Spinner is not a new character she is quite vital to the plot of The Book of Koli, but she is new as a narrator.

In Trials, the story again begins with Koli, but expands in the first few chapters to include a second first-person narrator, a character called Spinner Tanhide. In the former, the whole book is written in the first-person with Koli as the only point-of-view character. The Trials of Koli presents a narrative departure from The Book of Koli. During Book, Koli is banished from Mythen Rood and forced to scuffle for his survival alone solitary existence is not really possible in his world, though, so his banishment is essentially viewed by everyone as a death sentence. They feel like a real community in peril. The people of Mythen Rood work together, though not necessarily harmoniously, and they work very hard, and they just manage to squeeze out enough food and other essential resources to survive another day. In setting up Mythen Rood and the Calder Valley as places, Carey avoids most of the worst pitfalls of the genre: there are neither the rugged individualists re-enacting false frontier myths in some ultra-violent hypermasculine war of all-against-all nor a tech-granted reprieve for the villagers from their constant near-death struggle against the elements. The ruling class of Mythen Rood are the Ramparts, the handful of lucky souls who can manage to operate the few pieces of still-functioning technology from the pre-apocalyptic times. Koli lives in Mythen Rood, a small, isolated village in the Calder River valley – in what used to be the boundary between Lancashire and Yorkshire, England – at some unspecified point in the future. The first book in the series, The Book of Koli introduces the primary protagonist, a first-person narrator called Koli Woodsmith. Carey’s Rampart Trilogy is the shiniest bit of treasure to come along in post-apocalyptic fiction in some time.īook two in the trilogy, The Trials of Koli, is the most geographically expansive volume in the series and is, therefore, the one that most shows off the excellent worldbuilding upon which the trilogy is founded. What really demarcates the rare treasures in the genre from the dross is whether or not the setting – which is our world, just horrifically stilted by violence, decay and oblivion – is rendered in a credible and fascinating manner. What parts of our everyday lives are maintained into this indeterminate future and how have those features been distorted? Crucial to this endeavor, of course, is also nailing down a plausible apocalyptic event.

The hinge point on which the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction balances is how, precisely, our current society is preserved into and beyond the eschatological event that brings the book’s world into existence.

The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey