Loss Protocol by Paul McAuley
I would like to thank Gollancz for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Gollancz
Published – Out Now
Price – £22 hardback £12.99 ebook
Eight years after the catastrophic downfall of the cult his sister Izzy had joined, Marc Winters has at last found a refuge from unwanted attention. The wildlife ranger of a small, unremarkable island, he's quietly helping to preserve what survives of nature in a world wracked by climate change and chaotic weather, and trying his best to put his past behind him.
But then his narrowboat is burgled, the counterterrorism police come calling, and everything he thought he knew about the cult and his sister's fate is turned upside down. A cabal of so-called deep dreamers has revived the cult's crazy belief that the world could be healed by collective dreams fuelled by psychotropic mushrooms. They appear to think that Winters possesses information crucial to their success, and when he tries to discover more about them, he becomes inextricably entangled in plans that challenge his very existence.
A sense of grief at what we lose in life can be a terrible thing. That is often on the form of when we lose close family or friends, but it can be also caused by events such as the loss of health, the changing world we live in or perhaps the lost idea that the far right should not be tolerated in any shape or form. Grief can drive us to do strange things, and it can also drive us to hide from the world. It always makes us think of what could have been. These are subjects explored in Paul McAuley’s new novel Loss Protocol which I found myself on the one hand really enjoying the emotional journey of the main character and fascinating near future described but felt often it missed really digging deeper into an exploration of this world or the wider subject of grief.
Marc Winters very much tries to avoid the wider world these days. A ranger on the island of Cynsea he works in the not so far future tasked with trying to keep the local environment alive in the face of climate change, invasive species, pollution and the ever-decreasing number of species able to live on the earth as their habitat disappears. He also tries to avoid discussion of his sister Izzy who eight years ago had joined an infamous cult focused on climate change under a magnetic leader with unorthodox ideas that led to mass deaths. The media for a time hounded him out of the country but now he just works and keeps his head down. However, the revelation that Izzy may be alive is now combined with some strange events on the island suggest people think Winters knows far more than he does about Izzy’s re-appearance. Indeed, many now seem interested in Winters too for reasons of their own too.
The first half of Loss Protocol was a very immersive read that I do recommend savouring. McAuley works hard to create a very plausible future UK where climate change has really hit hard, and the consequences are felt everywhere. Huge storms have destroyed the coast; we now have various tropical species like tree frogs living happily on the shores and there is a feeling of a losing battle with climate change and pollution. It feels very tangible and sadly all too plausible as a world we may soon see come to pass. Winters is therefore a suitable world-weary man aware he can’t change things at a huge scale but doing what he can for where eh works. He also seems quite tolerant and kind but we are in many ways closed off to him. Intriguingly McAuley never calls him his main character by his first name almost to keep that feeling of separation between reader and story.
Our initial encounter with Winters is him meeting a young named named S and while Winters suspects S is in trouble he does not pry, report S to the authorities but neither does he let S off completely either. Winters finds work for S and carries on his love of joints (a lot of joints) and dealing with Drifters who are a counterculture movement of roaming people that has become very popular in this very uncertain world they all live in. The first half really brings this whole world to life, and I appreciated the subtle world building going on to allow the reader to work out how we got there from here. McAuley gently seeds us with where Winter’s relationship with Izzy came from and ended, we eventually witness the events that wrecked their lives and his shock at her apparent re-appearance. I was really enjoying the mixing of ideas of loss at a world and a family member and a growing uncertainty if all we had heard was true.
But I was overall less impressed with the book’s second half. There was a growing feeling halfway that while I enjoyed the ride we had not got very far at all in story terms. Suddenly McAuley ramps up the pace and I initially welcomed this but instead we just get a set of fairly mechanical set pieces of capture and escape that never actually raised any emotional beats for me. I never felt anyone was in serious jeopardy and instead we are moving into being told about the world of ‘shrooms’ and the idea that reality can itself be changed by drugs and deep dreaming a different reality. Unfortunately, this all felt quite late in the story as something needs to happen to now actually explain the plot and get to a conclusion. At which point I was hoping we’d have a lot more connection with the wider themes of a potentially dying world and a man in grief himself but while I think this was being aimed for, I found it emotionally quite cold and lacking much impact compared to the earlier scenes.
I think partly this comes as I increasingly felt that Izzy we are told a lot about but never really comes alive for me as a character in her own right but more a plot device of a woman (who may or may not be dead) giving a male character agency. There are some other women and non-binary characters in the story, but they feel all more to serve the plot and Winter’s own quest rather than a wider cast in their own right which became a growing issue as the story slowly moved on. I also increasingly noticed the number of pages to read was getting lower and yet very little was getting close to a conclusion. The finale I really felt let the story down. McAuley throw in tropes that I’ve seen much better handled in both fantasy and folk horror but here neither feeling either fantastical or creepy; those genres have moved on quite a bit so this felt like a story where the author was trying to go back a few decades in approach.
Indeed with countercultures, drugs and cults this felt like stepping back a few years to the weird near future SF you’d see in the late 1990s and 2000s but here felt a lacking of 2020s life and culture. Overall, by the end it sadly felt overly rushed and trying to be ambiguous but for me just undercooked. The idea of people just wishing effectively for a new and better world is one that should be really examined quite hard about people just wishing climate change would go away while people like Winters do hard work day in and day out; but ultimately this story seems not interested in what that could mean for our current world,
This can feel quite negative but I actually do think readers interested in the growing discussion of the near future climate of the UK would really appreciate the story in particular for the first half and while for me it ended up quite pedestrian there are some lovely character moments and writing that I felt can be appreciated if you go in knowing it may not come together as well as I was initially hoping for. A novel that is still worth a look but I will wonder if this is an idea McAuley will one day return to and I’d be fascinated to see where that story could go next.
