4.5 stars for all the arguments within that fascinate me endlessly. There's a lot going on here politically, in a way that manages to reveal something about the author while also never feeling out of character (and the characters are so beautifully different). The ideas of world peace unushered by genocide ring true, I just wished they were a little more bolstered by theory from outside the Western progressive circuit. There's something quite 19th century at times - I kept thinking "even the savages deserve rights" whenever sympathetic yet wildly inaccurate mentions were made of Africa below the Nile basin, and for all the mentions of Palestine (which, low bar, but seeing Palestine talked about without Israel is still a lovely novelty), the idea of Islam as the religion of a war god was lingering around. And why does everyone accept that the world would be better and *stay* better if we killed (almost) all the men? Love that the protagonists all recognise that's undoable and wouldn't be justified anyway, but they all agree that there'd be no murder, no rape, and especially no war, if the world was 99% women? This is the 80s, just look at Britain for a second, please.

Anyway, fundamentally this is a character novel, and that does track for these characters. Most of them are, after all, ancient, and all of them are biased (and know this. Even Marius, after recent events). I love that the message boils down to "No one needs or deserves a God stepping in to solve their problems with deceptively simple solutions, just as the global North should learn to keep it's hands out of the global South", and the characters make the arguments I believe they would make to support or contest that. I would just kill for a character who'd read Franz Fanon.