KASMAH-FORMA is part of the story of the peoples and places on the world of Kasmah, a planet of deserts, forests, and a city where learning and power struggles are intertwined.
The plot of the KASMAH-FORMA, such as it is, hints of trouble in the different regions of Kasmah, including the dispersal of a drug that sends its takers beyond the point of madness, and a bizarre curse that has struck one of the tribes. The book’s strongest points are the characters and the relationships and dynamics that exist between them.
“Kahli’s eyes creaked open, and for a while they watched light slowly flood
the room from the rising sun. Wanting to make sense of last night her mind
asked the question of ‘what happened?’ The answer her brain returned was,
at best, fuzzy. The more she probed for comfort, the more a sense of dread
crept in, stifling any desire to think or act.”
Such is the opening of the first chapter. And these sentences seem appropriate to the construction of the book; a world in which people, places and memories – many of them horrifying – slowly reveal themselves.
The three characters: Kahli, Toyo and Mulat, have mysterious pasts. Kahli is both blessed and cursed with “passenger” voices inside her head, and she struggles with many emotional traumas, including her discovery that her entire tribe has been slaughtered. Toyo’s past is unknown; recovering from amnesia, the cause of which is never fully revealed, Toyo is the name that he chooses for himself as he ekes out a place for himself among the Gozuri people in the Gadori. Mulat, the Integra Divinitas, is especially puzzling; one sees that he is not above using his inferiors as puppets, with all the detached fascination of a scientist performing an experiment, but the reader cannot tell whether his intentions are either good or ill. The narration rotates among three locations in turn: the Maharaan Expanse, Kahli’s desert home; the Gadori region, where Toyo finds himself; and the Integra Pol and the city of Orbis, home to Mulat and the other Integras.
Certain aspects of the book, including some of the character dynamics and the construction of the world of Kasmah, bear a strong resemblance to the work of Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler. Kasmah might almost be another planet in Le Guin’s Ekumen series, while the difficult family relationships in Kahli’s life – the theme of the odd child in the family – are similar to what a reader might see in Butler’s Parable books. The writing style might best be described as atmospheric, with long, detailed descriptions of the landscapes, the sounds, smells and tastes, and the fogs of memory and amnesia.
The book is largely a series of character studies, of Kahli and the Maharaan, the Integra, Toyo and the Gozuri people of the Gadori, and their interactions with one another. The plot is not entirely linear, it seems, but more of a framework on which the character studies are displayed: a method that both helps and hinders the book’s progression. At twelve chapters, the book is almost too long for the sheer amount of detail and the number of characters in it; each one of the three sections of the book could almost have been its own book.
KASMAH-FORMA offers intriguing character dynamics.
~ IndieReader.