OMEGA, by Christopher Evans,
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Christopher Evans is an author one feels must have another life, some secret overwhelming occupation which explains why he publishes so little. When a work appears, as OMEGA does now – his first adult fiction in ten years – one feels that, because it is so easily overwhelming, that something else has held Evans in thrall, diverting him from repeating his triumph with a new novel every year. OMEGA, on the surface, appears to be another alternate history novel – the Second World War has not ended; and it is also a medical mystery in which Owen Meredith attempts to recover from an accident in a London street. However, within those two strands are many others – one in which alternate time streams appear to be merging, one in which characters may or may not be real, and one in which the residents of a dystopia may be attempting to escape into the minds of our happier generation. Surrounding those events is a narrative style that is Evans’ own. Following his accident, as television director Owen Meredith attempts to recover, wondering why his family do not come to see him, he finds himself in fugues in which he switches into the mind of Owain Meredudd. Meredudd is a major in the British army, first met travelling through a war-torn London. In irregular and unpredictable occurrences of his fugues Meredith will discover more and more about the devastated, polluted world in which Meredudd lives; one in which the Second World War did not end but broke down in blocs, though not those of Orwell’s Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, and a world in which weapons defying all ethical control in their development and use have also, through accident and mishap, made ruin even more extreme. There is an almost throw-away line about the effects of a mutated measles which horribly exemplifies this perverted science. And meanwhile Meredudd, himself recovering from a battlefield injury, seems to be not just surviving but at times almost thriving. Meredith tells his own story, and paragraph blanks separate it from the sections in which he finds himself in Major Maredudd’s head, describing in the third person what the major is seeing and doing. Almost without noticing that what is happening to him is happening to us, the breaks between the two narratives start to slip, finally occurring within sentences. The separation of the worlds is dissolving. Only late does Meredith realise that during his fugues, what he has done to Meredudd, the Major may do to him: exploring his world, perhaps preparatory to a permanent residence. It can be tempting to say that an Evans novel resembles something by someone else: Christopher Priest’s THE SEPARATION, for instance. However, like Meredith and Meredudd their resemblance is not identity. Those flapping fugues, for instance, have a war-time precursor in Patrick Hamilton’s HANGOVER SQUARE and if there is any similarity anywhere it is in time and in Evans’ earlier works, especially THE INSIDER and IN LIMBO, and in the resolution he achieves and achieved in all three. Christopher Evans stands in contrast to his namesake and OMEGA is another of his successes, in a style unique to him.
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© L J Hurst 2009