By Catherine Cheek
Greg Bear’s The City at the End of Timehas no sex, no nudity, very little violence, and young protagonists. It is not a young adult book. Most young adult readers aren’t going to have the fortitude for a book this complex. This is a novel for the meticulous, intelligent reader who has already read the Mt. McKinley and Mt. Rainiers of literature and now has designs on K-2.
The City at the End of Time is a novel on a grand scale, full of wonders and vast panoramas and mysteries that span aeons. For characters, it’s got Jack the carnival juggler and Ginny the lost girl, Tiadba and Jebrassy (a brave pair of lovers from the far future), two immortal librarians (one of which is in a library whose books are illusionary, the other, Bidewell, in a library which contains all the books never written) and if that’s not enough, there are also a passel of gothic Edwardian villains and some six-toed sentient cats. Also, it’s got a serious conflict: reality is collapsing, time is ending, and no one knows how to stop it.
As a treatise on chaos, memory, time, and the nature of reality, The City at the End of Time satisfies. Those with a philosophical bent will enjoy this, as Bear’s theories are both erudite and sound. For those expecting a more traditional novel, The City at the End of Time disappoints. The characters start out interesting, but aren’t allowed to develop. The plot is simple and somewhat predictable, and the setting details have been sacrificed in favor of exposition.
Almost half the story took place in Seattle, a fascinating city whose charms and quirks were largely unexploited. Were it not for the names at the beginning of the chapters identifying the location, I wouldn’t have known where it took place. Even obvious landmarks, like the University of Washington campus and the Fremont troll, get only a glossed half-sentence of description. Nowhere is the smell of coffee or evergreens mentioned, and rain is only mentioned once.
The rest of the story takes place in the Kalpa, an alien city, alien enough that even though they say it exists on what was once Earth, the inhabitants are so different from humans that you can imagine they live aeons in the future. There are the Eidolons, the Tall Ones, who have for the most part relinquished their physical bodies and are now just pure energy. They’re also called angelins, Menders, Devas, Shapers or in one case, Keepers. There are also breeds, which are the people with physical bodies. The breeds, like Tiadba and Jebrassy, are retro-bred to be throwbacks, closer to original humans. The Tall Ones breed them like this because only the breeds that are close to human can withstand being in the Chaos.
Reading about the Kalpa brought me back to my college days when I’d translate old texts from dead languages. Here’s an example:
Several of these umbers met Ghentun beneath the wide sweep of the Shaper’s pallid caul. Two escorted him through the caul—proceeding without escort might subject him to unpredictable fields and pressures—and higher still, between green curtains of gel and tall, eerily still cylinders of primordial ice—into the lambent mist of the vitreion, the Shaper’s inner sanctum—where machines could not go.
Beautiful, yes, but what does it mean?
It was so alien that it needed a glossary to make sense of it. Eidolon=nootics=Tall Ones= immortal creatures. Breeds=physical people, pedes=insects that labor, crèche=nursery, niche=house, ciel=sky-ceiling, Tiers=building. They say when you read a book in a foreign language that you’ll encounter almost all of the vocabulary you’ll need within the first twenty pages, but late in this book I was still having to learn that a “clave” was a weapon of sorts, and then he introduced the word “trods.” Worry about the trods. The trods are dangerous. There are trods everywhere. The Silent Ones are on the trods. What’s a trod? A monster? Nope. It’s a road. Or, more correctly, it’s a smeerg.
It’s not just the nouns in the Kalpa that have multiple names. Immortals do too. There’s the Chalk Princess, who is also called “our Livid Mistress” and the “White One”. There’s “The Watcher” and “The Silent Ones” and Polybiblios and Ishanaxade and the Moth and Mnemosyne and the City Prince and the Pilgrim. Some of these people are the same as some of the other people, but it was hard to keep them straight. Every time I thought I had a handle on it, a new name was thrown in.
The City at the End of Timehas more than one protagonist. Jebrassy is a young fighter who talks a lot about how angry he is that the Tall Ones keep him and the other breeds ignorant all the time. He feels that the Tall Ones have made the breeds to be their toys, and it makes him frustrated. So when he meets Tiadba, an attractive “glow” (young female) who says she has a cure for what ails him, he follows her. She mentions a march, and he is keen to partake in it. Aha! A march!
That means that he’s going to rebel against the Tall Ones.
Nope.
That means that they are going to be chosen by the Tall Ones to go out into the Chaos, facing near certain death.
What?
Yes. And they’re keen to do this, even though no one has ever returned, and it’s not clear exactly what they hope to accomplish.
It was as if Frodo, hating all wizards for keeping the hobbit down, meets a hobbit woman who says she’s organizing a march, and just when you think he’s going to rebel, Gandalf shows up, hands him a ring, and says “go to the dark lands and, uh, get rid of this somewhere, I guess. You’ll probably die, and it might not do any good, but this is what you were born for.”
And Frodo says “okay.”
Alien motivations being as they are, Jebrassy really wants to go on the march. He doesn’t get to go right away though, because first he has to go to the librarian on Kalpa and listen to the librarian theorize for a few chapters.
Tiadba is probably the most important protagonist, as she’s the one who does things. Not many things. She finds a book, then finds more books, then reads stories from this book which unfortunately have significance later on. I say unfortunately because they were so pedantic that I skimmed over them and didn’t make a point of memorizing the names, which meant that when the names came up again a couple of hundred pages later, they were only vaguely familiar.
Tiadba is described as brave, and something of a leader, but she’s passive. She isn’t even the one who decides who goes on the march. Someone else decides. Once she goes on the march she listens to her armor, the voice in her head, and various other people who tell her where to go. She doesn’t know why she goes there.
Ginny is one of the fate-shifters, who have the ability to move themselves to alternate realities to avoid danger. She is also passive. One of the Witches of Eastlake tells her to go to Bidewell the librarian, so Ginny does. There she spends time stacking books and listening to Bidewell’s many lectures on Mnemosyne and the nature of Chaos. She asks questions and listens to the answers while Bidewell pontificates for three hundred and fifty six pages. Like most of the characters in this book, she has very little memory of her past. We know that she used to live with a bohemian crowd, but that people forget her easily. All that she remembers of her parents was that they gave her a stone called the sum-runner.
Jack has a sum-runner too. He also has rats and hammers, which he juggles. The fact that he juggles rats and hammers makes him interesting, as do his carnie friends, who are mentioned once and then never again. He gets captured by Glaucous and the creepy sidekick Penelope, but when Jack gets free both the rats and Penelope disappear.
Jack meets the Witches of Eastlake, then avoids them, and after he gets free from Glaucous he meets up with him again. Then he spends nearly a hundred and fifty pages in the library with Bidewell, where he frets about the end of the world and how no one knows how to stop it.
Jack, like Ginny, has no past. Well, he has a past, but it isn’t mentioned until page three hundred and twenty two, which felt too little too late. We don’t know what he eats for breakfast, or what he hopes for out of life, or what he fears, or whether he has siblings. We do know that he never drops anything. Like other characters, he wanders through the story waiting for something to happen and bemoaning how confused he is. Not unlike this reader.
Jebrassy and Tiadba are so closely tied to Jack and Ginny that it seemed that they were supposed to be previous lives of one another. Jack and Ginny dream of the two breeds, and occasionally even enter their heads and see through their eyes.
Unlike Ginny, who feels like she ought to be in love with Jack (but isn’t) Tiadba is in love with Jebrassy, and he her. This could have injected some human tension into the story, but they’re kept apart for so long that they don’t get a chance to explore it, and when they are reconciled, there’s no tearful passion because they’ve been so busy concerning themselves with the end of time that they haven’t had a chance to pine after one another.
Daniel is one of the other fate-shifters. When he shifts, he moves into the body of other fate-shifters and takes over. He does this several times, which makes him fascinating, but despicable. He also doesn’t have a past, so we don’t really find out why he’s evil.
That was really the main problem with The City at the End of Time. The people have no past, no motivation, and therefore, no personality. They just wander through, ignorant and confused.
Oh, some of the characters start out interesting, like Glaucous the bird catcher, who catches songbirds in a creepy alternate London, but the fact that he catches songbirds is never explained. It’s dropped quite early, as is any explanation of why he serves a goddess who he knows will destroy him. He’s unpleasant and unlikeable, but he at least knows what he’s striving for and why, which puts him ahead of the others.
When the entire plot of the book is that all of time is collapsing in onto itself, you know there are only two possible solutions: either time collapses and all of creation ceases, or it doesn’t. Obviously, if it doesn’t cease, the fate-shifting characters are going to be the ones to stop it.
Here’s a spoiler: they do. I didn’t feel any triumph though, because they don’t really strive and earn their redemption, they just muddle through until they somehow manage to figure out something that just happens to work.
At the end of Greg Bear’s The City at the End of TimeI felt as though I, like the characters in the book, had been slogging through a confusing landscape where time no longer moved past as it should. Diehard fans of Greg Bear who want more insight into his depth of thought should buy it, and expect to read it at least twice before they get everything. Those looking for pure entertainment, a novel as captivating as, say, Greg Bear’s Dead Lines, will be disappointed.
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