Beyond Redemption
Ratings14
Average rating3.8
Wow! Clever, dark, disturbing and wonderfully meta in places. This is high concept grimdark fantasy at its absolute best.
The conceit at the center of this is the idea that belief is your reality - the stronger you believe in something the more real it becomes. The twist on this is that the people who believe most strongly that things aren't as they seem are people with delusions, and when those delusions are strong enough they become the reality. This has to be one of the most unique and scary magic systems I have ever seen in a fantasy novel.
Michael Fletcher has dug up some really interesting delusions to give power to. Whilst you get some more standard ones like sociopaths (called Gefahrgeist in the novel) whose ids are out of control and project their belief in their importance or ability (for example Wichtig, who believes he is the greatest swordsman in the world, and because of the strength of his convictions, he is), there are weirder and more wonderful ones like Cotard's Syndrome (they believe they are dead/decaying), Syndrome of Subjective Doubles (believe that they have doppelgangers who are carrying out independent actions), Catoptrophobia (believe the reflections in the mirror are someone other than themselves) and so on. This range of beliefs produces a wild a wacky range of abilities. When the characters delusions start getting delusions then it gets even more out there!
And because those who are delusional are powerful, the world is a crazy and brutal place. This is proper grimdark with every character manipulating and not entirely sane. The belief is reality concept also drive the mythology - if enough people believe you are a god, you become a god. The cleverness of how the central conceit works to tie everything together should not be underestimated!
On top of that, Michael's prose is very readable. The main characters, despite their various delusions, are relatable. There relationship, messy as it is, has a gritty realness to it.
Honestly, this is going straight in to my top 10 favourite books I have read. Clever, dark and brilliant.
I have friends who enjoyed this book a lot and recommended it for being dark and original, two things for which I should have loved it.
It is - congratulations for that.
And I didn't.
Perhaps because I felt the writing to be stiff and the dialogues pompous, the characters lacking depth or simply because the story did not catch me, feeling more like a superhero(es) story than dark fantasy (I do not like anything with superheroes). I am not sure, but I did not go past 100 pages.