Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Conquest by Nina Allan

Conquest, Nina Allan (riverrun 978-1-52942-803-2, £16.99, 308pp, hc) May 2023.

One of the first things you learn about Nina Allan’s novels is that there are virtually no minor characters – everyone has a story, and the stories are likely to weave together in unexpected ways. Another is that some of these stories involve speculative elements, although assigning a genre label like SF – or mysteries, as with her new novel, Conquest – is invariably somewhat misleading. A third is that the central plot, though compelling in its own right, also serves as a kind of armature for those other divergent tales-within-tales. In the case of Conquest, that plot involves a coder and devoted Bach enthusiast named Frank Landau, who, having been previously hospitalized for “Gen­eralised Anxiety Disorder,” finds himself drawn in by a website called LAvventura into a kind of online UFO conspiracy cult, and is persuaded to travel to Paris, where he promptly disappears. (That website name might be a bit of a red flag to film buffs, recalling Antonioni’s New Wave classic about an unresolved disappearance.) His girlfriend, Rachel, concerned about his mental state and possible vulnerability, enlists the aid of Robin, a private investigator and ex-cop with her own Bach obsession (she also collects variant recordings of the Goldberg Variations), and her own involved backstory. Robin’s investigation predictably leads her deeper into the background of that vaguely sinister group, and in particular toward a friend of Frank’s named Edmund de Groote and a journalist named Jeanne-Marie Vanderlien, who posted on LAvventura under the name Jeanne-Dark.

One of the key beliefs of the LAvventura group is that an alien invasion is imminent, or may be already underway, and one of their key texts is an obscure 1958 SF novella called The Tower by “John C. Sylvester.” Keeping with her generous habit of leaving no narrative thread unpulled, Allan shows us the whole novella, which features an ambitious, Howard Roark-style architect de­termined to construct the most fabulous building in the world, the Conquest Tower, in the wake of a disastrous war with the planet Gliese. To add to the controversy, he insists on building it from masonite, a mysterious rock from Gliese with odd properties such as retaining heat, despite the huge expense and long delays involved in transporting it. Some critics, though, suspect that the rock may even be alive and dangerous. The novella is compared by one of Allan’s characters to John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, though it sounds to me more like early Ballard (and some internal details call into question whether what we’re reading is actually from 1958 at all; char­acters refer to NRA lobbying, nano-weapons, and CNN, and one says “Let’s just fuck already,” a line which would hardly have passed muster in a 1950s potboiler).

Whatever it really is, The Tower is important to Allan’s characters in the main narrative, and another chapter is presented as an essay by the re­doubtable Edmund de Groote – who drew Frank Landau into the conspiracy group in the first place – comparing Sylvester’s novella to Shane Carruth’s real-life 2013 movie Upstream Color. Yet another chapter is in the form of a review by the journalist Vanderlien of a concert of work by the (again real-life) German composer Hans Werner Henze. Both interpolated essays wander off into the personal memories and preoccupa­tions of their authors. Such allusions to the arts permeate Conquest, usually as a way of revealing particular dimensions of character. David Bowie and Ziggy Stardust turn out to be important to Frank’s girlfriend, Rachel, and a Caspar David Friedrich landscape seems to haunt Robin in her investigations. But the overarching aesthetic is the obsession with Bach, particularly the Goldberg variations, shared by Frank and Robin. Frank’s notion that musical notation is a form of cod­ing is hardly new – Douglas Hofstadter wrote a bestseller about it more than 40 years ago – but with chapter titles like “Aria,” “Chaconne,” and “Oratorio,” Allan seems intent on reminding us of the importance of musical structures and variations to her rich complex of tales. Conquest is probably the most experimental work yet from a boldly adventurous novelist, and even though  the mystery of what happened to Frank provides a fairly conventional through-line, it both demands and rewards a more ruminative reading.

This review and more like it in the April 2023 issue of Locus.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.