"Beneath the world, a sea" by Chris Beckett

 The Submundo Delta is  surrounded by a Zone of Forgetfulness; no-one can ever remember the things they did in here, giving people the opportunity to be their hidden selves and act out their repressed desires. Ben, a goody-goody policeman, travels through the Zone to the Delta to persuade the humans living in the delta (descendants of Victorian colonists) to stop killing the duendes, a mysterious humanoid life form who are able to telepathically enter into people's thoughts. "While the forest opened her up and made her less wary and more open to emotions in general, duende contact exposed the childish neediness which lay behind so many of them, leaving her with a sense of herself as clumsy and blundering and unformed." (14)

So the book is fundamentally about how people cope when their darkest thoughts become manifest to them.

It is superbly well-written. The world building is convincing; the characters are three dimensional. The reader enters into this forest in which the dangers come from within your own head. The plot dances with madness and the irrationality of the solutions we impose in order to keep ourselves from going mad. It is a brilliant piece of fiction which makes you think about the fundamentals of personality.

The pacing is a perfect match for the four-part plot structure, with major turning points coming at the 25%, 50%, and 75% points.

Selected quotes:

• "Something inside of him was keeping up a constant din of meaningless babble, and bad puns that reduced words to empty sounds, and mocking challenges to every apparently genuine thought or feeling, each one of which was immediately contradicted, peeled away, rendered meaningless." (5)
• "He had met so many people like him in his police work, people who called themselves anarchists, lived in squats or housing cooperatives, claimed benefits, switched promiscuously from one sexual relationship to the next, and thought that just because they'd abdicated all responsibility for anything whatsoever that happened in the world, they were somehow morally superior to those like him who were actually trying to keep the wheels of the world turning." (6)
• "The Greeks had a word for it. Alethia. Unforgetting. Truth isn't something out there, in other words. It's something we already possess but have temporarily forgotten." (6)
• "They were bright, highly educated people ... used to being much sharper and better-informed than anyone they met from outside their circle, and no doubt frequently frustrated, as clever people are, by the stubborn ignorance and resistance to logic of most of the human race." (6)
• "It was apparently necessary to be constantly measuring oneself against others, worrying whether one was good enough or doing one's best, and at the same time ensuring at all times that the standard that one was using to make these judgements was the right one, and not in itself revealingly old-fashioned or low-brow or vulgar." (9)
• "These people tended to come from backgrounds ... where you are rewarded from an early age for retreating from the world into a book" (10)
• "In London or New York, you or I could spend whole days sharing the streets with thousands of people we don't know, so naturally we have a set of rules and principles that allow us to get by as autonomous individuals surrounded by anonymous strangers." (11)
• "To be free of all worry and guilt that came from having a past and a future!" (11)
• "Pheromones. Shiny eyes, Giggly excitement. Ugh! What a desperate business it all was. How repulsive even. Damp mucus membranes. Bags of bones and skin and guts, pressing clumsily together in search of - what? What could one sack of guts, half-filled with shit, hope to find in another, except more guts, more shit?" (11)
• "Of course life could be lonely ... but she should know by now ... that those exciting and ridiculously hopeful feelings were basically a trick played by biology, which saw an opportunity for reproduction looming, and duly turned on a tap to flood your bloodstream with a drug not unrelated to heroin to dampen down your critical faculties and accomplish the formation of a couple. As soon as you reached that longed-for peak, the descent began almost at once ... back to a place where, as before, you were essentially alone again, except that, if you'd not been careful, you were now shackled to another person." (14)
• "The same basic architecture was present in every human and group of humans, so that the differences between individuals and groups were presumably the result of different circumstances and different histories rather than of some people just stubbornly or wilfully being wrong." (14)
• "He would be such hard work, as people always were when they were too contained and bottled up to really know themselves." (14)
• "Things slowly connected together, like isolated spikes sticking up out of a lake that revealed themselves to be the branches of a single enormous tree, when the water was drained away." (18)
• "Jael watched his face intently, like a falcon in a sky watching the movements of small creatures below it with a cold, clear-sighted and entirely self-interested gaze." (18)
• "The merging of himself with the world around him was no longer soothing in the way it had been then because he knew it would soon be beyond his reach." (18)
• "A human being's future self is really another, separate person from who they are now. The only thing that's special about this other, particular person is that they're someone who one day you'll actually have to be. And that's the beginning of responsibility." (19)
• "I'll tell you something about being super-intelligent: it's a drag. I figure things out at once that other people spend a whole happy evening discussing. I know what people are going to say before they open their mouths. I watch people cheerfully mangling logic and have to bite my tongue while others applaud therm and tell them how wise they are." (22)
• "Being smart means you get to look at the fractals at a higher magnification than everyone else." (22)
• "Fuck knows what someone like you does with all the needs an d wants you've had to suppress ... but I suppose they're in there somewhere, shackled in some dark cell, screaming, and rattling the bars, and slowly going mad." (22)
• "What was Ben Ronson anyway? He imagined a kind of web which linked up objects out there in the world with memories and nodes of feeling in long branching chains. At any particular moment almost all of this web was in darkness, and if he had a self at all, it was a kind of spotlight that swept back and forth through these hundreds of millions of branching chains, searching for some kind of meaning, some kind of sense that he was connected to something he wanted." (22)
• "If I survive this ... I will do something new. Why otherwise would I need more life than I've already had?" (25)
• "I'm the Ben that always exists when no one is watching him, not even Ben himself." (28)

Utterly readable. A page-turned. Brilliant.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God