Janus by John Park

Published by ChiZine Publications on October 9, 2012

Most of us have a hidden side, a part of our personality or past that we choose (sometimes unsuccessfully) to bury. Janus plays with that reality (sometimes unsuccessfully) by introducing characters with a hidden past, albeit not hidden by choice.

Traveling through the Knot (which, though unexplained, is presumably something like a wormhole or a stargate) to the planet Janus seems to provoke amnesia in about 30 percent of the people who make the journey, a condition that technicians on Janus are trying to correct. Attempts to restore Elinda Michaels' memory have been unsuccessful; why she emigrated from Earth to Janus remains a mystery to her. Her lover Barbara suffers from the same impairment. New arrival John Grebbel is troubled by the scars on his hands and arms but does not remember their cause. He just knows that something feels wrong.

Shortly after leaflets appear suggesting that immigrants have come to Janus from asylums and prisons, Barbara disappears. Suspecting a connection between those events, Elinda tries to track down the origin of the leaflets. At that point, Janus takes on the flavor of a detective story. The elements of a thriller or a spy story are added when a bomb explodes, an apparent act of sabotage. Yet the novel isn't really a detective story or a thriller, and it has only the trappings of a science fiction novel. Fans of world-building won't find much here. Except for its longer nights and some unusual animal life, Janus is awfully Earth-like.  Maybe that's why the two planets are linked by the Knot, but we'll never know since none of the characters know what the Knot is all about.

Two aspects of Janus are moderately interesting. One, of course, is the mystery of the missing memories, the characters chasing their hidden pasts. The other is the colony's response to the bombing -- interesting because of its deeper political ramifications. The head of security behaves in a way that is typical of those who value security over civil liberties, invoking "emergency powers" that permit security forces to detain and question people on a whim. Other colonists worry that by sowing the seeds of distrust, the security hawks will destroy the colonists' sense of society. Had that theme been developed more fully, Janus would have been a better novel.

The mystery, unfortunately, is more interesting in its development than in its resolution. A troubling surrealism creeps into the story that left me asking, "Why is any of this happening?" When the novel's big moment finally arrives, the revelation that explains it all, it seemed so contrived and improbable that I was left scratching my head and asking, "But why is any of this really happening?"

John Park's prose style blends power with grace. At times, the writing is too fractured -- a paragraph about this character, a paragraph about that one, then on to someone else -- but it is the story, rather than the way the story is told, that left me vaguely dissatisfied. I can't say that I disliked Janus, but neither can I say that I'm enthused about the novel.

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