Review: A Cloud of Unknowing by Andrew Gillsmith

Blurb:

"The universe requires sacrifice. It always has, and it always will, because the universe is sacramental."

Broken and scattered, the survivors of the strange events in the Taklamakan Desert are trying to make sense of what happened while the rest of the world tries to recover its balance by scapegoating the artilects.

The Process--an ancient, alchemical plan to transform human consciousness--goes far deeper than anyone thought, and only the artificial magnetic shield developed by astrophysicist Sarah Baumgartner is preventing the newly transhuman Ralph Channing from fulfilling it.

The Lucifer Particles, a mysterious high-energy flux that seems to originate from beyond spacetime itself, may hold the answers, but the path to understanding leads through the strange, sub-quantum world of the Holomovement, guarded by the secretive scientific cult known as the Divers. And the price of understanding might be Sarah's soul itself.

In Rome, the Princes of the Church converge to elect a new Pope. Cardinal Marco Leone does everything in his power to stop the rise of his rival, the worldly and cunning Leo Pensabene, while Father Gabriel Serafian, an exorcist and former neuroscientist, is drawn even deeper into a conspiracy of global--and possibly supernatural--dimensions.

Confusion reigns. New discoveries threaten the very foundations of both science and faith. A cloud of unknowing has descended upon the world.

Meanwhile, visions of a young Chinese girl who died in the concentration camps decades ago point to a way forward...

Review:

In the 2023 fable The Mysteries, author Bill Watterson—a name I’m sure many of you will recognize as the philosopher/artist behind the transcendent Calvin and Hobbes—describes a world in which a fearful populace desperately seeks to understand the unseen powers that lurk in the woods: the eponymous “Mysteries”. One day, a knight returns from the woods with a captured Mystery in tow, which the knight hands over to the King’s wizards for study; study by which Watterson’s characters speculate “[the Mystery’s] powers might be thwarted”. Science confronts mysticism and conquers it, shifting the world of the fable into a new epoch in which the Mysteries are perceived as “surprisingly ordinary”.

Andrew Gillsmith’s A Cloud of Unknowing, the 2024 sequel to the fantastic Our Lady of the Artilects (which I reviewed earlier this year), stands then as a kind of sister tale to The Mysteries. The novels of what Gillsmith is calling “The Deserted Vineyard” series are firmly rooted in this exploration of the intersection of science and mysticism, and have become some of my favorite novels in the genre for that very reason. 

The narrative of Our Lady of the Artilects, for those who haven’t read it, primarily involves the study of artificial persons known as “artilects” and whether or not it is possible for one (or any of them) to be possessed, have visions of God, or even have souls. Could something made by man be touched by God as if it were His own creation? A Cloud of Unknowing takes place in the immediate fallout of the events of Our Lady of the Artilects, and methodically unspools the investigations of the previous book, whilst tugging at new threads elsewhere on the tapestry. In the world of The Deserted Vineyard, many of the great mysteries of science have been conquered, answering questions that for centuries could only be “answered” by religion; and it is in this grand future that the once-mystical becomes, as Watterson said, surprisingly ordinary. At least, until it isn’t. Our Lady of the Artilects ends with the ordinary becoming quite extraordinary.

Though I loved Our Lady of the Artilects, A Cloud of Unknowing sat on my shelf far longer than I ever intended for the simple fact that I gave myself homework before I read it; and that homework took me far longer than expected to complete. 

You see, the first thing I discovered when I typed the phrase “A Cloud of Unknowing” into the Amazon search bar was not Gillsmith’s novel, but rather a 14th century text titled The Cloud of Unknowing. I knew—or assumed from my reading of Our Lady and my then relatively few interactions with Gillsmith on Twitter—that this could not be a coincidence. For Gillsmith to have given his novel such a similar title to this ancient work of Christian mysticism had to mean something. And so I set about reading The Cloud before I would allow myself to read A Cloud. 

But I quickly found that I was not entirely in the right headspace to read The Cloud of Unknowing. By way of brief explanation, The Cloud of Unknowing is a guide for a kind of contemplative prayer, through which the person partaking in said prayer or contemplation might “always rise higher and higher from sin, and nearer and nearer to God” (The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 4 - Anonymous).

The Cloud was a dense thing to parse, split into 75 chapters over the course of some 130ish pages (per the Penguin Classics edition I acquired); but I still could only read two or three chapters a day before I felt like my head had begun to spin just a little too much to properly comprehend any more of the anonymous author’s words. But my key takeaway was this (and I apologize for what will certainly be a grotesque generalization of the teaching contained in this manuscript): the author of The Cloud intended for their students to breach this “Cloud of Unknowing” in a very specific manner—through love. The author says this in Chapter 4:

“All rational beings…have in them, each individually, two principal active faculties, one a faculty of knowledge, and the second a faculty of love; and God, their maker, is forever beyond the reach of the first of these… but by means of the second, the loving faculty, [He] can be fully grasped by each individual being, to such an extent that each single loving soul may, by virtue of love, embrace within itself [Him] who is fully sufficient… This is the unending marvelous miracle of love.”

But now let’s pocket this away for moment, and pivot back to A Cloud of Unknowing:

Fans of Our Lady of the Artilects will certainly enjoy A Cloud of Unknowing. As I said in my review of Our Lady, these books are full of the exact kind of sci-fi I love: sci-fi that is technical, challenging, unpredictable, philosophical, and above all captivating. But if Our Lady of the Artilects has the texture of a Hollywood blockbuster, A Cloud of Unknowing has the texture of a stage play. Similar to something like Lem’s Solaris, long chunks of A Cloud’s narrative take place between people just sitting and talking to one another, politicking, philosophizing, expositing, or just generally shooting the breeze (I told Andrew over Twitter messages that I thought the book was “wonderfully meandering”); and yet the story does not ever feel like it is at risk of stalling out. Quite the contrary. Though much of the story is told through dialogue rather than action, there is a marked turning of the screws as each chapter continues into the next. The tension continues to ratchet up, despite the seeming calm of the literal events of much of the book.

The story of A Cloud of Unknowing takes place between four separate narratives (or four and a half, but we’ll get into that in a moment), told between a slightly greater number of POVs. The first arc of the story explores that of a papal conclave. Pope John XVIII, who presided over the Church during the events of Our Lady of the Artilects, has died; and a papal conclave must be convened to determine who will next fill the late Pope John’s seat. A wrinkle is thrown into the conclave when it’s revealed that one of John’s last acts as Pope was to elevate Gabriel Sarafian, the exorcist from Our Lady of the Artilects that had been sent to determine the authenticity of the supposed “possession” of the artilects, to the position of Cardinal; thus thrusting Sarafian into the dizzyingly political arena of the conclave, and isolating him (for a time) from the rest of the story—an isolation that will have profound consequences on the rest of the narrative. 

The second thread follows Sarafian’s ex-wife Sarah and a Quantum Simulation “Diver” named Ash. Gillsmith’s author bio says he grew up in the “Golden Age of Cyberpunk”, and you can definitely see that influence in this story arc. More so than in Our Lady, A Cloud prominently bears the fingerprints of Gibson and Pondsmith and the works of Neuromancer and Cyberpunk respectively (the back cover of Our Lady cites Stephenson’s Snow Crash as another relatively contemporaneous cyberpunk inspiration), as Sarah and Ash “dive” into a world beyond ours, seeking to peel back the veil between that which we can see and that which we cannot (one might also point out some aesthetic similarities to The Matrix, as Sarah is even given her own form of that film’s red pill/blue pill moment). It is also this thread through which A Cloud most heavily ratchets up the stakes. As previously mentioned, due to the nature of the conclave, Sarafian is unable to communicate with the outside world, and so Sarah’s calls to him in the days preceding her first “dive” into the Quantum Simulation (called “The Holomovement”) go unanswered. The reader knows by this point that there is something dangerous lurking at the edges of these dives, and perhaps Sarafian could’ve talked Sarah out of participating. But such conversation never occurs, and Sarah dives; and with each subsequent dive the screws tighten, forming a knot in the story and a knot in the reader’s gut—a knot eventually wound so tight that we know it must inevitably burst. But when? And who will it strike?

The third thread follows the Muslim shaykh Ilham Tiliwadi, who now presides over a vast congregation of artilects in the Chinese desert, who’ve gathered together at the site of the final showdown in Our Lady of the Artilects. There is a ticking clock here too, as many of the world governments, in light of the events of Our Lady, would love to wash their hands of the artilect problem and nuke the whole encampment off the face of the earth; a destruction seemingly held at bay by the papal conclave, with the hopes that the new Pope might be able to sway what leaders would wish to enact this genocide. Under the shadow of this potential bombardment, Tiliwadi and his artilect companions discover that there are still a great many secrets lurking in the darker corners of the complex; and there is a set-up and pay-off in this thread that was so good I had to message Andrew about it the moment after I read it. 

The final thread follows the Habsburg Praetor Namono Mbambu and the artilect Thierry (whom Sarafain exorcized in the previous book) as they attempt to covertly make their way through Africa and the Middle East to the artilect encampment in China.

But there is one final thread (the “half” a narrative I teased earlier), interwoven through all these stories; and it is the most important: a recounting of the final days of a young Chinese girl named Xingyun. I will not detail why her story is the most important, but trust me that it is. 

As any good storyteller does, Gillsmith forces all of these threads to converge in the third act (or fourth act if we’re going by Gillsmith’s penned act breaks: “Blackening”, “Whitening”, “Yellowing”, and “Reddening”), and it’s here where we also see the themes of the book coalesce. 

If we paint in the broadest of strokes, we could say that Our Lady (if you’ll recall from my review) was about empathy, and A Cloud is about love. I kept wondering, all through the book, where the influence of The Cloud would become clear. There were hints of it in Sarah and Ash’s story—the Holomovement bears some resemblance to what The Cloud’s author calls a “darkness…between you and your God”; a darkness that will “hold you back from seeing [Him] clearly by the light of understanding.” But it is in the final moments of the story that its inspirations from The Cloud are made plain. As empathy saved the world in Our Lady of the Artilects, so does love save the world in A Cloud of Unknowing. We might then remember the passage in the Gospel of John: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

That is as much of a spoiler as I am willing to give you in this review. A Cloud of Unknowing ends on a far more melancholy note than Our Lady, but one that leaves the door open for the next chapter of the story. I have my theories on where it will go, but I will not reveal them here. Andrew has also revealed to me the title for the next book, but it too will remain secret, for now. I’ll conclude then with another look at Watterson’s The Mysteries. Toward the end of the narrative, when the Mysteries have been conquered, made ordinary, and subjugated into irrelevance; Watterson notes that, “Nevertheless, the Wizards watched the horizon uneasily and made note of the strange creaks and shudders occurring far below in the ground.” A Cloud of Unknowing ends with a similar look to the horizon, so pick up your own copy of these books today so we can explore beyond that horizon together once the next chapter is available.