Woken Furies   by Richard Morgan

Starts off as a bit of a slam-dunk adrenaline powered kill-fest, but gradually sublimes into a surprisingly delicate work, culminating in the protagonist--more later--entering the mind of a body taken over by a zealot, to seek out the original occupant, only to find that they are happy to cede the body and live out an ephemeral existence with no physical presence. Deep indeed.

So this is a universe, like Richardʼs other works, in which minds and souls can be freely transferred between bodies both living and synthesized, and people effectively live forever. The actual containment of the spirit is a small module implanted in the neck at the top of the spine, and an act of extraordinary criminal activity is to kill a body, cut out the module, and either destroy it, preserve it, or even subject the spirit to eternal torture.

The protagonist is an ex-special operative, who has been put into a body (‘sleeved’) a couple of hundred years since he last knew consciousness. And the body he has been given has super-powers, like the ability to climb walls and survive what would have been fatal accidents. But this has in fact been done twice, so there are two such operatives and they are put on missions to eliminate each other. In truth, this duality doesnʼt enter the story as much as it might, and really ends up being slightly superfluous, except it keeps the prime protagonist (the renegade one on the run) having to think ahead of himself.

And the renegade falls in with a bunch of revolutionaries out to overthrow the excessively rich overlords of a small planet, who hanker after a long-dead leader who supposedly turns up inhabiting the body of a distant lover of the protagonist, alluded to above.

And so it is a very rich, subtle and involving story. In truth, as with all of Richardʼs books that I have read, there are just one or two too many characters to be able to keep track of, and at times the story line seems to fall away. But the surreality and sheer imaginative drive keeps the work going.

And then the grand finale is an adrenaline-packed shoot ʼem up that would suitably crown any mindless Hollywood production.