The Book of Koli (Carey)
Book One of the Rampart Trilogy
(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)
This was a Book Club selection. It's a post-apocalyptic story set somewhere in England (toward the end we find out it's 200 miles north of London). It is written as a narrative of a young man with little education from a village of people with limited education. The text is difficult to read at first, but you get used to it and ignore it, except for the times that you don't.
The biggest "offender" is the use of "of" in place of "'ve" in contractions. Every. Single. Time.
There are also times when you need to sound something out loud to figure out what he's refering to, and other times, I just didn't bother if I could figure it out from context.
It's also very conversational in how he recounts a bunch of stuff you need to know before he can tell you the story he wants to. It drags on a bit. Once again, had this not been a book club book, I might've bailed out after 30 or 60 pages. The pace picked up later on, but not nearly enough.
Koli and his family live in the village of Mythen Rood, which supposedly means something, or it could just be a corruption of "road". ("Rood" means Crucifix. It's also "door" backward but that doesn't mean anything.)
You never get a good idea how big, how populated, this village is. Is it dozens, hundreds, a thousand?There don't seem to be a lot of people mentioned and there are only three "Ramparts" protecting everyone. Ramparts are people who can wake up the ancient tech, except that there's only three pieces of working tech, and all the people who passed the test to wake the devices are come from a single family.
Like in Armored Saint, everyone's last name is their occupation. When they become an adult, if they don't become a Rampart, they choose the name they will be known as. Koli wants to be a Rampart but he ends up being woodworker. His best friend becomes a Rampart (and he's a member of that same family) and asks their mutual female friend to marry him. Koli is sad but doesn't stand in the way (nor does he stand up for him.) Koli finds out from Ursula, a medic who travels from village to village accompanied by a "drudge" that is apparently the size of a mini-van, that there are ways to activate tech and ways to authorize users. Koli comes up with a plan to acquire tech.
Koli's father was a traveling locksmith. He installed the lock on the door in the basement in Rampart Hold ("the Count and Seal") and another lock in the woodshed of Koli's mother. He installed the same lock with the same key. Koli uses the key, sneaks in the Hold and makes off with a bunch of devices, which turn out to be same kind of tech. (He also forgot to bring a bag to carry them, so he could only take what he could hold.) Of all of these, he gets a single item to charge up with sunlight: a Sony Dreamsleeve music and entertainment player, with a young woman AI interface named Monono Aware (A-war-ee). We find out more about her later on.
Koli keeps hoping that there's a weapon in the device, but there isn't. He also wants to be sure that he is authorized and that no one else is. He manages to make a verbal passcode for anyone other than him. Monono tells him that she can still access a site were the upgrade with the personal alarm is stored but it'll take a while to get it. Koli says okay, and the device goes silent for a long time. Koli thinks he broke it or chased the girl away. She returns at his friend's wedding (I forget his name already, but he married Spinner, but they won't be in the story much longer). He declares himself to be Koli Rampart.
The Ramparts disagree and imprison him. Half of them want to kill him and the rest want to make him Faceless and banish him. The Faceless men in the woods are mostly cannibals. So he sets out, without the Dreamsleeve, and tries to make his way to Ludden (which turns out not to be London, as I figured, but it was only 4 miles away, so it didn't make sense that it would be London.). The problem is that the trees can kill you either with vines or by boring seeds or whatever into you. But they are usually only active on sunny days. Overcast days are okay.
He makes it through the trees to the gate of Ludden. He finds out when he gets there that Ludden is dead. Everyone died off. (They weren't making enough babies, and not enough of those lived.) While he's there, he's ambushed by one of Rampart Cutter who followed him because he wants to know how to make the dreamsleeve work. Koli refuses to tell him and dares him to kill him already. There's a fight, and first the Rampart is cut with his own tech. The Rampart threatens to destroy the Dreamsleeve, but Koli uses a large rock to destroy the cutter, which blows up, taking the Ramparts arm with it. He dies.
Koli climbs a tower to spend the night (instead of finding a bed in any of the houses that remain). While up there, he hears voices. There are three people out looking for someone. They capture Koli and carry him back to a religous cult that is in an underground railway station. (They followed the tracks for quite a while.) When he gets there, the leader is ready to make him his altar boy, who will lead the land that was (shades of Hale-Bopp Comet folks). He's tossed in a cell, and there's Ursula, who is described as missing an eye, but it's actually just messed up a bit.
They eventually escape by creating a diversion, spilling gasoline onto the train and setting it on fire, and making a run down the tunnel. Many of the cultists leapt into the flames, thinking it would take them to the promised land. It did not. They make it outside, but Sky and some men capture them and are going to bring them back. Then the drudge strikes. They are free to make their next move.
At this point, the youngest cult member who helped catch Koli, Cup, catches up with him and is ready to kill him. Koli prevents the drudge from killing Cup. Cup is then revealed to actually be a boy who ran away from his village when they were going to marry him off to an old woman, which makes no sense if marriages are supposed to produce children from the villages to survive. This revelation wasn't foreshadowed and doesn't add anything to the story. If it was cut out, the story wouldn't be affected at all. If you skip a half dozen paragraphs, you'd have no idea.
At this point, they're ready to head to London. We don't have any closure on any of the earlier story elements, but since it's stated up front that it's a trilogy (and not some open-ended series), that is less of a problem. The only problem is that I don't think I'm going to look for book two, because reading book one was a bit of a drudge. (I didn't plan that, but it fits.)
Last note: apparently the apocalypse was caused by climate change, and a time very soon to now, but far enough away from all this wonderful tech to be developed. How climate change created those killer trees is not explained or readily apparent.
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