The Perfect Couple

This final volume of the trilogy tells the story of only one year, from 10 to 11 AE (After the Event), but it's a crowded and bloody year of full-scale war in various parts of Europe and the Middle East. In fact, there's too much war for my taste, although there's room in this long book for much else to happen between battles, including irrelevant digressions.

If you've read the second volume, you won't be surprised by the war in Tartessos or the siege of Troy, but there are some surprises in store.

The Battle of O'Rourke's Ford is a long digression, completely irrelevant to the overall plot, which I think should have been omitted; we have more than enough battles already. The California expedition, which goes on in the background for most of volumes two and three, is an even longer irrelevant digression, although it adds variety and makes use of the American continent.

I remember thinking when I first read this book that it was the best of the three, which is odd; because, after rereading, it now seems somewhat less good overall than the others. I enjoy the interaction between Ian Arnstein and Odikweos (known to us as Odysseus); I enjoy most of the scenes with King Isketerol; I quite like some of the interludes between battles. The land war in Tartessos is OK; but the naval battle and the later land battles are rather a grim slog, and it's not really much fun to read about people slaughtering each other.

However, in the end everything works itself out and a fairly satisfactory ending is achieved.

Main events: the Battle of O'Rourke's Ford (Chapters 3-13), Siege of Troy and capture of Ian Arnstein (Chapters 10-11), storm at sea (Chapter 10), naval battle of Tartessos (Chapters 18-19), loss of the Emancipator (Chapter 22), land war in Tartessos (Chapters 23-28), Raupasha wounded (Chapter 25), liberation of Sicily (Chapter 29), Battle of Armageddon (Chapters 30-31), death of William Walker (Chapter 30), death of Helmut Mittler (Chapter 31), conference in Nantucket and migration of Althea Walker (Chapter 32).

There are a couple of implausible developments towards the end, though they're not really important. Firstly, it was uncharacteristically foolish of the Nantucketers to use their valuable and vulnerable airship (using irreplaceable future technology) for dangerous bombing missions that would have been a mere nuisance to the enemy. Secondly, I don't believe Althea Walker could have persuaded enough people to join her 3000-mile trek eastwards. They had homes, investments, and a good life; they weren't under threat; why throw it all away to become homeless wanderers? If she wanted to retain her position and her life, she needed to earn their loyalty and not to put it to such a heavy test right at the outset.

I comment in passing that Nantucket seems to have an implausibly large stock of useful 20th century gadgets. They have enough binoculars to pass them out as gifts to selected locals; but how many binoculars would there have been on Nantucket at the Event? What proportion of people own binoculars? Likewise, they have enough radio transmitters/receivers to put them on the fragile and vulnerable ultralites; I suppose a fair proportion of people own radio receivers of some kind, but how many own anything capable of transmission?

Stirling left open the possibility of continuing this series into a fourth volume, and there remains some small possibility that this will happen; he has written at least one short story set in the same world, with one of the same characters.