The novel “The Book of Being” by Ian Watson was published for the first time in 1985. It’s the third book in the Black Current trilogy and is the sequel to “The Book of the Stars“.
Yaleen was reborn on her home planet and has become a priestess who can testify to the wonders she has experienced over the course of several lives. That situation also allows her to live with her family again, but things are far from simple.
For Yaleen, returning home doesn’t represent the end of her journey or her tribulations. The Godmind continues to pursue its plans towards humanity on all planets and Yaleen knows she will have to fight it again. An ally like the Worm is precious but it’s difficult to understand its true motivations.
“The Book of Being” concludes the Black Current trilogy, whose books are parts of a single great story that must be read in its entirety. The books are written in the form of journals by Yaleen, who at the beginning of this last chapter explicitly mentions the fact that she has written “The Book of the River” and that she’s about to start writing “The Book of the Stars”.
This ending may seem like a return to the origins for Yaleen during a cycle of death and rebirth but many things have changed for her, for her family, and for her home planet. These are the consequences of everything that happened in the previous books with various narrative threads that were developed to bring their plots to completion in this last book.
The trilogy has mixed in various ways Yaleen’s personal dimension, an inevitable characteristic due to the fact that she’s the one telling the whole story, and a cosmic dimension that often had mystical ramifications. Ian Watson has put a lot of imagination into creating that story starting from a journey on a river that is really peculiar and then expanding it with much longer journeys towards much more distant destinations.
I have to say that the prospect of a final clash with the Godmind had made me think of a greater importance of the cosmic dimension with its ramifications. From this point of view, this book is supposed to represent the culmination of all the events of the previous books, and for this reason, it ended up leaving me a bit puzzled.
My problem is that a good part of “The Book of Being” deals with Yaleen’s family problems, which interested me much less than the cosmic dimension. I understand that Ian Watson wanted to include moments that are even trivial to contrast with all the extraordinary events experienced by the protagonist. I understand that Yaleen sought in her family the normality lost after everything that happened to her. However, I ended up finding those moments connected to the family boring.
Honestly, sometimes, I had the impression that Ian Watson no longer knew how to develop the ideas from the previous novels and used his imagination to add moments of Yaleen’s life. The consequence is that if you expect an epic ending, you risk being disappointed. This is not entirely unexpected because the author tends to put many ideas in his novels but also to develop them in a chaotic and sometimes fragmentary way. In a trilogy, this tendency can be felt book after book more than in his single novels.
In the end, in “The Book of Being” and in the Black Current trilogy in general, it’s more than ever appropriate to say that it’s the journey that matters and not the destination. If this is not a problem for you and Ian Watson’s great imagination inspires you, I recommend reading it. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
