Book review: The Inferno

The Inferno by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle is very much in the style and tone of his other books, but my first impression is that despite the non-stellar¹ prose, it is just more intelligently written than the other stuff I've been surfing through recently.

The plot, in brief: a Scientist, Our Hero, Cameron who is in fact The Cameron, in Australia to arbitrate rival designs for a new radiotelescope, notices a reddish patch in the sky that isn't Mars, and which turns out to be not a supernova but even more excitingly the first signs of the galactic core turning into a quasar. Returning to his home in northern Scotland, conveniently shielded by the season from the core, he and a few others survive and begin to rebuild, encountering and overcoming vicissitudes along the way. At the end, he discovers that a providential darkness that had shielded the Earth from overheating had some unexplained extraterrrestrial origin.

All of this is quite nicely handled. There's a bit of religion thrown in - Cameron's wife gets religion and leaves him for the madness down south, there's a nice singing-in-ruined-cathedral scene at the end, and Cameron ponders the observations made by the Mad Astronomer which reveal that the darkness-that-saved wasn't natural. Cameron speaks gaelic to ghillies and ponders Culloden. I could find out if the Hoyles had roots up there, but perhaps it is just the climbing: there's a lot of names of mountains and the A9 out of Pitlochry stuff. The initial build up is nice: our man is from CERN, but knows enough to arbitrate UK vs Oz radiotelescope designs, flys around the world a bit, and sees kangaroos or are they wallabies in Oz. It all seems a bit like the rather more gentle pace of scientific life in the 60s. The scene when "Mars" is seen is almost comic, undoubtedly by design: Hoyle is either making fun at, or just replaying in-jokes, about astronomers only looking through computer-pointed telescopes and not actually knowing where any of the planets are.

In a way the ending, by which I mean all the stuff after the inferno, is - apart from the cathedral - a bit mechanical, working through "the obvious" sort of problems, but not in a heavy-handed maner.

Notes

1. Arf arf.