Elisabeth Vonarburg's books and the lament of the monolingual reader

[bibliogramma]

There are many times when I deeply regret that my ability to read in French is not strong enough to handle the complexities of fiction - most recently, because it means that I must wait and wait and hope that all the volumes of Elisabeth Vonarburg's amazing and mesmerising Tyranaël cycle are translated into English (hopefully, with Vonarburg herself collaborating on the translation, as she has done in the translations of the first two volumes).

The five volumes are:

Les Rêves de la mer, trans. Dreams of the Sea
Le Jeu de la perfection, trans. A Game of Perfection
Mon frère l'ombre
L'Autre Rivage
La Mer allée avec le soleil

Vonarburg is a multi-award winning author (both in French and in English translation) - her best-known work (at least in English) is probably Chroniques du Pays des Mères (published in English in the US as In the Mothers' Land and in Canada as The Maërlande Chronicles), a rich and multi-layered examination of a matriarchal society in a future/alternate history of Earth.

The Tyranaël cycle is, on the surface, a story of human colonisation of a new planet - but one on which at least one previous civilisation has originated, evolved, and then disappeared - apparently. The first two volumes deal, in part, with the early disasters and eventual successes of the early colonisers as they learn to live with some very unique circumstances and build a functioning society. At the same time, we see parts of this through the eyes of the Dreamers - precognitively gifted members of the previous civilisation on the planet - and we watch as some humans seek to find traces of, and understand something of, those who were there before them.

Threading through everything is the presence, puzzle and threat of the Sea - a strange fluid body/energy field/mystery that rises and falls hundreds of feet as the seasons turn, destroying life, interrupting electromagnetic currents and changing the shorelines of continents as it rises.

A blurb posted on the SFWA website from the publisher of the French editions says:

As the twin planets of Altaïr eclipse each other, a dangerous and mysterious blue Sea rises, killing most of the explorers from Earth. The survivors must make a new life amid the abandoned cities of the long-vanished native population, curiously intact. Or are the colonists just a nightmare of the aälmâdzi, the native Dreamers ?

So begins the epic of the planet Tyranaël : an adventure, a lyric journey through time, and a search for answers, each of which is more strange and wonderful than the last.

But the Tyranaël cycle is so much more than just another colonisation of space novel, with strange and mysterious aliens and inexplicable dangers. It is deeply philosophical, exploring the nature of perception, of truth, of time, of reality, but in a way that evolves naturally out of the events and characters portrayed.

And it is also, as all of Vonarburg's books (at least the ones I've read, the ones in English that have had her hand in the translation), a tour de force of language - lyrical, fluid, evocative, suggestive. Vonarburg's writing has always, to me, had the same kind of otherworldliness that I find in Borges, or Calvino, or in the deserted cities of Bradbury's Mars. It must be read to be understood, because the feeling of it is beyond description - or at least beyond my feeble powers to describe.

But it is a most welcome addiction, and I'm not-so-patiently waiting for more.