Beneath the World, a Sea: From the Arthur C. Clarke Award winning author of the Eden Trilogy

By Chris Beckett

'A disturbing descent into a surreal world, written with a deft hand.' Adrian Tchaikovsky, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2016

South America, 1990. Ben Ronson, a British police officer, arrives in a mysterious forest to investigate a spate of killings of Duendes. These silent, vaguely humanoid creatures - with long limbs and black button eyes - have a strange psychic effect on people, unleashing the subconscious and exposing their innermost thoughts and fears.

Ben becomes fascinated by the Duendes, but the closer he gets, the more he begins to unravel, with terrifying results...

Beneath the World, A Sea is a tour de force of modern fiction - a deeply searching and unsettling novel about the human subconscious, and all that lies beneath.


'Beckett is superb at undercutting reader assumptions with a casual line of dialogue or acute psychological observation: the book reads like Conrad's Heart of Darkness reimagined by JG Ballard.' Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: Corvus
• Release date: Apr 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781786491565

Chris Beckett

Chris Beckett is a former social worker and now university lecturer who lives in Cambridge. In 2009 he won the Edge Hill Short Story competition for his collection of stories, The Turing Test.

Reviews for Beneath the World, a Sea

[iansales_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I’ve known Chris for many years, and read and enjoyed his short fiction. I’ve also read several of his novels and, while I’ve appreciated the quality of their prose – which is definitely a cut above what is typical for science fiction – I’ll admit I found their conceits and plots felt a little second-hand. That’s sort of true here, and it gives the novel a slightly old-fashioned feel. But that actually works in its favour, given it’s set in a mysterious place the world has forgotten. Ben Ronson, a British policeman, is sent to the Submundo Delta in Brazil to prevent the locals from killing the indigenes, called duendes. The Submundo Delta is surrounded by the Zone, which, on exiting it, wipes all memories of what happens within it. Partly because of the Zone, the only way to travel to the Submundo Delta is by boat, and so visitors must spend a day in the Zone. The novel opens as Ronson leaves the Zone and enters the delta – and he has no idea what he did when the ship stopped, and is too scared to read the journal entries he made. That fear drives him as he tries to stop the duende killings by the locals and come with some way of preventing them from occurring. This is not helped by the fact the duendes trigger some sort of mental barrage of anxieties and phobias in humans when they are close. Everything in the delta is low tech, like the early decades of the twentieth century. It makes the strangeness of the world seems a little more, well, plausible. But not entirely. Beneath the World, a Sea reminded me chiefly of Paul Park’s Coelestis, a favourite sf novel, although since it’s not set on an alien world it doesn’t have sf’s scaffolding to support its world, and relies more on a Ballardian twisting of mundanity for its setting. The plot is almost incidental – Ronson investigates, Ronson falls prey to the place’s atmosphere, in an almost Graham Greene sort of narrative. Beckett’s novels have always been strong on character, and that’s equally true here – to such an extent, the focus on character actually results in the plot losing its way around midway through. It doesn’t seem to matter much, however, because Ronson’s failure was pretty much obvious from the start. The only duff note is what happens to him in the Zone on his departure from the Submundo Delta. It feels like a twist that needed more set-up and yet was an obvious conclusion from the first chapter. Despite all that, Beneath the World, a Sea is very strong on atmosphere, the prose is excellent, and I thought this one of the best books I’ve read so far this year.