Gogmago: The First Chronicle Of Ludwichg by Jeff Noon and Steven Beard (book review).

People don’t really travel down the river anymore. The ghost of a dragon has haunted its sixty-mile length for centuries, filling the waters with dark mists full of magic and strange creatures. Disturbing, but not actively hostile. Then, amid the explosions of war, the ghost grew sick and the river became more treacherous. Buoys now mark the limits of safe travel after too many shipwrecks and too many deaths. Even the most experienced sailor won’t risk a river voyage.

Cady Meade once sailed the river, one of the finest captains to sail those waters. Once. Years later, Cady is drunk in a rundown town, and all the missing people in the world will not bring her river back to her.

Now a sick young girl and her mechanical manservant have come asking for passage. Now Cady dreams of a bell, a wreck, and a gravestone etched with the name ‘Gogmagog’, and she knows she must lead these strangers into almost certain death on the ghost-ridden river.

Not straightforward. There are bombs, machines, and vans, but it isn’t our reality, and it isn’t quite a traditional fantasy setting. Creatures from other worlds now populate the land, and these are the different tribes, I think. Links to the ancient past of mythic kings and queens and their battle with the last of the dragons. Magic!

Jeff Noon won the 1994 Arthur C. Clarke Award for ‘Vurt,’ which I have not read but is described as’surrealist noir’ which sounds intriguing. Steven Beard leans more towards the non-fiction end of speculative fiction with experimental fiction and many essays on actual science and cyber theory through the lens of speculative and experimental fiction. So when these two authors combine, something pretty interesting is expected, and ‘Gogmagog’ is definitely interesting!

Noon and Beard do not lead you by the hand down the plot path. So much so that I felt a little adrift at times. There is a huge level of detail and world-building that builds a world in your head, but it is sometimes hard to know what to cling to as the plot takes abrupt shifts and dives between scenes with no connectors at one point but takes you step by step down the river at others.

There is so much detail and backstory that I had to go flip back a few times, what with the different tribes, the political issues, and the mythic lore.

People in starships landed on a world populated by dragons and, doing what colonisers do best, took over bloodily. The last dragon lived along a river and, in the dream logic of myth, incubated one of the fallen starships and its passenger, a princess. The king battles the dragon to free his sister, and he succeeds at the cost of his own life. The princess mourns the dragon that had, in a way, birthed her, so it raised its ghost so that it lingered along the banks of the river that had been its home. Centuries later, the world has developed radio, motors, and weapons of war. Amid the fire and blood of war, the dragon’s ghost sickens, and the river becomes impassable. This is where the story ‘begins’ but that is like saying, ‘Eve ate an apple, and here we are’. The backstory barely covers the aliens raising sixty-mile-long, sickly dragon ghosts. I haven’t gotten into the different types of aliens that populated this world, the strange plant-hybrid people they created, the golem-like creatures that house the spirits of the drowned dead, or the sentient robots.

All of this information is layered into ‘Gogmagog’ and the strange post-industrial, war-ravaged landscape that Cady takes us through. What adds to the surreal, dream-like quality of this story is that it is told through Cary’s eyes. She is an extremely old, extremely cranky drunkard, so this already complex world is seen through her headaches and beer goggles. She is not going to slow down and explain to any of the idiots around her, which includes the reader.

If Christopher Buehlman’s ‘The Blacktongue Thief’ was hallucinating the future through the eyes of a cranky old lady, you might like to try ‘Gogmagog.’ Is it good? Yes? I’m honestly not sure. To give yourself time to digest, read this book in bite-sized chunks. It is the first book of a duology, which I only realised when it ended in an unsatisfying dribble. I might try to find more of a definitive answer about how I feel about ‘Gogmagog’ if I pick up the sequel and read them together as one epic. If you like the detailed weirdness of China Mieville’s ‘Perdido Street Station’ or William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ then pick up ‘Gogmagog.’

LK Richardson

March 2024

(pub: Angry Robot, 2024. 400 page enlarged paperback. Price: $18.99 (US), £ 9.19 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-91520-282-6)

check out website: https://angryrobotbooks.com/books/gogmagog/