Review: The Heirs of Babylon

Man, the read and review for this one took longer than needed. Reminds me that I don't especially like doing reviews, actually. Sometimes they end up taking longer than the actual read.

The Heirs of Babylon is Glen Cook's first novel (not counting The Swap Academy under the pseudonym Greg Stevens), a post-apocalyptic naval military story, inspired by Cook's own tour of duty aboard the USS Moale in 1963 and by the anti-war sentiment of Vietnam-era America.

And eh... It's alright. Yeah.

Though Night Shade's edition of the novel comes with its own perfect blurb that manages to be pretty engaging, and almost manages to be something of a (necessary) exposition-dump in order to ground the reader in this world, I nonetheless felt I had to try and do some blurb of my own.

It is 200 years after the world came to an end. And yet the war that ended it continues to grind on.

Out of the ruins of a fallen society a whole host of ships are called to gather. They are to make the journey halfway across the world to take the fight to an ever-present enemy.

In what little remains of Germany, the muster is called. Recently married, new father-to-be Kurt Ranke has joined the destroyer-ship the Jäger as its quartermaster. He has no real stake or allegiance in the war, and every reason to stay with his young wife, but he is impulsive and stubborn and filled with a young man's foolishness.

The voyage is a long and hard one. Past the shattered coasts of Europe, the history-laden Mediterranean, to India and beyond the fleet sails, and every swell of the way will be made in the broken-down, archaic vessels of the past, the nigh-on incomprehensible remnants of more advanced technological age.

During his duties Kurt finds out that there is an underground group operating to thwart the designs of the High Command, the leading body responsible for the Gathering, but that they are woefully outmatched by the cold and terrible political officers accompanying the ship.

As the bodies of his friends and family start to pile up Kurt realizes that High Command has sent an undercover officer along for the ride, to sniff out rumours of subversion and mutiny. And soon Kurt finds himself targeted, by High Command and underground alike, and a deadly game to uncover the identity of the agents begins.

You can't, and shouldn't, rush your read of a Cook novel.
     Of course, you shouldn't rush through any novel you're reading, but sometimes there's too many books yet to dive into, and when you're too aware of that, of the great stuff yet to come, reading a novel that requires time to breathe, to settle, in order to linger, can be, if not downright unpleasant, definitely unsatisfying. Time is finite, after all, and there's so much yet to read.
But Cook's novels, due to his style of writing, are those that require some time to sink in, lest they will refuse to linger in the mind. With Darkwar I made sure I had the time, but with this one, I'm sad to say, not so much. I confess I felt impatient to continue on into my next read.

Either way, despite my flaws and those of the book itself, I did quite like this one.
Cook delivers with The Heirs of Babylon a naturally compelling narrative, his recognizable style already very much present and even here already very readable. The story is decent although almost one-note, with a cynical note of sadness running throughout, an oncoming doom, and a foregone conclusion waiting to happen.

Unlike with his fantasy work, this one doesn't break much new ground and instead feels more like it homages various other works, from anti-war novels to dystopian literature.
Though the world-building is lacklustre it's almost extravagant by Cook's standards, or at least, it feels this way. Given that this universe that the story takes place in is our own in the immediate apocalyptic future, there are a lot of blank spaces filled in by our own knowledge of our own world. Meaning until that Cook specifically says otherwise; this is all recognizable, and even in its ruination familiar.

The story isn't as engaging as some of its elements are. Kurt Ranke is an interesting protagonist, very much unlike your usual hero, and is instead filled with enough flaws to float a derelict battle ship.
The (almost) game of cat and mouse is probably the most engaging aspect of the novel, as Kurt tries to identify the undercover agents, and coupled with the question of why the war is going on, and the nature of the grand enemy, and whether there even is one, despite the very clear overarching end goal Cook manages to keep you pretty interested in the proceedings until the very end.

However, the ending itself is confused (but not confusing) and a bit unsatisfying, though spectacular in a distant sort of way, and almost poetic in another, but all in all, there's too much questions remaining to completely satisfy.

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The main question that really remains is why that the war is still going on. There is no definitive answer to this. you can deduce, and you can guess, but you can't really know. And maybe the fact that there aren't any real answers to the questions we want answered is part of what Cook set out to do with his first story.
There can be no good answers to why this war is going on. Let me rephrase that: There can be no good answers for why war is going on. Any answers anyone would want to give, to validate the waging of war, will always fall short.