Lucifer's Dragon by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

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Lucifer's Dragon by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
pub: Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster. 377 page enlarged paperback. Price: Ł 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-7434-7827-4

check out website: www.simonsays.co.uk and www.j-cg.co.uk

This book is actually the author's second published novel (Hodder Headline 1998) reprinted here in the same format and cover design as his later books.

They make a nice matching set. 'Lucifer's Dragon' suffers from some of the problems encountered by many writers trying to deal with a lot of ideas unfamiliar to the reader. The setting is a far future, high-tech Earth. Somehow, the extrapolations that are taken for granted by the inhabitants but are unfamiliar to an early 21st century reader, have to be conveyed.

There are a lot of jargon words and sections providing information without taking the plot onwards, especially towards the beginning of the book. Initially, they get in the way. Later, the novel settles down as the story unfolds. There are two stories here, bound together, one in the story's now and the other in its past. neoVenice was created a century ago on the whim of a rich young woman, Passion diOrchi.

She wakes up one morning and resolves to give up all her current vices and create a whole new city. She uses intelligence, business skills and family contacts to raise the money to buy a vast fleet of rusting ships which she sails in to the Pacific and sinks them on a reef binding the lot together with an artificial coral. The initial design is a replica of ancient Venice with a similar government structure but others bring ships and weld them to the original structure.

These make up the levels where life is tough and many of the inhabitants are modified, either genetically or technologically. It is here that a hundred years later, Karo diOrchi, comes to pit herself against the virtual reality game, Lucifer's Dragon, in which a dragon and an archangel fight for supremacy and the player tries to overcome one then the other.

The history of neoVenice is cleverly told as a recording viewed by Angeli, a policeman who was briefly called in to investigate the death of a security guard at the Doge's palace. He knows he is not expected to solve the crime, but intends to anyway.

It is rumoured that the Doge has been kidnapped and Angeli suspects that the two incidents are connected. This is why he is interested in Karo, who he recognises as a rich kid, slumming it. He wants to know how she gets to the levels as a sonic barrier very effectively prevents travel between the levels and the privileged sector. Bound up with the events Angeli wants to unravel is Razz. She is an enhanced, silver-skinned bodyguard to the young Doge.

She is killed at the start of the novel and awakens in Zurich in a younger, unaltered body without any notion as to what is going on. The three sections of the novel are intimately linked and there is a lot of subtlety within it, although it is sometimes difficult to see exactly how Razz's story and Angeli's section fit together. There is an explanation but it isn't entirely convincing. Razz's latter story line is surreal, but insufficiently so.

Once the initial scene setting is overcome, the details of life in the levels and the interactions between the characters and the events they set in motion is exciting and well plotted. However, there are questions that are hinted at but are not resolved, loose ends that have become entangled in the action and forgotten.

This is a promising early novel and a good indication of the reasons for following of readers Grimwood has accrued with his later novels.

Pauline Morgan

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