Kari is a young woman born in the mountains of North Africa and on the run from her past. It is a past hidden by a veil she steadfastly refuses to remove. People who meet her are at first struck by superficialities: her extraordinary athleticism, her modesty and diffidence, her intelligence, and her powerful work ethic. They also notice her physical appearance; one person remarks that she must be a Viking newly arrived from Norseland on board a dragon ship. Those who get to know her are astonished by the breadth and depth of her learning. She is fluent in Arabic and a number of European languages, and she can easily read Greek and Latin. She can speak knowledgeably about a great many subjects, including mathematics, science, philosophy, history, and religion. And if she were so inclined, she could teach university courses in the history of ancient Greece and Rome. She is twenty-two at the time the series begins, and she is groping her way forward. When told about the Norseland comment, she remarks bitterly that she is operating under orders from a Viking chieftain who told her she needs to learn how to pilot her ship within the modern North American continent.
Malory is a product of Oxford and Cambridge, "the City" (London's world of banking and high finance), the British Royal Navy, and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). He is a decade older than Kari, and he isn't doing any groping: the idea of moving forward is one he would find ludicrous; he is just surviving, day to day.
In Cycle A, Eternity's Sunrise, Kari and Malory are both newly arrived in Lucerna. They meet for the first time, and they separately become involved with a historian named Tamara Santillana, who is attached to a university think tank. Tamara is a woman they both come to care about deeply, despite the fact that she seems determined to keep them (and indeed everyone) at a cool distance. Together, Kari and Malory uncover her secrets, solve a murder mystery, and develop a friendship.
Neither one of them expects that their relationship will develop further. If an outsider were to tell either of them they had fallen in love, they would deny it. Both have souls that are deeply scarred, and both have reason to believe that love is not to be sought but rather to be feared. Eternity's Sunrise extends over a five-month period beginning in April 1992. At the end of it, Kari and Malory go their separate ways. Kari becomes a student at Rayneval University, working on a master's degree in Ancient Studies. Malory leaves Canada altogether, and although he remains in touch with Kari and other friends in Lucerna, he says little about what he is doing. When people inquire, he tells them he is acquiring new skills so that he can one day become a professional layabout.
Kari and Malory are brought together again at the beginning of Cycle B, Fortuna's Way. It commences in the spring of 1994 and extends into the late fall. They once more find themselves trying to understand an enigmatic character, this time a woman named Gina Vasari, a one-time professor of history at Rayneval who had befriended Kari at the time she was a student there.
In January of 1994, Gina was brutally murdered. Two months after the killing took place, Kari is given what she thinks will be a short-term job: to inquire into some scholarly work Gina was doing at the time of her death. Before too long, Kari decides to do more. She first of all wants to understand Gina's personal life — why she seemed to have no interest in finding a long-term partner, despite the fact that her beauty meant that she had no trouble attracting suitors. Second, Kari wants to figure out why Gina abandoned a highly successful business career in order to become a third-rate historian. And third, Kari wants to identify Gina's killer. With help from Malory, Kari tries to answer these questions. The consequences, for her, are catastrophic.
As Fortuna's Way unfolds, the feelings that Kari and Malory have for one another deepen. But they again do nothing to advance their relationship into something other than what they both understand it to be, a casual friendship. When the cycle ends, they once more go their separate ways.
Cycle C, Meeting the Night, begins in February of 1996. Malory and Kari are now on wholly separate tracks. Malory is on a vengeance mission, seeking to destroy the man who ended the lives of the two people he loved most in the world. For her part, Kari is struggling to deal with a succession of tragedies.
Their lives again become intertwined when Kari disappears, seemingly from the face of the earth. Malory drops everything and sets out to find her. One of the first things he discovers is that she has become good friends with Araceli Donovan, an accomplished businesswoman who owns a company that has its head office in New Zealand, and who is a citizen of Hong Kong. Her presence in Kari's life immediately arouses his suspicions.
Malory finds Kari, and he then sets out to discover more about Araceli; he wants to know if the suspicions he's harbouring are warranted. He also renews his relationship with Kari, and it isn't long before he perceives that she is about to embark on her own mission of vengeance. Fearing that she will get herself killed, he seeks to engage her in work that will keep her out of danger. He does so knowing that this could ultimately tear their relationship apart.
A reader who happens upon the entire Avernus Gate series arranged on a shelf in a bookstore could perceive it as fifteen units, as three cycles, or as one whole.
Each unit, each individual novel, is carefully structured so that a handful of plot threads are advanced and resolved. The endings satisfy but also entice. Readers finishing one book are eager to turn immediately to the next.
The cycles are arenas where Kari and Malory try to make sense of a single enigmatic life. The three lives have names attached to them: Tamara, Gina, and Araceli. Each of these women is (or was) accomplished, attractive, unmarried, and driven. But driven to do what? And why? The search for answers, which are far from obvious, propels each cycle forward.
Each cycle can also be seen as an attempt to probe certain problems of history — problems that are real and that present-day scholars still contest. Readers come to the end of a cycle satisfied that they have learned truths about remarkable people who shaped our past.
The series as a whole can be regarded as an extended romance and a probing of two souls. Who is Kari LaMarca? And who is Malory Ballantyne? Their first encounter, in 1992, is not an accident. Malory goes to Lucerna specifically to meet Kari, and he arrives not expecting to be with her for long. But as he later reflects: the unexpected always finds a way to confound expectations. He ends up staying in Lucerna for the entire summer. During that time he and Kari forge a relationship, but instead of taking steps that would allow it to progress, they run from it. Why is this so? Why can't they embrace the love that is manifestly growing between them? What are the tragedies that caused them both to have fortress walls around their hearts? Can these walls be breached or taken down? Why do Kari and Malory always seem to be separating, even as they are coming together? What will be their destiny?
Avernus Gate spans continents. Malory and Kari have their first encounter facing one another across a deep valley in the Sahara. Their second is in Lucerna, and Lucerna is the locale they usually inhabit while the three cycles are unfolding. However, they also find themselves (either together or with others) residing in a Spanish latifundia, travelling to an estate in Austria's picturesque Wachau Valley, carrying an assassin's gun in the dark streets of Stavropol, sailing the waters of the Mediterranean, being thrust into the beautiful and strife-filled world of the Caucasus, savouring stimulating conversations in Parisian and Istanbul cafés, being spiritually elevated by the beautiful old churches of Seville and San Sebastián, and delighting in a tranquil cruise on the seas of the Philippines.
Malory and Kari travel (virtually) in time as well as space. They are able to imagine themselves sitting next to Benjamin Franklin as he negotiates the extraordinary treaty that made the United States an independent republic; they are in Monticello with Thomas Jefferson, as he doubles the size of his country and lays the foundation for an American presence on the western side of the continent; they take up residence in the St. Petersburg office of a far-seeing French ambassador who is attempting to shape Empress Catherine's policies regarding Alaska and the North Pacific; they accompany the many hardy explorers who are seeking to comprehend the northwestern quadrant of North America; they join the French naval commander Jean-François de Galaup, the comte de Lapérouse, as he captures a fort on Hudson Bay and then proceeds to explore the vast Pacific Ocean; they are with Sir Francis Drake as he sails westward from Mexico and tries to decide how he is going to get home to England; and they inhabit the ateliers where scholars and artists employed by the Mughal emperor Akbar created some of the most beautiful and profound books the world has ever seen.
The time travels of the two protagonists also take them to the ancient cities of Athens, Rome, Alexandria, and fabled Avalta Regius. Over a thousand years, these cities were home to competing schools of philosophy fighting each other for precedence. Malory has embraced one of these schools, or so he claims. Kari acts and speaks as if she actually attended another. He is an Epicurean; she is a follower of a little-known Roman-era philosopher named Eliana. The doctrines of Epicurus have survived. Those of Eliana have not. So how is it that Kari knows them? And what exactly are they? These are questions Malory finds himself trying to answer, not realizing that he wants only to know Kari better.
Avernus Gate can be likened to a long-running TV serial containing a number of nested arcs. Each chapter is a single episode featuring a few characters, highlighting certain aspects of their personalities, and advancing one or several plot threads. As the chapters multiply, readers become better acquainted with the lead players and become invested in their fates. Layers of both plot and character are revealed. Mysteries arise and are resolved, only to be replaced by new ones. Characters come together and grow apart. Each novel is like a complete season, and they sometimes end with cliff-hangers. Each cycle is a multi-year series unto itself.
Is Avernus Gate plot-driven or character-driven? It is both. The plotting is intricate, substantive, and suspenseful. But it is the characters who will stay with most readers long after they put the books down. And it is the changes in the characters' lives — the insights they gain into who they are and what matters to them, the way their relationships form and evolve, the new challenges they set for themselves, their handling of crises and failures, the things they learn about themselves — that will cause readers to always be thirsting for more.
The series explores the imperatives of loyalty, the tyranny of memory, the fragility of trust, the several dimensions of love, the morality of vengeance, the conviction (the fable?) that lives can be built and rebuilt, the cosmic power wielded by Fate and Fortuna, the patterns of dissolution and preservation that characterize all human relationships, and the immense difficulty of truly knowing others.
Avernus Gate is unique in the realm of fiction. Regardless of which novel serves as the entry point, readers will come to the end of it saying to themselves: "I have never come across anything like this." They will want to go back to the beginning and read it again. But they will be torn, because the remaining volumes of this extraordinary series will be sitting there — beckoning.
