Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 29 Dec 2018

The Inferno by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle

A while ago I reviewed Fred Hoyle’s earlier slice of science fiction hokum, The Black Cloud, and found it a similar experience to watching a 1950s British ‘B’ movie of the kind that now pops up on obscure digital television channels. I said then that Hoyle, however good a scientist and astronomer he was, was not a novelist of any substance and so I was intrigued to see whether this 1973 outing that co-opts the collaboration of his son was any improvement on what had gone before.

Sadly, the answer is no. In fact, if anything, this is something of a step backwards. The premise of the book is that somewhere in the centre of our galaxy a quasar suddenly appears in the night sky, the effect of which is to send harmful radiation hurtling towards the Earth, stripping away important elements of the protective atmosphere and sending human civilisation back to the Dark Ages.

Leaving aside the fact that it’s a story that has been hamstrung by advances in scientific and cosmological knowledge since it was written – the quasar thing makes no sense at all given what we now know about the evolution of galaxies – there are so many problems with the construction of the novel that it’s hard to know where to start.

Possibly the biggest problem the book has is structural. The whole first half of the novel is taken up with an extraordinarily tedious set-up storyline that is meant to establish the character and credentials of the central character, Cameron ( this is a world in which all the men refer to each other by their surnames – first names only seem to be the territory of women and ‘girls’ who have nothing much to contribute to the plot or the action). Waiting until virtually a hundred pages into a two hundred page novel to introduce the central plotline of the quasar explosion is just daft – as is the insistence on cramming half-chewed scientific theories into the dialogue and even filling a page and half with a maths calculation!

Hoyle was a bit of an outsider in the scientific community – he refused to give up his ‘steady-state’ theory of the universe despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – and he uses fiction here to grind a few axes and promote a bit of pro-Hoyle propaganda. Satisfying as that may have been to him, it’s got no place in a novel that needs pace and jeopardy.

The second big problem is characterisation. His central character, Cameron, is meant to be a keen-jawed, no nonsense scientist who is proud of his Scottish heritage (something that will have a major role to play in the second half of the book). But instead of an iconoclastic hero, Cameron is in fact an irritating, crashing bore and bully who you’d be delighted to see fall foul of the chaos that subsequently engulfs the Earth. Poor as the characterisation of Cameron is, at least he has something that might pass as character – which is more than can be said for anyone else in the book where flimsy, two-dimensional cyphers dominate.

Finally, there’s the plot itself. I’m not going to say too much about this because if anyone is planning to read the story you’ll want to avoid spoilers but I will say one thing – it’s totally absurd. Leaving aside the almost completely unintelligible scenario that is created post apocalypse, the Hoyles just haven’t left themselves enough space to explain, describe and develop a disaster in a way that allows the reader to engage or sympathise with the central characters – a problem made even more of an issue given that the one person you don’t want to survive is meant to be your ‘hero’.

I’m not giving anything away when I say there’s a sort of proto-Mad Max thing going on in the final section of the book and a very strange quasi-mystical ending that I personally couldn’t make any sense of.

All in all, not great. Where The Black Cloud provided an acceptable Sunday afternoon entertainment, The Inferno felt like I’d had part of my reading life stolen by incompetent thieves. My advice is that unless you’re a huge advocate of Fred Hoyle and all his works or you’re a die-hard science fiction nut, leave this well alone.

 

Terry Potter

December 2018