Hauntingly creepy and insightful. Flawed people floundering in a psychologically hostile territory. Everything is wrong, and nothing is solved. Form follows function. ( )

I’ve known Chris for many years, and read and enjoyed his short fiction. I’ve also read several of his novels and, while I’ve appreciated the quality of their prose – which is definitely a cut above what is typical for science fiction – I’ll admit I found their conceits and plots felt a little second-hand. That’s sort of true here, and it gives the novel a slightly old-fashioned feel. But that actually works in its favour, given it’s set in a mysterious place the world has forgotten. Ben Ronson, a British policeman, is sent to the Submundo Delta in Brazil to prevent the locals from killing the indigenes, called duendes. The Submundo Delta is surrounded by the Zone, which, on exiting it, wipes all memories of what happens within it. Partly because of the Zone, the only way to travel to the Submundo Delta is by boat, and so visitors must spend a day in the Zone. The novel opens as Ronson leaves the Zone and enters the delta – and he has no idea what he did when the ship stopped, and is too scared to read the journal entries he made. That fear drives him as he tries to stop the duende killings by the locals and come with some way of preventing them from occurring. This is not helped by the fact the duendes trigger some sort of mental barrage of anxieties and phobias in humans when they are close. Everything in the delta is low tech, like the early decades of the twentieth century. It makes the strangeness of the world seems a little more, well, plausible. But not entirely. Beneath the World, a Sea reminded me chiefly of Paul Park’s Coelestis, a favourite sf novel, although since it’s not set on an alien world it doesn’t have sf’s scaffolding to support its world, and relies more on a Ballardian twisting of mundanity for its setting. The plot is almost incidental – Ronson investigates, Ronson falls prey to the place’s atmosphere, in an almost Graham Greene sort of narrative. Beckett’s novels have always been strong on character, and that’s equally true here – to such an extent, the focus on character actually results in the plot losing its way around midway through. It doesn’t seem to matter much, however, because Ronson’s failure was pretty much obvious from the start. The only duff note is what happens to him in the Zone on his departure from the Submundo Delta. It feels like a twist that needed more set-up and yet was an obvious conclusion from the first chapter. Despite all that, Beneath the World, a Sea is very strong on atmosphere, the prose is excellent, and I thought this one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. ( )

Some interesting ideas, especially the zone where,once you left, you couldn’t remember anything about it or what you did in it. Reasonable psychological exploration of the characters but not that much plot. September 2019 ( )

Thank you to ReadersFirst for sending me this book.
I look forward to reading it!

The Submundo Delta is unlike anywhere else on Earth. The forest floor is made up of tree roots, tangled together over the sea to make up a landmass, the foliage is magenta and the creatures are unrecognisable. When English police-officer, Ben, arrives at the Delta to investigate the deaths of a group of local creatures only recently deemed persons, he discovers that the forest has strange and enticing power.

This book is written in a very interesting and unprecedented way. It is not story driven, which I believe puts a lot of people off, but which I actually found very interesting. It is a book of world building and concept building, which does not, in my opinion, need to rely on a strong storyline. Beckett introduces a variety of characters and with their backgrounds, shows the Delta through their eyes and explores their psychological journeys. The setting is, in a way, the whole story. The way that the Delta effects people differers, and each person's experience shows a different aspect of humanity, psychology, compassion, logic, etc.

I love the concept of the Zona, an area which you cannot remember once you have left. The time spent there is erased from your memory as soon as you leave it's boundaries, meaning that in the Zona people find themselves free to do whatever they wish, knowing that they will not have to live with any consequences, even so little as the memory of having done it. Ben is convinced of the idea that the Ben who was in the Zona is not the one who lives outside of it, and is terrorised by the idea of what he may have done when he knew he wouldn't remember.

This book made me think a lot about what it means to be human, whether or not we should let fears be part of our decision making, and whether we as humans really have a right to take what we want, accessing remote areas regardless of how it effects local communities and habitats.

The conceptual nature of this book was done very well, right up until the last 50 pages or so. At that point I felt that it began to unravel, and unfortunately it stopped working for me. I get that the forest was working it's magic on Ben, and so he is meant to be getting more theoretical and less literal, but by the end I just found his chapters to be unreadable messes, more abstract than interesting. I get what Beckett was going for, I really do, I just didn't enjoy his execution of it. There was one sequence for instance that gave me a flashback to the video game scene in the film of The Beach, which is not a compliment coming from me.

Overall, I loved the general setup of the book, and the characters were each fascinatingly flawed. The delta was beautifully crafted, and I enjoyed all of the amazing descriptions of the otherworldly foliage and fauna. It's exciting to imagine somewhere on Earth being so different and other. I would say around the middle of the book I would give it 3.75 stars, but by the end, 3 stars. ( )