# By Light Alone by Adam Roberts



## Werthead (Aug 30, 2011)

Decades  in the future, the world has been revolutionised by the  introduction of photosynthetic hair. The poor now no longer need to be  fed, as they can live off sunlight alone, whilst the rich flaunt their  wealth and power by their unnecessary consumption of food and cutting  their hair. Supermodels are now immensely fat and the rich very bald. A  well-off family undertakes a skiing trip to Mount Ararat on the  Turkish-Iranian border, but during their holiday their daughter, Leah,  is kidnapped. Attempts to track her down fail, but a year later she is  found and returned to their home in New York City. But Leah's return  preludes a time of immense change in the world, as revolution  threatens... 

_By Light Alone_ is Adam  Roberts' eleventh novel. On the surface it's the story of a young girl  who is kidnapped, returns home, and whose return serves as the catalyst  for significant changes in her family life. But this is only a very  shallow reading of the text. As the narrative continues, it becomes  clear that there are a lot of different things going on, and  periodically the text switches to a new POV and rewinds in time to  provide a fresh perspective on events we have already seen. The main  characters - Leah and her parents, George and Marie - are all somewhat  unreliable narrators and finding the inconsistencies between their  accounts of the same event is a fascinating exercise in itself. 

The central SF element - the photosynthetic hair - is a Maguffin  that sets up a world in which poor people no longer need to work to eat,  resulting in a mounting overpopulation and unemployment crisis that  threatens the lives of the rich and powerful. Roberts explores the  ramifications of this well-meaning development through its impact on  society and how that affects the central characters. The rich are now  more self-absorbed than ever before, treating skinny people with long  hair as social lepers and disdaining anyone who _works_  for a living, whilst avoiding watching the news (which they regard as  beneath them). However, their lives are also portrayed as empty, with  little to galvanise or interest them outside of a few hobbies. Leah's  kidnapping forces her father, George, into contact with ordinary people  and her subsequent return catalyses him into seeing the world in a  different way. The way that the characters, world and story drive each  other relentlessly onwards is particularly impressive and accomplished. 

However, an even more successful move is when Roberts executes a  narrative shift in the second half of the novel, dropping us into the  lives of the poor, whose freedom from having to find food has simply  plunged them even deeper into abject poverty and desperation, raising  the spectre of revolution and violence. This is a dark, grubby and  distasteful world of sexual violence and petty crime, out of which  emerges the prospect of change, though whether that is for the better  remains unclear at the novel's close. 

_By Light Alone_ is an  accomplished novel, with expertly-crafted prose, well-developed thematic  elements and engaging characters combining to form an intricate,  satisfying narrative which concludes by posing hard questions and not  offering easy answers (out of the four Roberts novels I've read, this  has by far the strongest ending). The problems are relatively minor:  there is an idiosyncratic sense of humour in George's chapters which is  occasionally tonally jarring, and the limits of the hair technology are  not really explained. People not needing money for food is one thing,  but presumably they still need it for shelter, clothes and water, so the  apparent willingness of some of the hair-using majority to ditch their  jobs and loll around on the beach all day doesn't entirely track.  However, given that the explanations for much of this come from the rich  cats whose views are inherently biased, this incongruity can be seen as  part of the effect, rather than a problem in itself. 

_By Light Alone_ (****½) is  an intelligent and well-written SF novel with real literary ambitions  that it comes close to fulfilling. This may not be the modern SF  masterpiece I am fully confident that Roberts is capable of producing,  but it is not far off. The novel is available now in the UK and on import in the USA.


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## Rodders (Aug 30, 2011)

A nice review Werthead. I must confess that i have only ever read two of Robert's books and enjoyed them both very much.


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## Tillane (Sep 2, 2011)

Good review, Werthead.  I read and enjoyed his short story "Hair" (from anthology *When It Changed: Science Into Fiction*), so I'm glad to see he's expanding on the ideas in that.  Sounds like he's done a heck of a job of it, too.


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