Ferren and the Invasion of Heaven
Review by Stephen Dedman
(Stephen's updated bibliography of short fiction)
(Review first appeared in The West Australian)
Richard Harland's Heaven and Earth Trilogy has been compared to The City of Lost Children, LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy, and the Mad Max movies. His inventiveness hasn't flagged in this final book of this fantasy for young adults, where bizarre forces are mounting for another war on heaven.
It's the year 3000, and after foiling one attempt to invade heaven, Ferren and his friends have managed to unite Australia's scattered tribes of Residuals - the last descendants of un-engineered humans - into an alliance. Unfortunately, most of the elderly representatives seem more interested in fighting among themselves for personal power than in freeing the Residuals from the tyranny of the artificial Humen. Things become even more complicated when Ferren's tribe sends the seductive and voluptuous young Zonda as their representative. Ferren's enemy Skail, who had opposed the formation of the alliance, becomes the Sea-folk's representative on the Assembly and a major divisive influence.
The Doctors, rulers of the Humen, accept the fallen angel Asmodai as their new leader, and send a Queen-Hyper as ambassador to the Assembly to propose a pact between the Humen and the Residuals. Skail persuades the representatives to agree to her terms, but the visit is merely a diversion while Asmodai assembles his forces in the City of the Dead and launches an attack. Ferren, Zonda, Skail and a few dozen other Residuals rescue the warrior angel Miriael from Asmodai and escape to Ferren and Zonda's old home. Miriael re-establishes contact with the Archangels' War Council, but they refuse to believe that Asmodai is a real threat and reject the guerrilla tactics of the Residuals as unethical and unworthy. However, they've underestimated the fallen angel's ruthlessness and are unaware of his new weapons...
Ferren and the Invasion of Heaven has an energetic, almost breathless writing style; Harland has cut back on the onamatapoeias in this book, but there are still occasional cluster-bombings of exclamation marks. Horror and humour are mingled (the first named casualties of the attack on the Assembly are Erne and Bertel), and the plot is driven as much by sexual tension and jealousies as it is by the looming apocalypse. Apart from its inventiveness and liveliness, one of the real pleasures in this novel is the believable teenage characters: Ferren, courageous and an instinctive tactician, but unable to see the obvious when it comes to women; Zonda, narcissistic and flirtatious, but also more clever and capable than she seems; wrestling-mad hunk Bross, as self-obsessed as Zonda and oblivious as Ferren; gun-crazy Tadge, weighted down with more weapons than anyone can use; and others (think of the Tripods trilogy with some female characters). The villains are repulsive enough to keep reading in the hope of seeing them getting wiped out; the archangels are as snobbish as they are saintly, and mystical to the point of being downright weird.
Epic fantasy, war novel, coming of age story: Ferren and the Invasion of Heaven is all of these, and a worthy conclusion to an entertaining and imaginative series.
Copyright © Stephen Dedman
Publisher: Penguin
352 Pages
ISBN: 0141005122