Book Review: "Truth of the Divine"
Lindsay Ellis' sequel to "Axiom's End" is sadly a bit of a misfire, eschewing most of the propulsive plotting and philosophical questioning that made the first book such a delght.
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Warning: Spoilers for the book follow.
There are few things more disappointing in a bibliophile’s life than when a sequel doesn’t come close to living up to the potential established in its predecessor. Much though it grieves me to say it, Lindsay Ellis’ Truth of the Divine, the sequel to Axiom’s End, is a bit of a misfire, though it’s saved by an ending that gets us somewhat back to the pleasures of the original novel. It ends up spending too much time in self-reflection and not enough on action, and it too often gets lost in its own self-indulgence.
When the novel begins Cora is still trying to come to terms with the events of the previous novel. Both her grievous wounding at the hands of the creature known as Obelus and her bonding with Ampersand proves to be a double-edged sword, often causing her more trouble than aid. Things get more complicated, however, by the arrival of yet another creature of Ampersand’s race (eventually named Nikola) and, as if this weren’t enough, this being also shares a powerful bond with him. A further variable is Kaveh, a journalist with The New Yorker (and a former ally of Cora’s father, Nils), who takes the young woman under his wing and develops a romance with her, a decision that will have tragic consequences. By the time that the novel has come to an end both Cora and her alien companion have had to accept that there is no saving Earth and its inhabitants and that, in fact, it might be better off for everyone if humanity ceases to exist altogether.
Perhaps the most glaring problem with this novel is, ironically enough, Cora herself, who basically spends most of it curled up in a fetal position. Now, to be clear, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with having a hero struggle with mental illness, and in fact this can be a very good thing, as it helps readers grasp the full enormity of what’s happened (and representation of mental illness is itself a good thing). After all, it’s not as if Cora hasn’t been through absolute hell, and the novel reminds us that she was essentially disemboweled by Obelus and that it was only thanks to Ampersand’s abilities that she was able to survive at all.
At the same time, it can be quite tedious and emotionally taxing when almost the entirety of a book is focused on this character when she rarely does anything but instead simply reacts to whoever happens to be in her vicinity. What makes this all the more frustrating is the fact that Cora was such a badass in the first book–always willing to take a chance, to charge into the right–that it’s disconcerting and disappointing to see her reduced to largely a cluster of neuroses is disheartening.
Ampersand–rechristened Jude in this novel–also suffers from a curious absence. Once you get about a third of the way into the book he essentially disappears, with most of his major activity taking place off-page. This is ultimately just as well, since Cora isn’t in the frame of mind to really be able to connect with him. Among other things, she’s busy forging a very strange and borderline exploitative relationship with Kaveh, who is a thorny knot of his own.
Let’s drill down on this, shall we?
To begin with, I always wonder about the wisdom of introducing a brand new character in a new book. Given the extent to which Axiom’s End was all about Cora and her relationship with Ampersand, it’s rather jarring to spend a big chunk of the sequel inside the mind of a character that we haven’t really met before now. But, then again, when your hero is basically incapacitated for large chunks of the book you’re writing, what other choice did you have but to switch gears to someone who at least has a bit of agency?
More troubling, obviously, is the nature of his relationship with Cora, which really puts its toe right on (and sometimes over) the line of downright exploitative. It’s not that I think that there’s anything inherently wrong or problematic with age-gap relationships, but there is definitely something morally questionable about a supposedly good guy beginning a sexual and emotional relationship with someone coping, unsuccessfully, with both PTSD. There’s also the fact that the chapters in which he goes on at distressing length about how much he wants to fuck on Cora, often when she’s at her most pitiful. It’s almost as if Ellis was attempting to write about a man in the same way that so many male writers write about women. That is to say, reductively and sometimes downright gross.
I might be a bit more willing to overlook these issues with Kaveh if, you know, he didn’t end up dying in the end anyway. I generally have a very dim view of novels that introduce an entirely new character in a sequel only to kill him off by the end, and this feeling is exacerbated by the fact that his death is just so…senseless. Could he really not have ducked to make sure that he didn’t get struck by a bullet? Given that there’s another whole volume of the series to go, it leaves me wondering why we’re asked to spend so much of this book getting to know him and invest in his struggles only for him to meet his end. It feels, quite frankly, a little bit like lazy writing. If you can’t really envision a future for a particular character, and if their death feels more than a bit tacked-on, then it’s usually best to jettison them and find some other way of writing yourself out of a plot conundrum of your own making.
All of this isn’t to say that there weren’t things that I didn’t enjoy about Truth of the Divine. The moments when Cora isn’t completely swallowed by panic and a nervous breakdown are a pleasure, and the book does engage with some weighty questions. This is particularly true when it comes to Nikola and the question of humanity’s ultimate end at the hands of his amygdalines. The question at the heart of the novel is: to what extent is the human race really worth saving? That might seem like an easy question to answer but, due to her trauma and what she witnesses as the novel goes on–particularly the xenophobia and violence of vigilantes and Senators alike–Cora starts to think that the answer might be “no.” However, as Kaveh’s posthumous piece that closes the novel points out, there’s always reason to hope for humanity, even when it seems so intent on destroying itself.
As importantly, the novel demonstrates the extent to which the roots of our current discontent very much lie just as much in the mid-2000s as they do in any other period of American history. The book is filled with nefarious, opportunistic politicians and alt-right wackos who see the presence of aliens on Earth as an opportunity to further their own agendas, no matter the damage they might inflict. Even though the novel takes place in the past, it’s easy to see our present reflected back to us.
In a nutshell, I’d say that Truth of the Divine is entertaining, and it maintains just enough of the momentum of the previous book to make it worth continuing. At the same time, I would be lying if I said that there weren’t times when I was tempted to just put it down and move onto better things. I take no pleasure in saying this, because the first book had me hooked from the beginning. Now that I’ve finished the first two volumes of the series, I suppose that it’s time to dive into the third volume, which I hope does a better job of foregrounding the action and philosophical introspection that were so much of why I loved Axiom’s End.