COWBOY ANGELS by PAUL McAULEY
Gollancz paperback, 400pp, £12.99

Reviewed by Dr Ian Hocking

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By page two of Cowboy Angels, the new book by Paul McAuley, I couldn’t help but pause, glance at the list of novels inside the front cover, and make a ‘hmm’ noise.

There are seventeen volumes under McAuley’s name. Though my copy of Cowboy Angels is an uncorrected proof, it does not read like the work of an author whose catalogue should encompass more than one million published words.

For example, there are odd moments of redundancy. When a character says to another, “Adam… her husband isn’t dead,” the words are followed by a bald statement from the narrator telling us that the character has never used Adam’s first name before. Yes, we know; we were there during their conversations.

The cliches come thick and fast: ‘music thumped out’, ‘the air was hot and oppressive’, ‘as if she had just seen a ghost’. McAuley’s metaphors are drawn from domains that are almost comically incongruous; in a late scene, a nauseous man clings to a door-frame ‘like a drowning sailor’. Tar cracks race ‘under the nose [of a car] like ticker-tape hieroglyphs written by a vanished race to appease their sky-gods’.

Riiiight.

Let’s leave my observations of the prose style there ‚Äì and remember that I’ve selected these oddities from a long novel whose prose is basically adequate. But if you find it a problem, you won’t get on with the book. If you’re happy to see past it, there is an interesting and worthwhile story beyond.

Adam Stone has retired as a Cowboy Angel, a US soldier/agent working for the executive arm of The Company. That’s ‘The Company’, not the CIA, because the Stone we meet in this book lives in a universe parallel to our own (known as a ’sheaf’). In his sheaf, ‘the Real’, the USA has developed technology to cross from one universe to another. New Americas have been discovered.

Some of these have suffered nuclear war; others are overrun by communism; others still are inhabited only by exotic animals like the mastodon and the sabre-toothed tiger.

During the active career of Stone, successive governments of the Real undertook covert military actions within repressed and stricken sheaves to propagate the Real’s flavour of democracy. To rescue from fascism and communism; to erect an empire; to franchise.

The parallels with the American military policy of our own universe are clear. But, more than this, the echoes in the novel go all the way back to the Bay of Pigs. What strength does it take for America to export its brand of democracy? What stupidity, when the effort and likely success are considered?

Added to this is a sense that, far from being born of noble aims, these excursions are largely business enterprises designed to stoke the fire of the economy and misdirect the public’s attention beyond the borders ‚Äì or ’sheaf’ ‚Äì of America. In their quieter moments, McAuley’s characters touch upon the notion of an ideal America. For some, the ideal is worth murder on a grand scale. For others, the ideal is unattainable, or exists only in isolated pockets.

But this is not an overly contemplative book. The engine of the story turns over a couple of times early on, then catches when Stone suffers a personal tragedy and embarks on the chase of another retired Cowboy Angel, Tom Waverly. The action is stark and well-presented, notwithstanding my feelings about the prose. (There are moments when McAuley shows glimpses of the writer he might be in another sheaf; his description-in-flashback of Stone’s earlier kidnap is occasionally beautiful; as are the longings of Stone for his own ideal America, an America of frontiers and brotherhood and simple technology).

For me, the story is excessively complicated by the introduction of a second technology mid-way through the book. It leads to plenty of head-scratching and very cryptic dialogue. And Stone’s cynical reaction to the possibility of this technology seems at odds with his acceptance of the mechanism of Turing Gates. But, if you can get past the first-draft feel of the prose, there is a page-turner here with some interesting ideas that resonate sharply with our supposedly modern world, in its various versions.

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Ian Hocking has a PhD in experimental psycholingusitics from the University of Exeter, and currently works for the Open University and Canterbury Christ Church University. His science fiction novel Deja Vu was published in 2005. He is represented by John Jarrold and maintains a blog at http://ianhocking.com/thiswritinglife.html.

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