen in quite that order. It’s complicated, but also very rewarding.
I say “we”. I’m privileged to have a Julian May fan handy who’s prepared to read them out loud – a lovely way to experience fiction. We’ve already done the same with the whole of the Modesty Blaise oeuvre, but he is balking at Patrick O’Brian’s 21-volume Aubrey-Maturin series of naval novels. For some reason…
The four-volume Saga of the Exiles was a pleasure to read. (Given that it encompasses themes like genocide, slavery and reproductive coercion this is necessarily a somewhat qualified statement.) Next came Intervention, the first of the Galactic Milieu books, which bridges every scale from intimate personal relationships to global power struggles and galactic politics, and includes characters ranging from idealistic visionaries wanting to secure the future of the human race to psychopathic maniacs struggling desperately to destroy it. (I should note here for enthusiasts that I’m talking about a big, fat, spine-broken copy of Intervention that includes both the Surveillance and Metaconcert sections rather than splitting them off into separate novels.) So that’s quite an undertaking, since it’s not the most cohesive work of fiction ever written, and I must admit we did have to pace ourselves.
Now we are out the other side and we’re back with our old friend and guide Uncle Rogi, the boozy, misanthropic, bloody-minded, foul-mouthed Franco-American anti-hero of the whole 20-21st century saga, a man cursed by a complex of immortality genes to witness the progression of his sizeable Catholic Remillard clan from backwoods Canadian immigrants and New England lumbermill labourers to rulers of the galaxy by way of incest, murder, alliance-building, misplaced idealism, politics on the global stage and – most importantly – the development of a set of metapsychic superpowers that makes them literally the most mentally powerful entities in existence in the whole of the Milky Way.
Of course, they do all this through a shocking degree of inbreeding thanks to the fact that nearly every operant metapsychic in North America is initially descended from Rogi’s no-good yet promiscuous and charismatic twin brother Donny. (Rogi himself is mercifully sterile after a childhood dose of the mumps.) And the family tradition of marrying cousins and even unacknowledged half-siblings really comes home to roost in Jack the Bodiless when the most powerful Remillard yet, the eponymous Jon of the title, narrowly escapes abortion in order to be born with a genetic blueprint so apparently flawed that he shouldn’t have survived out of infancy. How he does, and how his survival impacts on his extraordinary teenage sibling Marc, his powerful politician father Paul, his reserved academician grandfather Denis, his devoted several-times-grand uncle Rogi and the rest of the family is the subject of this novel.
The struggle of Jack and his supporters to get him born, at which time Galactic statutes will protect his right to medical care despite his abnormalities, and despite the reproductive crimes of his parents, constitute a satisfying thriller plot. And, continuing the tradition of both The Saga of the Exiles and Intervention, there’s a mystery at the novel’s heart. There the reader was invited (although not compelled) to work out the identities of first the mysterious Lylmik entity that rules the Galactic Milieu and then of the Fantome Famille – the ‘family ghost’ that protects and bullies Rogi in about equal measure. Those in the know can have a little chuckle here. In Jack the Bodiless we are introduced to two new malevolent and murderous entities who are too close to the dynasty for anyone’s comfort – Hydra and Fury. Hydra’s identity is not too hard to work out and is in any case revealed by the time the credits roll. Fury’s is frustratingly difficult and the mystery is not resolved until the next book in the series, Diamond Mask.
I cannot recommend that you read Jack the Bodiless. I have to instead recommend that you read the entire Saga of the Exiles and Galactic Milieu series, a considerable undertaking and one that you should only attempt if you like the space-opera genre. Although that is perhaps misleading since so much of this story takes place on an individual human and family level. It’s a bit like setting out to read everything to do with Middle Earth.
But, like everything else in life, the amount of reward you get tends to be at least related to the amount of effort you put in. One book from the end, we’re certainly reaping that.
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database: Julian May
- Yahoo Groups: Julian-May-discuss
- SF Bookcase: Julian May
- Wikiquote: Julian May
Tags: Galactic Milieu, Julian May, Rogatien Remillard, Saga of the Exiles