A Good Return to Status (Ab)Normal - A Review of The Delirium Brief

[kamreadsandrecs]

The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is the eighth book in a series. While this review is spoiler-free for the book itself, it might contain spoilers for the other books in the series. To avoid getting spoiled, please do not read this review without having first read the other books in the series.

I think it is safe to say that nowadays, politics is more like a circus than anything else, and we all have front-row seats whether we like it or not. I certainly feel that way, watching an erstwhile mayor-turned-president attempt to use brutish small-town tactics on a national level, while his sycophantic followers praise him to high heavens and use his influence to forward their own agendas. This, while on the other side of the Pacific, an equally incompetent president helms the most powerful (and therefore most dangerous) country in the world, whose actions and words alternately threaten total political collapse or World War III - and sometimes, both at once.

Against this backdrop of troubled (and troubling) politics and world events, the Elder Gods loom larger than ever. Though these powerful denizens of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos have always been popular in speculative fiction, they have recently become popular enough that they are surfacing in more mainstream consciousness. On one hand, there is a growing movement in SFF that attempts to deconstruct Lovecraft’s oeuvre by casting a wary and hairy eye on his racism and classism, both of which are deeply embedded in the bones of the Mythos itself. More and more, SFF authors - especially those from minority backgrounds - are beginning to realise that Lovecraft’s disgusting politics cannot be allowed to go unchallenged, and many of them have found excellent and fascinating ways to address those politics via stories ranging from short stories to immersive novels, along with essays and reportage across various forms of media.

On the other hand, the Elder Gods, as represented by Cthulhu, have come to symbolise the idea that an alternative - any alternative - would be better than the ones currently available to the voting public. In 2016 Guillermo del Toro proposed Cthulhu as an independent candidate from the US presidential race, running with the tagline: “Why choose the lesser evil?”. The idea has gained such traction that there is a website encouraging Americans to vote for Cthulhu in 2020. While it is a satirical skewering of the candidates of the 2016 US elections and is clearly meant to be played for laughs, the website also shows just how frustrated people are that an Elder God - a force of evil so great that the whole point of many of Lovecraftian stories is keeping them out of our reality - would be preferable to an orange marmot in an ill-fitted suit. (No offence to marmots; they are fascinating creatures, and I am sure would have the good taste to choose well-fitted suits, if given the opportunity.)

It is against this backdrop of political upheaval, albeit scaled up to times a thousand, that the events of The Delirium Brief, the eighth novel in Charles Stross’s Laundry Files series, occur. In the wake of the explosive (in more ways that one) unveiling of the Laundry’s existence during the events of the previous book The Nightmare Stacks, Bob Howard has returned to the United Kingdom, and since he’s the only one in the Laundry with clean hands (technically), he is being trotted out as the organisation’s “public face.” While Bob is out doing media appearances, behind the scenes certain people are moving against the Laundry, and they are doing it in the most modern - and, for the Laundry, the most dangerous - way possible: privatisation. It is the most effective way of taking down the Laundry, and all the management knows it. And if the Laundry gets taken down, then nothing stands between the uncaring malevolent entities that lie beyond our dimension, and it will not be long until the world succumbs to an apocalypse.

And so Bob - along with his colleagues and bosses - are forced to contemplate a move none of them would have ever considered before: take over the government to protect it from itself.

One of the most notable things about this novel (and the main reason for my excitement) is the return of Bob Howard as primary narrator for the story itself. Since The Atrocity Archives I have grown immensely fond of Bob, so when I learned after The Rhesus Chart that he would not be at the helm of this series for a while I was mildly worried. But then, when I read The Annihilation Score, which is narrated by Mo, Bob’s better half, I was pleasantly surprised and immensely pleased. It raised my expectations for the series as a whole, since The Annihilation Score made it abundantly clear that Stross could not only continue to tell the story of the Laundry Files from another character’s perspective and still make it enormously fun, but he could also write female characters pretty well, too. I adore Mo to pieces, so having her narrate the story for once was very satisfying.

This means, therefore, that I went into The Nightmare Stacks with some very high expectations - expectations which were subsequently dashed. I was not entirely happy with Alex Schwartz as a character; he rather struck me as a return to Bob from The Atrocity Archives but with lashings of Hipster Pretension I find unpleasantly inauthentic and, consequently, irritating. But that book was crucial because it narrated what I knew was going to be a key event in subsequent novels, and so focused on reading it purely for the plot movement, all the while hoping that the next book in the series would be better.

And I am glad to say that, with Bob back in narrative control for this novel, the narrative quality is back to what I am used to - especially since I have missed Bob’s wit something fierce. Readers who feel the same way I do will be glad to know that Bob is in top form in this novel, as this excerpt will show:

…she looks like Taylor Swift in boardroom drag—a version of TayTay that runs on type O negative and has a severe sunlight allergy.

Typical Bob, but where his humour really excels is when he’s shooting across the bow of political figures and issues. Take the following, for example:

(Apparently you’re only allowed to demolish Wolverhampton if you’re a property developer like Donald Trump. Crawling eldritch horrors don’t get planning permission unless they’re Trump’s hairpiece.)

Or this:

… “What a mess. Why can’t humans run a nice sensible feudal hierarchy like anyone else? Then you wouldn’t have these problems!”

I decline to derail onto the War of the Roses.

However, also typical of Bob, it’s not all snark, as he does make some rather serious observations every now and again:

The most efficient kind of censorship isn’t the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman: it’s the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we’re afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange.

While fans of this series will likely be pleased to have Bob back in the driver’s seat (so to speak), he is not the only character who makes a reappearance. This book feels like a reunion of many of the secondary characters who have appeared in previous books: Mo is a key character in this novel, as are Persephone Hazard, Mhari Murphy, and Johnny McTavish are here too. Even Alex and Cassie make an appearance, and not just briefly, either. Also returning to the scene are a few villains from previous novels, though I will refrain from mentioning specifically which ones come back to prevent leaving spoilers.

Plot-wise, this novel is a culmination of practically everything that’s been going on since at least The Fuller Memorandum. Over the course of the last several books for this series, it has been quite clear that something big is on the horizon, with the biggest event to date occurring in The Nightmare Stacks. However, what happens in this one is far bigger in scope. Questions about lesser evils and deals with devils come into play: a reflection of the larger, real world political situation, as institutions negotiate their own survival in the face of a hostile, profit-focused landscape.

Of more interest to me, however, are Bob’s doings while he has been away from the United Kingdom. There are several moments throughout this novel where Bob mentions that he has been to Japan dealing with “a kaiju problem,” and that has piqued my interest. I have high hopes that Stross will produce a novella detailing those adventures, since I think they are utterly fascinating (not least because of the interest in kaiju generated by Pacific Rim and its upcoming sequel).

Overall, The Delirium Brief is a classic entry in this series, bringing back the character that started it all (in more ways than one) and setting the stage for a new direction for the story as a whole. It does not break any new ground, but it is a great touchstone for a very long series, and will hopefully be a launching pad for even more interesting stories in the future.