The Actual Star

Summary

The novel braids three stories, each 1,000 years apart and the first starting in 1012 in the fictional Mayan city of Tzoyna as twin brother and sister Ajul and Ixul prepare to become king and queen, and their younger sister, Ket, seeks to help the royal cause with a bloodletting and psilocybin-induced vision. Jumping forward 1,000 years gives us Leah from Anoong, Minnesota, departing to her paternal ancestral roots in Belize and encountering twin tour guides Javier and Xander. The final story concerns Niloux and Taanaj, diametrically opposed charismatics in a world that has embraced identity choice and renounced capitalism’s stationary hoarding. The story spans these three centuries as each triad of characters is seeking Xibalba, the world behind the world, a paradise of authenticity where the stars are actual stars and not projections.

Thoughts

This one was conflicting. Advertised as David Mitchell meets Octavia Butler, the novel tells a story in three parts across 3 millennia. And sure, it might be a Mitchellian construction to span a story across drastic time skips, but what makes a Mitchell novel isn’t necessarily its neatly entangled plots but rather a facility with language, how genre and voice and character are bent to the whim of plot. Mitchell also largely eschews symbolism and parable, but The Actual Star is all symbol, its three characters Sun, Moon, and first human awaken anew in each story as a set of twins, one mercurial and passionate and the other rational, as well as the visionary observer. The plot revolves around the conflict between Sun and Moon told across those millennia.

The Actual Star does feel closer to Butler’s Parable novels; they both concern a charismatic leader who builds a religion or has one built around her. Both tell stories of a world cleaved by climate change, of a future of human wanderers and refugees. In Byrne’s novel, that wandering has been elevated to a religion. Instead of God being changed, God here is entropy. And Leah, the Instead of raising your own children, they are raised by a series of zadres. You don’t have brothers and sisters as such, but hermanix. Everyone is born with male and female genitalia, and are free to choose their nationality and ethnicity, herein called a manera. A note on language, Byrne’s future imagines that English is spoken commonly with Spanish idioms sprinkled throughout. This is mostly innocuous, but there are long sections rendered in Kriol, which is a Belizean creole of English slang, and reading it is like trying to read text speak while someone shoots a squirt gun directly into your eyes. I mostly skipped these dialog sections and hoped the salient plot points would be rendered in a more readable format subsequently.

The future Byrne envisions here feels a little imbued with an agenda and the novel teeters occasionally into manifesto. Leah, for someone who a religion is built around, is insufferable at times. Men frequently get erections at the slightest prompting, and walk around with them unperturbed. The novel feels overlong. Sometimes, the Spanish is incorrect (jugador doesn’t mean actor). But all that said, it is ambitious, and at times compelling, and a worthy read despite those shortcomings.