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Spock, displaced in time, watches his closest friend heed
his advice by allowing the love of his life to die, thereby
preserving Earth's history. Returning to the present, Spock
confronts other such crises, but chooses instead to wilfully
alter the past. Challenged by the thorny demands of his logic,
he is forced to re-examine the choices he has made in his
life. Unwilling to accept his feelings of loss and regret,
he seeks that which has previously eluded him: complete mastery
of his emotions. But while that quest will move him beyond
his turmoil, another loss will bring him full circle to once
more face the fire he has never embraced...
In
common with Provenance
of Shadows, the previous book in the Crucible
trilogy, which focused on the character of Dr McCoy, the plot
of The Fire and the Rose weaves with two main timelines.
Following a prologue set during the episode Where No Man
Has Gone Before (it makes sense to start here, as author
David R George III demonstrates that Kirk and Spock's close
friendship only really kicked off after the death of Jim's
old comrade Gary Mitchell), the novel alternates between the
years following Star
Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and a novelisation
of Spock's view of events in The
City on the Edge of Forever. We also see more
of the dramatic conclusion to the five-year mission, as depicted
in Provenance, this time from the Vulcan's perspective.
As with the previous book, the author reconciles certain oddities
from the TV and movie series along the way. For example, he
subtly explains why, in Where No Man Has Gone Before,
Dr Piper administers a pill to Captain Kirk without first
examining his patient.
Unlike
the McCoy novel, this is a much shorter work - though that's
only a relative term. Whereas Provenance weighed in
at a hefty 624 pages of densely packed type, The Fire and
the Rose runs to a "mere" 388 pages, with fewer lines
of text per page. (Maybe that explains why this review is
similarly briefer!)
Actually,
some of the material from the McCoy book might have been just
as appropriate in this one, if not more so - particularly
Spock's emotional regression while in Sarpeidon's past during
the episode All Our Yesterdays and his subsequent resignation
from Starfleet in order to undergo the Kolinahr ritual
shown in Star
Trek: The Motion Picture. Having said that,
perhaps George intended those two incidents to be interpreted
as cause and effect in the previous novel, only for that assumption
to be overturned here. It transpires that Spock's reasons
for wishing to cast out his emotions are considerably more
complex than heartache following his doomed romance with Zarabeth.
This
book and its predecessor show McCoy and Spock to have more
in common than you might think. In addition to being Jim Kirk's
closest friends, they also harbour inner demons that cause
them to lose sleep, and both have trouble holding down stable
relationships when it comes to romance. The author wastes
little time before introducing a woman, the wily yet logical
Ambassador Alexandra Tremontaine, whom the Vulcan finds sufficiently
"fascinating".
A
less cumbersome work than Provenance of Shadows, The
Fire and the Rose rises to the occasion very nicely indeed.
It's just a shame that the subtitle is so off-centre on the
spine.
Richard
McGinlay
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