Category Archives: Novels

Triptych

Posted by Tomcat on

Brian Aldiss Non-stopThe idea of a ‘generation ship’ had been kicking around in both scientific non-fiction and SF for quite a few years by 1958, when Brian Aldiss wrote the first novel-length treatment of the concept.  Non-Stop concerns itself with several scavenging, semi-primitive tribes who inhabit a primordial jungle; the obvious mid-novel revelation being that these tribesmen are, in fact, the distant descendants of the crew of a vast generation ship that has lost its own history and which, owing to some horrific accident, has become over-grown with mutated plant life (dubbed ‘ponics’ – presumably a corruption of the term ‘hydroponics’).  I say the twist is “obvious”, but this is only because it has, in recent years, become an over-used cliché of both visual and literary SF, from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun and Christine Love’s Analogue: a Hate Story, to cinema’s abortive 2009 horror bore-fest Pandorum.

The reason for this over-use is obvious: the scenario is an incredibly fruitful one, a twist that generates impressive narrative momentum and sense-of-wonder while simultaneously knocking at the door of deeper philosophical investigations and a Platonist questioning of the material evidence for the world around us.  Non-Stop is one of the better examples of this scenario, and is, of course, awarded extra SF points for being its progenitor.  The prose is a little dry, occasionally veering on clunky, but the sheer pace of the book mitigates any sense of stylistic aridity, and the deftly handled dénouement is, for modern readers at least, a much more impressive shock than the early disclosure that ‘they were on a ship all along’.

Generous readers might want to argue that Non-Stop (both its plot and, fittingly, its title) functions as a metaphor for human history and our awakening from an ignorant dark age into a self-aware scientific knowledge.  This transition, it’s religious and psychological implications, are brilliantly worked-through in the character of Marapper, a priest who leads an expedition to find the ship’s legendary “bridge”.  Unfortunately, however, the rest of book’s characterisation is inconsistent at best, with the majority of protagonists seemingly unfazed by the surely mind-blowing discovery that the recognizable world of their arid jungle is actually an enclosed hermetic space aboard an interstellar, man-made ship; I was hoping for at least a little existential panic.  (Although there is a strikingly beautiful sequence in which several characters stumble upon and activate a viewing window, exposing themselves for the first time to the stars and the vastness of the cosmos, a moment that functions as an unsubtle but nonetheless arresting metaphor for the death of religion and the revelation of human smallness).

It’s not without its flaws, then, but Non-Stop is a swift, highly readable novel that has stood the test of time. It is also, perhaps, one of the best, clearest examples of what Adam Roberts calls the defining dialectic of Science Fiction: the tension between scientific, materialist logic, and the mystical spiritualism encoded in religious myth that pervades so much of our history, literature and attempts to explain the universe.

 ***

NovaSamuel R. Delaney’s Nova (1968) is an early example of Science Fiction wilfully deconstructing its own tropes and stylistic proclivities, a wry rebuttal to the hero-centric adolescent nonsense of SF pulp. Delaney has since become a giant of both Science Fiction and the academic study of the same, and this early novel (he wrote it when he was 25!) serves as a good way-in to both his narrative style and his dry wit, without posing the insane post-structuralist difficulties of his later works like Dhalgren.

The premise is classic space opera: Captain Lorq van Ray assembles a rag-tag crew of drifters and aspirants to gather ‘Illyrion’, a game-changing energy source that can only be harvested by flying a ship through the heart of an imploding star.  The story is relayed from the perspective of The Mouse, a gypsy from Earth, gifted musician (he plays the hologram-generating ‘syrynx’: an instrument shamelessly plagiarised in Futurama’s Holophonor), and one of Lorq’s recruits.  This seemingly run-of-the-mill premise is soon complicated by the character of Captain Lorq himself; a narrative red herring who initially fits the archetype of noble space captain, but is gradually revealed to be a violent, deformed, ignoble, impatient and dangerous obsessive: the book’s shocking, brutal and brilliant ending forcing the reader to completely re-adjust her opinions of this central but ultimately intangible figure.

The ‘love interest’ trope, meanwhile, is a cartoonishly sexualised femme fatale engaged in an are-they-aren’t-they incestuous relationship with her brother (Lorq’s rival); the jealous, insecure but ambitious Prince Red.  The mythopoeia of the setting similarly upsets space opera conventions by being grounded on Tarot law and strange references to the Grail Quest; and it’s this, combined with one character’s constant musings on the nature of the novel, that gives Nova it’s strange bipartite identity, half manic space-race to an elusive fuel source, half thoughtful rumination of the nature of spirituality and art.

It’s a relatively short novel (my copy: 224 pp), but one that strikes out in so many different directions (race, sexuality, philosophy of science, revolutionary politics, war, revenge tragedy etc.) as to feel, T.A.R.D.I.S.-like, vastly bigger than it’s meagre page count would suggest.  Nova is incredible: completely exhilarating, decades ahead of its time, and brimming with challenges to the reader’s pre-conceived notions of what SF is, or how it should behave; and it achieves all of this without ever feeling saturated or confusing or in the least bit pretentious.

 ***

The DispossessedUrsula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) is a Utopian Science Fiction that explores the odd-couple societies of twinned planets; one a capitalist democratic paradise, the other a haven of anarcho-socialism. The protagonist, Shevek, is a brilliant physicist from the anarchist desert planet of Anarres who’s developed a method for ‘Simultaneity’ – instantaneous communication across vast interstellar distances.  Shevek finds that the technologically basic and bureaucratically corrupt anarchist administration obstructs the development of his revolutionary idea, but when he travels to Anarres’  twin planet Urras, he is confronted with a politically conniving capitalism that’s more interested in owning his ideas than making them a reality.  What follows is a theoretically dense but always readable extrapolation of two very different political approaches to the individual, to genius, and to human relationships in general.

In a recent review of Patrick Ness’ The Crane Wife, Ursula Le Guin laments modern literature’s penchant for brief, quippy dialogue predicated more on wit and style than realism or meaning: “for me these dialogues, even when clever, fail to work as part of a novel. But expectations change with generations, and the reduction of human relationships to a back-and-forth table-tennis bounce of bodiless voices may be perfectly satisfactory to readers who spend a lot of time on a mobile phone.” The Dispossessed, then, definitely offers the antithesis to this post-mobile phone rendering of dialogue. The greater part of the novel comprises very long, politically charged exchanges between Shevek and various characters (notably his partner Takver, a beautifully realised character piece who epitomises the contradictions inherent in, on the one hand, fierce loyalty to her social ideals and, on the other, to her lover and family).  But such is Le Guin’s ear for realistic speech and characterisation that these long cogitations on politics and morality never feel text-booky or robotic, always coloured as they are by an incredible empathy for human emotion, and enlivened by Le Guin’s characteristic wit, “It’s hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist”.

I’m finding it difficult to describe, in the compass of this mini-review, quite how detailed Le Guin’s descriptions of the finer workings of these two societies are. It’s extraordinary, and made more so by the human interest that tempers any potential for cold politicising. The book’s ending is a tad out-of-the-blue, and there’s a revolutionary riot scene on the capitalist planet that takes place in sympathy with the plight of the anarchists and which we would probably now call Miévillian in its tone (sorry, I know that’s an awful neologism… alternative suggestions on a postcard, please), but ultimately The Dispossessed is a captivating, ferociously intelligent and deeply moving epic. The book’s imagery is dominated by descriptions of walls, of boundaries and their violent breach, and this forms a very successful visual and metaphoric subtext for the more violent events of the plot.  For the curious among you:  this is my favourite novel of the three I’ve reviewed in this post, so if for some reason I can only convince to read one of these books, make it The Dispossessed.

Tomcat.

The Quantum Thief – Hannu Rajaniemi

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TQTHannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief occasionally does this really interesting thing whereby it wilfully undercuts its own hyperbole, often to grand (if a tad saccharine) emotional effect.  The greater part of the book’s aesthetic comprises a kind of rampant over-the-top-ness; it’s very, very far-future SF: every character is a quasi-immortal (don’t ask) posthuman, the action transpires on a walking Martian city, nanotech implants enable instantaneous telepathic communication, everything is surrounded by a data cloud called the ‘exomemory’, and the titular thief himself can manipulate physics to steal quantum time off a person’s life.  The whole thing is wildly inventive and stylistically zappy: an exuberance only matched by the book’s stratospheric levels of pre-publication hype. But after the umpteenth description of planet-sized this and million-year-old that, your reader began to feel justifiably (I think) exhausted by all the cold techno-babble and sense-of-wonder fetishising of big numbers and weird technologies.

I’ve read in numerous places that all of this book’s ideas are scientifically on the money (Rajaniemi has a PhD in quantum or string something-or-other, so it’s fair to say he knows his tachyons from his, er, apples).  And yes, sure, the book can be exhilarating in its wry challenge to the reader to keep up with lots of strange new words (most of which are given no explication whatsoever), and there is something pleasingly hypnotic about being swept up in a relentless stream of terminology (which you can either let wash over you, or spend hours trying to unpick the weird etymologies of); but such things can only carry a novel so far.  As I read The Quantum Thief, I often found myself longing for something recognisably human – emotionally, socially, even politically – amid the salvo of jargon and un-relatable plot twists.  Happily, such moments do pepper the narrative, but always with an accompanying sense of bathos, as Rajaniemi has to deliberately undermine his own stylistic and lexical extravagance in order to make them work, resulting in such narratively interesting passages as:

I scan my fragmented memory for images. An ice castle in Oort, comets and fusion reactors tethered together into a glittering orrery, winged people chasing them. Supra City, where buildings are the size of planets, domes and towers and arcs rising up to meet Saturn’s ring. The Beltworlds and wild synthbio covering them in coral and autumn colours. The guberniya brains of the Inner System, diamond spheres adorned with the faces of the Founders, filled with undeath and intrigue.

The odd thing is that all that feels less real than sitting in the sun with her, pretending to be human and small.

So The Quantum Thief willingly destabilises itself; the stylistic status quo of large-scale imagery and high-level geek speak undercut by emotive language to create a kind of contrast or tension, out of which comes the book’s more successful emotional moments.  It’s an admittedly interesting technique, but to be honest I can’t decide if Rajaniemi’s reliance on such a thing to create tone and feeling is a brilliantly self-aware critique of hard SF genre proclivities, or just a rank failing of his predominant style.

It is, however, unfortunate that such moments are so few and far between, as many of TQT’s descriptive passages are so jargon-filled that I often had no idea what I was supposed to be visualising: a frustration that would undoubtedly have been mitigated by more such bathos as that quoted above.

But what’s it all about? Well, for the record, any statement I make about the book’s plot should be assumed to carry a parenthetic “(I think…)”, as the narrative is so fast-paced, confusing and hinged upon terms that the author refuses to elucidate that now – several days after having finished reading it – I’m still not entirely clear on what happens.  But here goes… Jean le Flambeur is a master thief broken out of jail by a warrior, Meili, who wants Jean to steal something for her.  First, however, they must travel to Mars to steal Jean’s own memories that an older version of himself has hidden away. Meanwhile, also on Mars, Isidore Beautrelet, a gifted young detective, is investigating a conspiracy while guided by a flying law enforcer who dons a top-hat and steel face plate and who goes by the moniker ‘The Gentleman’.  It’s not long, unsurprisingly, before the stories of Jean and Isidore intersect.

In reality, though, this meagre synopsis doesn’t scratch the surface of Rajaniemi’s inventiveness: there’s the ‘gevulot’ system of perception-based privacy, also the armies of ‘Quiets’ – machines inhabited by the consciousnesses of Mars’ dead (before they’re re-born to live again, that is) – and (a personal highlight), Perhonen, Meili’s flirty, vivacious and sarcastic space ship. It would take several review-sized posts just for me to list, verbatim, the myriad SF weirdnesses that comprise TQT, so let’s suffice it to say that Rajaniemi is mindblowingly creative, and his universe impressively consistent within the remit of a narrative framework in which almost anything goes.

Amid all of the unrestrained chaos of such imaginative outpouring, however, TQT is centred upon a fundamentally well-established and familiar character conceit: the gentleman thief versus the detective savant. The fact that the thief has no idea what he’s stealing, and the detective no idea what or who he’s investigating is equal parts amusing and frustrating though, as almost every character has the advantage of the reader in terms of the information available to them.  Equally as frustrating is the fact that the entire cast speaks with the same voice: the book’s dialogue is undoubtedly impressive, a fast-paced, flippant and snarky style that’s predicated on wit and banter-esque exchanges, but it’s let down by its uniformity.  The sharp and oh-so-droll conversation isn’t consistent in its quality, either, occasionally reading like a sub-par Aaron Sorkin or Joss Whedon: all of the snark, but none of the depth: “She knows pop culture references! I’m in love.”

The narrative that surrounds the dialogue, however, is consistently brilliant (if, as I’ve stated, frequently confusing), and manages to combine swift pacing with convincing philosophical asides, flitting comfortably between third and first person perspectives without the pretentiousness that such a gimmick often involves.  I also enjoyed the sly references to the roots of SF; with the thief/detective dual narrative paradigm functioning as a definite call-back to early 20th Century noir magazines, and the Martian horde of rampaging ‘Phoboi’ a nice nod to the mutant alien swarms of hero-centric SF pulp.

Jean le Flambeur himself is equally hit-and-miss in his presentation. His gentlemanly charm and politeness is pleasingly at-odds with his morally dubious profession, and the emotional rawness that comes to the fore as his forgotten past is slowly revealed is well realised. But his irresistible sexual allure and string of in-novel liaisons (even Meili’s space ship falls for him) borders on farcical (and not in a good way); a throw-back to the male adolescent fantasy-fulfilling aspect of pulp SF that I didn’t welcome.

The Quantum Thief, then, is a frustrating book.  The gigantic architectures of Rajaniemi’s imagination are on full display, and many of the book’s ideas are truly original; no mean feat in 21st-century SF. But punctuating the craziness and unfettered creativity are several problems with characterisation, clarity and an obtuseness of language that obstructs the book’s imagery. Where China Miéville or M. John Harrison might employ terminological obscurity as a narrative device to drive momentum, or an aid to a kind of immersive estrangement, TQT is just bafflingly convoluted, alienating, and kinda smug with it. Rajaniemi’s scientific knowledge is impressive, but the refusal to explain the terms of his world doesn’t have the aesthetic panache he seems to think, nor does it carry the depth of reference to be passed-off as somehow modernist. It is a good book: fast paced, highly original, and occasionally undercut by a moving sense of emotional bathos, but every success is counterpointed by a frustration that tempered my whole experience. I’ve never read anything quite like TQT, but I can’t help but feel that it could have been… more…

Tomcat

By Light Alone – Adam Roberts

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BlaYou know zombie movies, yeah?  Zombie movies? Okay so you know how in zombie movies there’s often a protracted period in the opening act during which the characters have no idea that the world has gone to shit and that the zombie horde is almost at their front door, and the only way that the viewer has any idea about the zombies is because she’s given glimpses of subtly-placed newspaper headlines and T.V. footage telling her about the zombies – reportage of which the characters all seem blissfully unaware?  Well, Adam Roberts’ By Light Alone begins in very much the same vein.  There are no zombies, but the world has most definitely gone to shit.  This may be painfully obvious to the reader, but the rich, self-centred protagonists, sealed off in the hermetic paradise of uber-affluent Manhattan, have no idea about the true state of things – reading the news, you see, has become distinctly unfashionable.

I say there are no zombies – but that’s not really true.  By Light Alone is set 100 (ish) years from now, when humans have genetically engineered the ability to photosynthesize through their hair, thus eliminating the need for food.  This results in a kind of extreme Marxian two-class society: the rich (who can afford real food) are completely sealed-off and unreachable, and affect baldness as a visual signifier of their wealth. The poor masses, by comparison, grow long flowing locks and spend their days prostrate in the sun in order to survive. (I suppose the “jobsuckers” (those who work) form a third class – analogous with the petite bourgeoisie – but the novel never deals with these directly.) The so-called ‘longhairs’ are seen by our rich protagonists as the zombie plague: socially worthless (they don’t need food, so there’s no motivation for them to work the low-paid jobs of the poor), nomadic and emaciated, they ring the walled-cities and lay-about on rafts, just existing in their millions, described using imagery highly reminiscent of cinema’s zombie hordes: gorging all day (albeit on sunlight), walking about, and not doing very much of anything else.

In order for By Light Alone to work, then, the reader has to swallow the ridiculousness of photosynthesizing hair, and for what it’s worth I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief in this regard (who says Science Fiction has to be about real science, anyway?).  I was wary going-in to a book that so obviously functions as a thought experiment, a transposition of our real world concerns about a growing rich-poor divide that utilises a science fictional gimmick (the “hair”) to both simplify and radicalise the terms of the enquiry (I’ve always been more interested in sci-fi as a poetics than as an extrapolation). But the clinical and gloomy investigation into the nature of poverty is pleasingly tempered by Roberts’ knack for charming characterisation and frequently hilarious satire.  This, if anything, is what justifies Roberts’ couching of his debate in the form of a novel (-as if such a thing needs justifying…).  The satire in question isn’t especially subtle (and his caricatures of the vain, ignorant, unsympathetic rich are so extreme as to be unhelpful in some passages), but I generally found the jokes to be successful, and the culture criticism to be biting and astute.

**

The first half of By Light Alone is uncomfortable reading. We spend most of our time with George and Marie: grotesque, vain, vulgar millionaires entirely ignorant and dismissive of the wider world and its myriad problems.  They spend their time holidaying and eating various expensive and exotic foodstuffs; partly because it’s fashionable, and partly because they just can.  George and Marie’s children are cared for by a full-time nanny, who is occasionally commanded to bring the kids out so that they might be shown off for 5 or 10 minutes to George and Marie’s equally abhorrent friends – this being the total extent of the interaction between parents and children.

I experienced a strange cognitive dissonance when reading about George and Marie, somewhere between voyeuristically delighting in their vileness, and morally despairing at the unapologetic pride they have in their own ignorance.  Much of the language in the first half of the novel is equally divided: there’s a limited narratorial point of view that seems similarly unaware of the wider “real world”, but which simultaneously satirises the protagonists’ despicable ignorance and gluttony.  It’s impressive stuff, coloured by Roberts’ characteristically dry sense of humour. For example, when Marie admits to a friend that she has two children, the narrator chips-in with this sly description:

‘Two!’ repeated Ys, as if this number were one of those mind-stunning statistics you hear on documentaries about the vastness of interstellar space.

The primary catalyst for dramatic action occurs when George and Marie’s daughter, Leah, is kidnapped while on holiday.  Leah is returned to them after several months’ frantic communication with the local police, but something about their daughter isn’t quite right. She’s lost the ability to speak English, has been forced to grow her hair long and, after months in the capture of poor “longhairs”, hasn’t eaten “hard food” since her kidnapping.  After various psychological and pharmaceutical therapies, Leah slowly returns to her old self, but the process takes its toll on her parents, and this traumatic event inevitably exposes the cracks in their marriage.

The change in George’s world view at this point is a slightly garish and parable-esque U-turn that’s just about in keeping with his pre-established character, but the more interesting emotional fallout is definitely Marie’s, whose search for solace in various lovers, drugs, therapies and hobbies reveals an emotional complexity that tested my pre-conceptions of this rich, vain woman.  She’s still patronising and ignorant, of course, but it’s satisfying that Roberts’ caricatures attempt some emotional depth.  There’s a strange amount of posturing in By Light Alone, and the book constantly had me shifting and re-adjusting my opinions of its characters.  I’m not sure if this is a consequence of deliberate misdirects and red herrings designed to play on my own prejudices, or if it’s just down to some clunky writing.

When ‘what happened to Leah’ is eventually revealed to the reader, for example, I was equal parts pleased by the originality of the twist, and disappointed by its implications for characterisation. I guess it’s down to the caprice of the individual reader to decide whether he can buy-into the idea that Leah’s parents wouldn’t have immediately sussed what was going on, even though Roberts had laid some of the groundwork for their parental ignorance in advance. I’m still not sure what I feel about it, to be honest.

**

The second half of By Light Alone entails a dramatic shift in narrative focus, and the book now concerns itself with Issa, an itinerant “longhair” trying to reach New York.  The change in register at this point is welcome; long descriptions of food, affluence and luxury are replaced like-for-like with accounts of hunger, poverty and violence.  The tonal move is jarring, but deliberately so. As Issa travels through (I think) Turkey, she is variously assaulted, dehydrated, lost and forced to deal with the Spartacists (revolutionaries set on overthrowing the superstructure of the real-food-eating rich).  It’s harrowing and often deftly-handled stuff, but I found many of the long passages that recount Issa’s wanderings to be tedious, repetitive and a bit too vague in their imagery (I had a lot of trouble actually visualising the landscape).  Perhaps you could generously describe such sequences as the novel’s form mirroring the experience of its subject… but er..hmmm.

Seen from the perspective of the “longhairs”, of course, it is now the super-rich of the book’s opening chapters who appear to be the zombies: constantly stuffing their faces, ignorant about, well, everything, and just kinda brain dead and detached.  I don’t want to take this whole zombie analogy too far (I admit it’s a bit fatuous and vague), but it’s definitely helpful in describing the somewhat ironic way in which the book’s two groups of people (the rich, and the longhairs) see one another. The most successful aspect of By Light Alone is the way the novel appears to set-up simplistic binaries, but then perpetually interrupts the process by shifting the perspective to the other side, to detail the pains and flaws of what was heretofore an “other”.  As I’ve said, the rich aren’t exclusively depicted as emotionally depthless and selfish, and likewise Roberts is keen to avoid any stereotypes of the noble poor (many of the “longhairs’” actions are truly despicable).

**

So By Light Alone is an odd thing, really. It makes a lot of demands of its readers: you have to buy-in to lots of nonsense that can’t always be waved away as “just satire”, but if you’re willing to read it without too much cynicism, then you’ll find the book to be frequently funny, engaging and, at its action-packed dénouement, genuinely moving.  I found myself having to constantly re-orientate my opinions of its characters and their actions, and this, in some ways, is a good reflection of the complexities and problems of the debate at hand.  The second half of the book is a little too earnest, and definitely over-dependent on unlikely coincidences to drive the narrative forward, but By Light Alone remains a fascinating thought experiment, and definitely worth a read.

Tomcat.

The A26 – Pascal Garnier

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The A26I guess it’s customary for me to begin my reviews by writing about the genre in which any given book functions, but darn it this one has me stumped.

Stylistically The A26 borrows from mid-Twentieth-Century hardboiled noir; stuff like Raymond Chandler and Georges Simenon.  The writing is often cynical, curt and metaphor-heavy, characterised by an unsympathetic portrayal of gruesome violence.  In fact, many of the narrator’s observations are so close to something Philip Marlowe would say that they can only be viewed as appreciative nods in Chandler’s direction.  Where The Big Sleep equates bodies with heartbreak:

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

The A26 follows suit with the slightly less eloquent:

They say there is nothing heavier than an empty heart; the same is true of a lifeless body.

Of course this specific reference to Chandler may just be an idiosyncrasy of the translator (I don’t have a French copy (or a French speaker, for that matter) here for comparison); but needless to say there’s definitely a noir-esque tone that pervades the prose.  Acts of violence are described with a glib matter-of-fact-ness, and when the writing does become more lyrical, it’s always with a snarky undertone and dark sense of poetry:

The countryside, accustomed to low skies and drizzle, looked ill at ease in its Sunday best.  The bricks were too red, the sky too blue, the grass too green. It was as if nature felt embarrassed at being so extravagantly made up.

These stylistic proclivities, coupled with the story’s bodycount and focus on social outsiders, should make the act of genre classification an assured thing, right? It’s a noir. But once you’ve read a few chapters, and you start to get to grips with the actual plot, things don’t seem quite so clear-cut.  The A26 has murders, sure, but it’s not about the murders, per se; there are no procedural or detective elements, and without meaning to sound dismissive of noir and its pulp roots (of which I am much-enamoured), The A26 just seems too… literary.  It’s a novel about the strange hinterlands between spaces – both physical and figurative – and the inevitable fallout that ensues when people try to bridge the gaps between, for example, the rural and the urban, past and present, love and hate, life and death.

This thematic pre-occupation with boundaries is made readily apparent in the book’s opening chapter, a metaphorically loaded scene that sees Frenchwoman Yolande staring out at the world through a tiny peephole drilled in the wall of the boarded-up house that she never, ever leaves.  Yolande believes that World War II is still on-going, and that all of her neighbours are ‘boche’ informants.  She is cared for by her brother, Bernard; a retired rail worker obsessed with the construction of the ‘A26’, a major road (and obvious metaphor for death) slowly impinging on their rural community.

Yolande and Bernard have lived in this old house – separate and hermetic – for decades, and the real substance of this book is found in the ways these characters react when the outside – illness, neighbours, the new road, technology, the present – begins to push against and trespass their borders.  It’s as much an investigation into solitariness, love and desperation as it is a forensic examination of the circumstances surrounding some particularly imaginative murders.

So might we just call it Literary Fiction with noir tendencies, then? Well, no, because to do so would be to perform an almost sacrilegious disservice to another of the book’s defining traits: The A26 is really, really funny.  It’s so funny that (you could probably argue) calling it anything other than a Black Comedy is to decidedly miss the point. The blogger WinstonsDad is correct when he likens the book’s premise to the opening of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is comedy to be found in the new road, with all of the traffic and metaphors it brings with it. But WinstonsDad’s second comparison – that the siblings of The A26 evoke the reclusive brother-sister duo Edward and Tubbs from the T.V. show The League of Gentleman – is much closer to the descriptive mark.  The comedy is decidedly a gallows humour; Garnier’s descriptions of a bic biro being used as a murder weapon are gruesome, but also very funny.  And the humour isn’t exclusively violent; between the book’s murder sequences the comedy is frequently scatological and sexual: preposterous in a way that’s reminiscent of medieval fabliaux (a genre of writing that emerged from Northeast France – and I imagine it’s no coincidence that The A26 is set in Picardy).

But in order to stop the novel descending into abject farce, which would bathetically undermine the book’s more serious concerns for loneliness and mental illness, much of The A26’s grotesque comedy is undercut by, well, stuff that’s just genuinely grotesque: grotesque in a way that provides some nice tonal variance, but also establishes a disconcerting and genuinely unnerving tension.  Somewhat predictably, then, this leads me onto another of Pascal Garnier’s genre appropriations: horror fiction.  Converging with the noir-esque narration, the literary concern with boundaries and the book’s strange sense of comedy, are some passages that wouldn’t be out of place in Lovecraft or Ligotti:

Always at the end of this dream, however, his two halves would be wriggling on either side of the track and would manage to stick themselves together again.

Or:

Something had smashed on the floor, her bowl half-full of red wine.  Some creature going past no doubt.  They were everywhere.  You couldn’t see them but they were there, nibbling, scrabbling, gnawing at even the very shadows.

And this description of a rictal grimace is absolutely a reference to Georg Heym’s The Autopsy:

On the mattress the exposed corpse gave a toothy grin.

But much like the other element’s I’ve discussed, the horror isn’t prevalent enough to warrant labelling the entire novel as such.

I could go on and on: the changes that Bernard undergoes when he realises his illness is terminal could encourage me to read The A26 as a kind of late-life bildungsroman.  The quasi-incestuous nature of the siblings’ relationship make me want to tag the novel as a love story (albeit a dark, twisted one); and the neighbours’ investigations into the strange murders almost (almost) make this a piece of straight-forward crime fiction.  But simply listing verbatim all of the different literary genres that Garnier has appropriated, though providing some glimpse of the book’s aesthetic, doesn’t really offer, in itself, any kind of critical understanding of the work.

So, why, then, is The A26 such an obvious smorgasbord of so many disparate genre conventions?  Well, as I understand it, this blurring of genre borders acts as a deliberate structuralist reflection of the book’s actual plotting and themes.  Bernard and Yolande have spent decades trying to erect walls (both physical and figurative) around themselves, but their efforts are ultimately proved futile as their borders are all breached with violent inevitability.  Within their tiny house, Bernard and Yolande’s approach to life seems divided: he is obsessed with death, she insists that “Nothing [is] ever supposed to stop” – but even this distinction is proven to be permeable, as the novel’s denouement so powerfully demonstrates: both characters choose the same path, regardless of their individual approaches to death.

The A26 is a warning against hermeticism, blockades and isolation: an illustration that the borders we so unthinkingly put up – even those literary distinctions between genres – are in fact unstable and transient.  The proper word for this rejection of boundaries and certainties is probably “modernism” and this, it seems, is the best label for the book: at least it’s better than the bullshitty genre compound “Horror-fiction-literary-black-comedy-noir”.  But the fact remains that whatever you do decide to call The A26, the book is absolutely fantastic.

Tomcat

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami

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TWUBCOn the face of it, Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle seems a fairly innocent and quirky coming-of-age story; an earnest yarn about a passive, unemployed waster who only realises the true value of life and love (etc.) when his wife leaves him, an old friend dies, and his, er, cat disappears (what is it with Murakami and disappearing cats?).  But even the most superficial reading will soon reveal a cliché-riddled and structurally confusing mess of a book populated by inconsistent and ungraspable characters whose various motivations, behaviours and decisions are just completely baffling.  Worst of all, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is underpinned by the most appalling misogyny, reinforced by a fetishistic presentation of violence and a dismissive treatment of rape.  It’s a male power fantasy that lamely attempts to justify itself by gradually exposing all of its female characters as adulteresses, pathological liars and manipulators, as if in some way this validates the male-gazey, objectifying and frankly gross way the book presents women.

It begins well enough; protagonist Toru Okada – a polite, shy, loving but unambitious sort – is introduced living in suburban Tokyo with his wife Kumiko and cat Noburo Wataya.  Soon both wife and cat mysteriously vanish from Toru’s life, and what follows is an increasingly confusing sequence of events interspersed with cod-philosophical musings on, for example, the transitory nature of love, Japanese consumerism, and the modernist quest to find meaning in an increasingly homogenised world.  Punctuating the mundane, kitchen sink-ness of the runaway wife plot are some slightly more “weird” (a favourite adjective of Murakami’s) events: mysterious phone calls, visits from people with access to information they shouldn’t reasonably be expected to have access to, occasional prophesies from old, wisened herbalists etc..  It’s the sort of trendy, surreal-lite kind of stuff that literary hipsters dine out on.

The prose, meanwhile, is characteristically understated and blunt; there’s little in the way of lyricism, but the matter-of-factness of tone is perfectly charming, and the frequent off-tangent ramblings and numerous adjacent references to classical music and food preparation give the writing an identity truly its own.  The clipped, simple sentences and the author’s reluctance to indulge in polysyllabic words lend great pace to the narrative, and I found myself turning pages at a pretty good whack.

It’s not long, however, before this quirky and amiable tone is subsumed by a more sinister penchant for titillation, exploitative quasi-pornographic writing and a truly unbelievable description of one woman’s sexual “awakening” (more on this later).  Toru’s investigations into the whereabouts of his missing cat lead him to recruit the services of Malta and Creta Kano: sisters who offer a sort of life-coaching-cum-spiritualism advice service.  During Toru’s first meeting with Malta, she describes the rape of her younger sister at the hands of Toru’s brother-in-law.  This long passage of direct speech is constantly interrupted by copious descriptions of Malta’s breasts, the shape of her buttocks as discernible through her dress, the movements of her tongue as she speaks etc. and etc.  Malta is recounting an act of monstrous sexual assault, meanwhile the author’s gaze (and by proxy the reader’s) is focusing on her body.  It seems that while Murakami is attempting to elicit an emotionally sympathetic response in his readers, he is at the same time trying to… turn them on.  The juxtaposition of a distressing rape confessional with constant descriptive asides about the speaker’s body is unsettling in the extreme, denigratory towards women and patronising to the reader; as if the only way Murakami can hold our attention during what should be one of the book’s more difficult, more emotionally demanding scenes is to make cheap appeals to our sex drives.  I say ‘our’; of course the writing is actually targeting a very specific readerly demographic: probably young, definitely straight, men.  Murakami lets it be known in no uncertain terms who he wants reading his book. The overall impression of the scene is this: “yeah, her sister was raped: but phwoar!”

There’s no saving grace; this contrasting placement of rape confession and perving is not trying to make some larger, over-arching thematic or structural point: there’s zero nuance at play here, and suggestions that this scene is meant, in some way, to tell us something about Toru as a character are, I feel, generous in the extreme, as Toru’s behaviour is completely at-odds with his pre-established personal concern for sympathy, kindness and respect.

And unfortunately this is not an isolated example; there isn’t a single female character who isn’t first introduced (and then meticulously described) in terms of her physical characteristics.  Of course this isn’t by any means unusual – writers have to paint their pictures – but the descriptive focus of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is distinctly sexual and, I might add, this is a narrative idiosyncrasy that does not apply to any of the book’s male characters.

To return to the aforementioned “sexual awakening”, then.  At about mid-way through the book, the rape of Creta Kano is described for a second time, only now it has been re-evaluated not as rape “per se” (Todd Akin, anyone?), but as a kind of re-birth for the victim.  I shit you not.  Creta takes great pains to describe herself as a previously numb and empty shell, devoid of all passion and emotion; literally incapable of feeling.  All of this changes when she is raped [[and as a note, the word ‘rape’ mysteriously vanishes from the text at this point – whatever it is that happened, both narrator and characters stop calling it ‘rape’; it’s now just sex, or whatever]].  Creta Kano, upon being raped, undergoes a miraculous transfiguration and is now capable of love, compassion, anger, happiness – why, the whole gamut of regular human emotions! Now that she’s been “made to feel such intense sexual pleasure” she undergoes a “gigantic physical change” and an “escape from [her] profound numbness”.  What was initially described as a rape becomes, without any pretext, explanation or logic, some kind of sexual rite of passage requisite for any woman to truly become able to experience proper emotion.  This is reiterated later, too, when Toru’s wife Kumiko writes a cold and uncaring letter to him in which she confesses to months of promiscuous adultery (over which she has “no sense of guilt”, of course) with men she doesn’t even like, but which sex enables her to finally enter the world of stable, adult emotional life.  The Wind-up Bird Chronicle offers a “literary” (word used in the loosest possible way) equivalent of the macho cliché “what she really needs is a good seeing to”.

The conception of women as numb homunculi or empty shells incapable of feeling until true emotion is fucked into them at the behest of men’s generous cocks is just… well… the word offensive doesn’t quite seem to cut it.  The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is founded upon a deep structured misogyny, and any reading that doesn’t interpret the book in this way would be very forgiving indeed.

Of course, no journey into the finer points of what it means to be human would be complete without our hero having lots of no-strings sex with beautiful women – but there’s a problem here, too: our hero Toru is married, and Murakami has already established that adultery is wrong. The solution? Dream sex! You’ve never heard of it? Throughout the novel Toru has multiple sexual encounters with women in his dreams – but these are no mere wet dream fantasies: the women in question experience everything, but in some mutual otherland or dreamscape rather than the real world.  Imagine that shared dreaming stuff from Inception, only with lots more sex, and you’ll get the idea.

Essentially, dreamsex is a mechanism employed by Murakami to exonerate his hero from any accusations that he is committing adultery (which would reduce him to the same moral level as the other adulterers in the novel –all, by the way, female) while at the same time enabling him to screw all of the women he desires.  The point of all this dreamsex is narratively incomprehensible, seeming to serve no purpose in the wider plotting of the novel, nor in its emotional intricacies, as Toru, remember, is supposedly a man broken by the abandonment of his wife.  We must conclude, then, that the dreamsex serves no other function than to titillate the reader by breaking up the monotony of what would otherwise be a primarily thoughtful and philosophical rumination on the agony of love.  A kind of bribe to maintain our interest, treating the reader with the same disdain for our attention spans that T.V. and film producers have for their audiences’: keep the action and the sex frequent, lest we give the impression that this is a work of cohesion and depth.

The preposterous height of these non-sequitur titillations, if you will, occurs at around the three-hundred-and-fifty page mark, when Toru picks up a garden hose and is propositioned by a bikini clad sixteen-year-old school girl:

“Would you spray me with that? It’s sooo [sic] hot! My brain’s going to fry if I don’t wet myself down.”

It was warm and limp. I reached behind the bushes and turned on the tap. At first only hot water that had been warmed inside the hose came out, but it cooled down until it was spraying cold water. [...] I aimed a good, strong spray at her. I looked at [her] body, hardly covered by her bikini.  She was sixteen years old, but she had the build of a girl of thirteen or fourteen.

I hope by now that I’ve established that I’m not just being prudish: quite why this gratuitous scene (it goes on for several pages) is even in the novel is completely beyond me.

Anyway, you get the idea: it would do my review a disservice were I to list, verbatim, all such sequences in the novel. But over and over again in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, women are routinely objectified, vilified and pacified by the actions of character, narrator, writer and, in a kind of gross by-proxy complicity, reader.

Elsewhere the story unfolds in myriad confusing and messy ways until the final 200 pages: an entirely baffling and bizarre sequence of events that defies any logical explication and structure.  Can Toru melt through the walls of a well? Sure! Does the black mark that appeared on his face for no reason 400 pages ago similarly vanish without ceremony? You bet!  Does Toru follow a Tokyo stranger all the way home and beat the living shit out of him with a baseball bat in a superfluously violent scene that undermines everything Murakami has heretofore done to establish his character? YES!  I’ve read various internet reviews/commentaries/forums in which critics have attempted to paste some philosophical or moral reasoning over the book’s nonsensical events, but very little actually seems to stick.  I’ve enjoyed novels by Murakami before (Kafka on the Shore and After Dark I thought were pretty good), and taken pleasure in the obvious fact that he doesn’t plan before writing (he’s admitted it, too), but The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is just surreal for surreal’s sake; a trendy misappropriation of post-structuralist genre proclivities that captures much of the style of the continental philosophical novels that Murakami is clearly aping, but none of the depth.

So, no redeeming qualities then? Well, Toru’s neighbour May Kasahara is a wonderful character: playful, puzzling-but-not-in-a-maddening-way, idiosyncratic in speech and morally aware of her own past mistakes and limitations. It’s unfortunate that about mid-way through the novel, then, Toru and May are separated and reduced to corresponding via letter; at which point May looses much of her personality and quirkiness, as if once May is out of Toru’s arm’s reach, Murakami couldn’t be bothered with her anymore – it was the proximity of their relationship and the obvious contrasts therein that made the characters work together. Adding distance subtracts tension.

But that’s about it.  The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is a sinister, misogynistic book characterised by an overabundance of pointless sex and violence, coupled with an alarming treatment of female sexuality, emotion and morality.  The placing of long, rambling descriptions of the Japanese military efforts in Manchuko adjacent meaningless sequences of dreamsex is puerile, belittling and offensive.  Ostensibly the book is about the journey from numbness to feeling – but I just don’t see it; for me and my own journey reading this book, it was the other way around.

Tomcat.

Light – M. John Harrison

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I’ve read in numerous places, which I’m far too lazy to reference here, that M. John Harrison’s 2002 novel Light does for Space Opera what his Viriconium sequence did for Fantasy back in the 1980s.  This is quite the claim, as Viriconium towers over the landscape of postmodern fantasy literature as a definite and unchallenged Olympus; the book that finally did-away with the literary naivety of the field by drawing direct attention to the problematic artificiality of secondary-world High Fantasy, all the while remaining deeply enamoured of the tropes, traditions and history of the genre; a genre with which Harrison is clearly well-versed and much in love.

To think that the same writer could reinvigorate not just one, but two distinct genres both of which, let’s be honest, suffer from more than their fair share of cliché, repetition and imaginative exhaustion is difficult to believe, but having read the frankly staggering (and not to mention extraordinarily beautiful) Light, I’m definitely coming round to the idea.  It’s 30-odd years since Harrison seemingly abandoned New Wave sci-fi with his early (and criminally underrated) novel The Centauri Device, but his forays into the lands of Fantasy and (later) Literary Fiction were obviously time well spent, as Light meshes a keen commitment to psychological realism with a penchant for inventive, stripped-back imagist prose.  The book toys with and deconstructs many of the familiar tenets of science fiction, but in a joyous and celebratory way, never sneering.  Harrison’s frame of reference is galaxy-spanning, and Light is replete with subtle (and not-so-subtle) tributes to the canon of famous (and not-so-famous) science fiction literature, T.V. and film.  Please don’t think the book is just some big party of self-indulgent genre references, it most certainly isn’t: the narrative is dominated by an unflinching and unsympathetic portrayal of horrific violence, manipulative sex and mental illness, but underpinning this grit is a definite comic treatment of the vagaries of space opera.  The satire is tender, and the commitment to sensawunda is genuine.

Light focuses on three larger-than-life characters; the theoretical physicist and serial killer Michael Kearney; Seria Mau Genlicher, a woman who’s been (voluntarily) cybernetically mutilated and encased in a vat of protein fluids from which she pilots a strange alien craft – an artefact from some long-extinct race of star-moving galactic engineers; and Ed Chianese (/Chinese Ed), a Virtual Reality addict enlisted in what can only be described as a… er… space circus. Michael’s story takes place in 1999, the latter two narratives (Seria’s and Ed’s) transpire around 2400 AD, with chapters alternately flitting between each character.

All three protagonists are haunted by different manifestations of ‘The Shrander’, an ungraspable and incarnately weird creature that variously functions as terrifying apparition of death, anti-hero, malcontent, surgeon, seer and sage.  The Shrander’s most memorable form is that which haunts Michael Kearney in the guise of a be-robed and spritely stalker with a horse’s skull in place of a head. Not only is this a clear aesthetic reference to the Celtic Welsh tradition of the Mari Lwyd (and a knowing wink to fans of Viriconium with a suggestion of a shared universe), but the horse skull-headed version of the Shrander also acts as microcosm for one of the book’s major themes: the estrangement of the familiar.  By tradition the Mari Lwyd is a luck-bringing and festive Celtic ritual, and while The Shrander definitely contains elements of this festivity, it is by turns a much more terrifying and grotesque presence: it’s the Mari Lwyd uprooted from its traditional contexts and placed, instead, within a weird and defamiliarising alien landscape.  Removed from its place as a curio of Celtic festive and musical history, the writer imbues the image of the horse skull-headed puppet-creature with more sinister connotations – death, madness, murder.  This is largely achieved by a fixation with the anatomical otherness of the Mari Lwyd.  In general the image of a skull is inseparable from the concept of death, and Harrison manipulates this to truly horror fiction-esque scales.  A big part of Lights’ aesthetic is a making-strange of otherwise common place or traditional objects.

A Mari Lwyd. My what big teeth you have, etc.

Outside of The Shrander’s haunting, much of the plotting is concerned with explaining how the three protagonists found themselves in their current situations.  Seria Mau’s life before her cybernetic implantation into an alien ship is told through a series of disjointed and cryptic dream sequences that, though initially baffling, come together in a way that rewards patience and is immensely satisfying.  The disorganized memories of her troubled childhood gradually expose the awful circumstances that led her to make the irreversible choice to be implanted into her ship, and I expect the visceral scenes of techno-surgery to stick with me for some time.  It’s a testament to Harrison’s skill as a writer that something so physical and disturbed can also be so moving.  Seria Mau is mutilated, trapped and profoundly alone, but these are truths the reader has to parse out from prose dense with scientific jargon as she concerns herself not with pitying introspection, but with the everyday mechanisations of her FTL alien ship and the technical demands of operating in nano-second time frames stretched out by mind-altering drugs to last, for her, for subjective minutes.  The tragedy of Seria Mau isn’t her present circumstance, but that the universe organised itself in such a way that she made the choice to live like this.

Decisions, then, form the thematic heart of the novel.  This is re-iterated by Michael Kearney’s work as a quantum physicist exploring the various theories surrounding probabilities, quantum states and branching, possible universes. Driven half-mad by the stalking Shrander and his failure to devise a useful system of quantum computing, Kearney defers all of his choices to a strange set of dice that he stole from the Shrander in some un-written prologue to the novel.  The dice are loaded (… I apologise in advance for this…) with symbolism… with connotations that range from choice theory and quantum mechanics to the world that could have been if only different choices were made.  Of course “dice stuff” is a big cliché of post-modern fiction, but here the beauty and pitch-perfect tone of Harrison’s prose and the playful morality of his ideas stop Light from ever seeming trite or disingenuous. Also there are cats (two cats – one black, one white) that manifest in all three timelines and that play a significant part in the choices and directions of the characters’ lives, both literally and figuratively.

This is all well and good, but where Light really (again, I’m sorry…) shines…  is in its examination of the ways these characters’ choices affect the lives of the people close to them. The supporting cast is a lowly and agency-less collection of tragically damaged individuals tossed around like ragdolls by the selfish and often misguided decisions of the three protagonists. Michael Kearney’s ex-wife/occasional fuckbuddy Anna, for example, is a mentally unstable woman in thrall to Michael’s every movement. The beautifully constructed, psychologically piercing and eloquent exchanges between the two are a stylistic highlight of the novel, albeit harrowing and difficult to “enjoy” in the usual sense of the word:

“I try to help you – only you won’t let me”

“Anna” he said quickly, “I help you.  You’re a drunk. You’re anorexic. You’re ill most days, and on a good day you can barely walk down the pavement. You’re always in a panic. You barely live in the world we know.”

But in terms of its style, Light is a book of many shades (… just take my apologies as a given from now on…).  Several long passages of esoteric technobabble (much of which I suspect is more bullshit than science) are almost David Foster Wallace-esque in their challenge to the reader to actually look up the words you don’t understand (only to find that a percentage of them actually are bullshit).   While some may argue that this renders the “science” part of “science fiction” arbitrary and spurious, I think the real point is a playful fixation on the glorious sounds and tones of jargon, absent their content, to become a kind of poetry. It doesn’t have to make sense, as the narrator puts it: this is “a place where all the broken rules of the universe spill out”.

Light is a challenging, oftentimes abstract novel that, in spite of (or maybe in complement to) it’s title, contains a lot of dark.  The novel’s dénouement ties the three narratives together in unexpected yet fulfilling ways, and the book’s examination of senseless cruelty and selfishness only lend the ending greater poignancy.  It’s a book of clichés turned in on themselves, of constant references to a saturated history of science fiction that Harrison neither attempts to ignore nor to revolutionise, but to celebrate.  I’m not sure if Light is the Viriconium of Space Opera, simply because I don’t think Space Opera suffers from the same institutionalised problems as modern Fantasy literature. It is, however, an incredible novel; perfectly balanced, relentlessly beautiful; puzzling but always fascinating.

Tomcat.

The Crossing – Cormac McCarthy

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Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing isn’t so much concerned with the violent and sudden breach of clearly demarcated borders as much as it is with the slow bleed-out and eventual death of innocence, tradition and stability.  There’s a parallel to be found between Billy’s journey from affectionate and naive purity to hardhearted maturity (via, of course, the violent upheaval of cruel experience), and the changes that the American South underwent during the sudden industrialisation of the early Twentieth Century.

It’s almost a truism for reviewers to draw a distinction between the literal crossing of borders undertaken by the book’s protagonist (America to Mexico), and the subtextual crossing of child- into adulthood; but there’s also a third implied narrative, one that concerns itself with national identity, with the U.S as a frontier nation, in a state of perpetual flux. It’s telling that McCarthy begins the novel with an assertion that the country “was itself little older than [a] child”, and ends with an allowance that “The past is always this argument between counterclaimants. It is history that each man makes alone from what is left. Bits of wreckage. Some bones.”.  It’s these more allegorical boundaries which, much like its predecessor All the Pretty Horses, firmly establish this novel as a uniquely American bildungsroman.

The Crossing tells the story of three journeys made by teenager Billy Parnham from his home in New Mexico down into Mexico proper, all in the late 1930s.  The first expedition sees him attempting to lead an injured, pregnant wolf back to her home territory; in the second journey he travels even further south, looking for the horses stolen from his family; and the third crossing sees a hardened yet defeated Billy searching for his missing younger brother, Boyd.  The book doesn’t quite hark back to the levels of cruelty and darkness that McCarthy displayed in his earlier output (Blood Meridian, Child of God, Outer Dark being the most nihilistically exposed of his opus), but it is nonetheless unremittingly bleak and violent; a definite system shock when compared with the relatively more optimistic tone of its sort-of prequel, the aforementioned All the Pretty Horses.  The heartbreaking and insistent sequence of tragic events that punctuate Billy’s journeys and which all encapsulate some form of loss (both literal and figurative: his family, his home, his innocence) do run the risk of overwhelming the reader, or even verging on the self-indulgent; but separating the book’s more shattering set-pieces are long passages of wilderness writing, which often act as sympathetic fallacy for Billy’s situation – dark and tempestuous when he’s at his lowest ebb.  This not only imbues the book (and Billy’s journeys) with an impressive sense of scale and majesty, but further establishes the notion that The Crossing is as much concerned with America as nation and landscape as it is with the struggles of its individual characters.

Stylistically, The Crossing is characteristic McCarthy: long sentences constructed in polysyndetic syntax are very much the grammatical standard, with a striking and only occasionally tedious penchant for meticulous physical descriptions.  As with all McCarthy novels, there’s also an attendant lack of punctuation: no marks to indicate direct speech, very few apostrophes (even when they’re grammatically appropriate) and even fewer commas.

The winter that Boyd turned fourteen the trees inhabiting the dry river bed were bare from early on and the sky was gray day after day and the trees were pale against it a cold wind had come down from the north with the earth running under bare poles towards a reckoning whose ledgers would be drawn up and dated only long after all due claims had passed, such is this history.

I’m tempted to make some twee comparison between the barren emptiness of the book’s landscapes and the typographical ways this is reflected in the absence of punctuation, but there’s really only a very limited extent to which even I could draw-out such a trite association.  Ahem.

I will, however, remark on the unusual sense of power that McCarthy’s prose seems to carry.  There’s something about his narration that’s so heavy and authoritative, as if Cormac McCarthy isn’t describing his personal vision of America, or giving us some lyrical interpretation of a subjective point of view; he seems, rather, to be telling things exactly as they are, as if he’s carved into stone an absolutely inviolable and sacred record of the world in its making.  I’m not sure how he achieves this: maybe it’s the sheer length and microscopic focus of his descriptions coupled with his lexicon of earthy, physical words, or maybe the simplicity and directness of his writing contains some biblical and hypnagogic quality that transcends the usual vagaries of fiction writing to imbue upon The Crossing a sense of absolute authority.  Either way, the book almost defies its notional identity as a novel to feel, instead, like some kind of definite, objective and truthful record of America. This is exacerbated by the book’s unsympathetic treatment of its readership; with almost all of the dialogue rendered in unstranslated Spanish, there’s a faithfulness to realism that’s given precedence over the needs and concerns of the individual reader.

The Crossing is an extraordinary novel. It’s difficult to discuss the finer points of its plot without resorting to massive spoilers, but Billy’s compassionate treatment of a trapped wolf that is the book’s beginning, and his violent attack against an old dog that is the book’s end should give you some indication of the bleak and pain-filled journey contained within the intervening 400 pages, and of the histrionic and deeply moving changes that effect and re-mould the perennially lost protagonist.  It would be somewhat amateurish of me to list, verbatim, all of the different ‘crossings’ (metaphoric or otherwise) that dominate the book, but I couldn’t help but feel that the most significant journey is the one that none of the characters ever truly accomplish: to cross the vast landscapes between one another, and to stop themselves from ever feeling acutely and profoundly alone.

Tomcat.

My Work Is Not Yet Done – Thomas Ligotti

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I’ve written before about the protean nature of Thomas Ligotti’s horror fiction; the ways in which he seems completely at home writing in genres as diverse as Lovecraftian grotesque or the ghost story, slasher fiction, philosophical horror, vampire mythos, demonic possession etc. and etc.  He’s equally comfortable subverting and corrupting the well-established tropes of these categories as he is paying sentimental homage to their more classical incarnations.  And while his mastery over so many different genre forms is undoubtedly impressive, it’s a little too easy to accuse Ligotti of over-reliance on the anaphora of his forbearers; the once-original motifs that have since become tired and predictable through over-use, Hollywood hack and the familiarity of age.  This isn’t to say those stories in which he channels Poe or Aickman or Lovecraft or Heym are disappointing or unsuccessful, quite the contrary, but horror fiction – perhaps more so than any other genre – relies on constant innovation in order to fulfil its ostensible mandate: to provoke, shock and disturb.  Even when Ligotti is distorting classic designs, he is still nonetheless working within structures that were mastered elsewhere, by other writers.  Predictability is the greatest crime a work of horror can commit.

Thankfully, My Work is Not Yet Done signifies the point at which Ligotti steps out of the shadows of the old masters and does something we all secretly hoped he was capable of: writes a novel in a genre truly his own.  The descriptor “Corporate Horror” is perhaps a crude epithet to plaster over the title page, but it’s a useful term, and one which I’m sure will soon become a valid and commonplace part of critical vocabulary.

The novel, as this appellation suggests, is about a man who works in an office – scary stuff, right?  It’s true that the office space and the workaday routine has become common fodder for the literary mainstream – the pointlessness of it all, the existential ennui of routine and the black comedy of bureaucracy – but the office of My Work is Not Yet Done, though as mundane and ordinary as any other, is cast as a place of abject panic, despair and horror for our narrator Frank Dominio, whose prose is most poignantly characterised by his opening and oft-repeated refrain “I have always been afraid”.

The book takes great pains to describe the head-splitting flicker of florescent office tube lights, the grotesque and unearned self-confidence of those in higher management, the never-ending barrage of non-specific and pointless paperwork and the unfair and unreasonably small ways Frank’s co-workers attempt to undermine him.  The acts of selfishness and cruelty best described as “office politics” Frank knows he should ignore and rise above but which, simultaneously, seem deeply, personally, disgustingly offensive and hurtful.  Ligotti’s pitch-perfect prose oscillates between a microscopic focus on unimportant, trivial details on the one hand, and a fetishisation of the mundane, vague, unspecific blandness of it all on the other: “He was of average height and build, average weight, average age”.  The cumulative effect of this cloying and constant description is a sensation of desperate, claustrophobic loneliness, anxiety and horror as Frank trudges through his daily “maze of pain”.

I was somewhat disappointed with the second half of the novel, in which some strange force Frank terms “the great black swine” grants him the power to fulfil all of the sadistic fantasies of violent murder he harbours against his co-workers “I wanted to do things to Richard that would make the sun grow cold with horror”.  The jarring tonal shift from paranoia and solipsism to supernatural hyper-violence really irked me: it converges clumsily with the insightful social criticisms of the novel’s first half in a way that almost undermines the book’s sense of hopelessness.  I mean, the novel’s second half is well-conceived, well-structured horror with some gloriously imaginative comeuppances directed at the book’s most perversely unpleasant characters (and I especially liked Frank’s hubristic fall when he presumptuously ignores the single caveat and condition of his new supernatural gifts – powers which are otherwise in danger of being so all-encompassing and poorly defined as to be narratively uninteresting), but the whole supernatural element is just so, so unnecessary.  The book’s aesthetic identity is fully realised in its first half. The fact that Ligotti crafts such disturbing and panic-ridden horror from what is essentially a description of a man going to work is the book’s most striking achievement.  The rest is good Ligotti, but perhaps the writer’s ideas would have been better served had these two parts been kept entirely separate.

It goes against my every readerly impulse to say this, then, but when Ligotti offers the suggestion that the book’s supernatural elements have entirely rational and psychosomatic foundations, I embraced it whole-heatedly.  Given the choice, I would usually pick the more fantastical of any two feasible textual interpretations (it’s just more fun that way), but the possibility that My Work is Not Yet Done doesn’t collapse into hocus-pocus-fuelled demonic mayhem, though by far the least substantiated interpretation, is by far the most interesting reading.  The nine-to-five office space of corporate drudgery, with all its potential for loneliness, repetition, anger, desperate anxiety and claustrophobic despair is horror enough: there’s nothing more to add.

Tomcat.

Yellow Blue Tibia – Adam Roberts

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There’s a scene in Adam Roberts’ Yellow Blue Tibia in which the narrator, Konstantin Skvorecky, is interrogated by a junior member of the KGB.  It’s your archetypical interrogation set-up: windowless room, tape recorder, table and two chairs.  During the course of the questioning, the seemingly polite and considerate interrogator will reach across the desk, pause the recorder, and subsequently launch an abusive tirade of threats at Skvorecky, paying particularly gruesome attention to the protagonist’s balls.  He’ll then un-pause the recorder and pursue his inquiry in the aforementioned polite and courteous manner, only, of course, to stop the tape machine again and make progressively more disturbing and violent threats of injury to Skvorecky’s testicles.  The scene progresses in this manner for a number of pages until, in a somewhat predictable but nonetheless hilarious switcheroo, it’s revealed that the KGB officer has been unintentionally recording the “stuff about balls” but pausing the tape while conducting the interview proper.

It’s very funny (and nothing I can write in this review could possibly articulate quite how ball-obsessed this KGB guy is); but as well as serving to bathetically undermine the seriousness of the interrogation scene as over-used genre trope, this sketch also functions as microcosm for the entire novel.  Yellow Blue Tibia essentially examines the tensions between state-sanctioned truths and the deeper, behind-the-scenes, capital-T Truth (while asking the question: can such a thing be said to exist anyway?).  As this interrogation scene pertinently demonstrates, there’s often a gap between the history as it’s recorded and it’s wider, un-written contexts.  The book’s key thematic elements are the narrative problems of memory and the recording of the same, and the reconciliation of different characters’ conflicting subjective interpretations of the same events.  It’s the kind of thematic fodder that you might expect from more mainstream literary fiction; but don’t worry, Yellow Blue Tibia doesn’t skew quite as close to such middle-brow bore-fests as The Sense of an Ending as I’ve perhaps made it sound.   One of the key questions Yellow Blue Tibia attempts to address is this: what, exactly, is science fiction, and, then, what, exactly, is science fiction for? Fittingly for a book that examines truth, openness and the problems of definition, the setting is Perestroika era Russia. Oh, and there’s loads of stuff about UFOs too. Lots and lots of UFOs.

In brief: A group of renowned Russian sci-fi writers put their heads together to produce a collectively authored alien invasion yarn on the orders of none other than Mr Stalin himself, who feels that a new enemy is just what Russia needs to unite its people.  Not long into the creative process, the writers are ordered to abandon their efforts and, on pain of death, never speak of their narrative again. Jump-cut forty years to 1980s Moscow, where one of the writers, Konstantin Skvorecky, now an elderly divorced ex-alcoholic, is working as a Russian-English translator.  Just as Gorbachev is having his way with Communism, the alien invasion that Skvorecky and colleagues cooked-up all those years ago begins to transpire for real. Or maybe it doesn’t.

Of course, any book that takes as its subject the nature of truth and the trouble with definition presents some particular difficulties for the reviewer (i.e me).  Whether or not I label Yellow Blue Tibia as predominantly realist fiction psycho-drama or escapist sci-fi is somewhat dependent on my own interpretation of its events.  In reading, the novel offers a kind of genre mashup: equal parts literary realism, sci-fi novel, historical fiction, thriller, and satire.  All of this is perennially augmented(/problematised) by the narrator, who will frequently refuse to commit himself to any one version of events, a feat he achieves by constantly employing the book’s defining refrain: “It was [x]; or it was [y]; or it was some third thing”.

So, is there an alien invasion in Yellow Blue Tibia or is there not? (or is there some “third thing?”).  Well, refreshingly, the text doesn’t encourage the reader to plant a flag and take sides with either the ‘yes’ or the ‘no’ camps. Of course our objectivity is somewhat limited by the necessarily biased first-person narration (Skvorecky’s testimony is our only source), but one of Roberts’ most extraordinary achievements is never pushing the balance too far in favour of one interpretation over another.  In this regard Skvorecky is a perfect narrator and an effective canvass for reader-sympathy; being a Russian-English translator, Skvorecky, like the reader, also finds himself adrift between two irreconcilable perspectives; held in suspicion by the Russians (surely it’s impossible to learn English without simultaneously appropriating some of the fundamental deep-structures of the capitalist mindset?), yet not at home with the Americans either (there is a (cold) war on, you know etc.).  This dualism transcends the sub-text to characterise the page-by-page style of the book’s narration.  Skvorecky’s confusion over the alien invasion (that both is and isn’t happening) is charmingly reflected in his narrative voice, which frequently employs bi-lingual puns, hilarious Russian misunderstandings of 20th Century Americanisms and a charming penchant for both Slavic self-deprecation and American pride and blow-hardedness.  Yellow Blue Tibia is a novel of unresolved parities and long-drawn passive conflicts (if you wanted to be reeeally twee about it, you could argue that the book’s overall structure functions as a long-game metaphor for the cold war).

Elsewhere the supporting cast fulfil their roles well: the matter-of-fact and aspergic nuclear physicist-turned-taxi-driver Saltykov offers a pleasing comic foil to Skvorecky’s self-indulgent world weariness.  American love interest Dora gives a satisfying non-Russian perspective while simultaneously providing Roberts with an excuse to have his narrator explain all of the clever puns he’s making. Trofim is your prototypical Bond villain henchman, whose brief moments of verbal eloquence come only when he’s repeating verbatim the philosophy of his superiors, an affectation counterpointed to great comic effect with his otherwise lumbering stupidity.

That Yellow Blue Tibia revels in these kinds of conflicts and ambiguities is what makes the book so special (I also enjoyed the constant and often contradictory attempts to define science fiction, e.g.: “science fiction is a conceptual disorganisation of the familier” etc.)  Being the nerdy reader of sci-fi and fantasy that I am, I’m usually pre-disposed to the more fantastical interpretation of any given set of events. But Yellow Blue Tibia almost denies me this readerly choice by making both of it’s possible outcomes a reality: the alien invasion both is and isn’t happening – and while I can’t explain how the writer achieves this without resorting to massive spoilers, suffice to say the ending really is something else.  For the immovably cynical among you, Roberts offers an out in the form of an ‘it was all a bump on the head’ possibility, but this is by far the least interesting of the explanations offered up by the text.

In a brief end-note, Adam Roberts states that the kernel of the novel was an attempt to reconcile the “seemingly contradictory facts about UFOs: that, on the one hand, they have touched the lives of many millions [...] and on the other, that they clearly don’t exist”; but I would posit that Yellow Blue Tibia also carries with it some strikingly more literary connotations, and that Skvorecky’s dilemma (the synchronized existing and not-existing of the book’s aliens) stands as a metaphor for the interpretive pluralism of literary texts – those wildly different readings of books which are, nonetheless, all equally valid.  That the book is narrated by a writer, and that the story constantly draws attention to itself as a multi-layered work of fictions within fictions adds further weight to this argument, I feel.  I enjoyed the book immensely.  Yellow Blue Tibia is about the different ways we read and interpret texts; it’s about the consequences of fictions; or it isn’t. Or maybe it’s some third thing.

Tomcat

A Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula K. Le Guin

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I’m an apostate of epic fantasy.  Until about 5 years ago I was completely up-to-speed and up-to-date with most of the major sagas: ‘The Sword of Truth’, ‘The Wheel of Time’, ‘Shannara’, ‘Coldfire’ etc. and etc.   I’d even attempted, as a teenager, to read whatever it was that Tolkien wrote surrounding Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit: you know, all those long, dorky mythos books and histories (stop sniggering at the back – I’m not ashamed!).  But in recent years I’ve grown impatient with a genre whose current identity seems more dependent on Homeric length than any attempt to break imaginative moulds and creative precepts.  A genre has a problem when I can use the somewhat oxymoronic phrase “standard fantasy setting”, only to find that everybody knows exactly what I mean.

So I gave up on epic fantasy when I realised that the singular sense of readerly joy I was gleaming from the genre was a kind of smug and breathless mountain-climbing satisfaction at the grinding achievement of having read yet another 1000 page tome in which absolutely nothing happens.  To this you could add my more recent intellectual problems with the 200 page end-of-novel historical appendices that seem to dominate the epic fantasy paperscape.  In my view, reducing something as massively subjective and complex as history to a list of ordered names and dates at the back of a book and subsequently claiming (as the fanboys will tell you) that this amounts to narrative depth is nothing but a great big structural fallacy (history is not objective, and meticulous world building is not deep).

But sans all the newest epic fantasy releases piling up on my desk, I still found myself yearning for the more abstract and aspirant tenets of the genre.  This conflict lead me to discover, for want of a better term, “short form fantasy”; and, long story elided: I now encourage you all to read everything by Michael Moorcock and everything by M. John Harrison (if I ever grow the analytical balls, I might attempt a review of his cathedral (adjective) Viriconium sequence).  Sure, short form fantasy appeals to me in practical, time consumption terms, but I’ve also fallen for the sharper focus and experimental lyricism that’s necessitated by the strictures of a much lower word count – there’s a definite feeling that short form encourages more heretofore untried and interesting story telling modes.  The sense of scale and wonder implicit in fantasy now has to come from a ferocious and creative linguistic poetry that’s so often lacking in its epic genre brothers: siblings that too often rely on high page count to craft the illusion of scale, and appendices to craft the illusion of depth, or to function as substitute for the same.

***

Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea is one such example of short form fantasy that encapsulates all of my more favoured genre aesthetics – a bleak and ambiguous approach to history, psychologically impactful monsters, a sense of massive scale, a barrenness of landscape and a convincing depth of characterisation – and does all of this, without, thankfully, running to 900 fucking pages.

I’m wary of making any grand claims that Le Guin was, in 1968, attempting to subvert a genre whose Tolkien-derived clichés were only just beginning to be instituted, but there’s definitely something gloriously cavalier and anti-establishment about both A Wizard of Earthsea’s form and its content. Nowhere is this more immediately apparent than in Le Guin’s treatment of mapping.  Epic fantasy has a strange hang-up tendency to offer the post-war comfort of relegating evil to a definite and confined place on a map (c.f. Mordor, D’hara, Northland etc.) – and perhaps it’s my own historical imperative of being a post-9/11 reader that’s doing the talking here – but I find this model simplistic, over-used and somewhat of a fop to nationalism and the idea of evil as exclusively external alien otherness.  (I should note that I have no problem with fantasy mapping or imagined geography as a concept – it’s the bullshit metaphors for good and evil that get pasted over the top of these maps that really grind my gears).  Of course such an established and rigid convention of mapping (good is here, evil is here, monsters be here etc.) paves the way for some wonderful tom-foolery at the hands of more ironically self-aware writers – nowhere more so than in the ‘evil’ empire of Grenbretan featured in Moorcock’s Hawkmoon – a fantastic mapped inversion of post-war geopolitical paranoias.  A Wizard of Earthsea takes a subtler, but nonetheless powerfully disdainful approach to subverting this perverse tradition.

I knew I was going to enjoy the book, then, when I encountered the wonderfully indecipherable Jackson Pollock mess that is the mandatory hand-drawn map printed at the start of the text.  Imagine tearing Middle Earth into a thousand pieces and re-assembling it at random, and you’ll have some idea of the paratextual cartography that dominates A Wizard of Earthsea.  The scrawly, scatter-gun map with its too-small-to-read annotations, half obscured by the crease of the binding, is of absolutely no use to the reader – neither as an aid to narrative clarity nor as an aid to a visualisation of the world’s landscapes – but that’s entirely the point.  Its narrative uselessness functions as an ironic and playful exposé of this most bullshitty convention of the genre.

But Le Guin’s playfulness doesn’t end here. There’s a beautifully post-modern dismissal of these conventions in the actual narrative – specifically the ending – which takes place (I kid you not) off the edge of the map.  It’s perfect fodder for imaginative fantasy, and not only pokes fun at the (anachronistic) medieval notion of a flat earth, but makes a more theoretical statement about the limited ability of these fantasy maps to aid or contribute to narrative coherency. Just as the novel ends, when one might arguably rely on the map the most, the map becomes its most useless. It’s extraordinary.

***

In plotting, A Wizard of Earthsea melds the more familiar tropes of high fantasy (faux-medieval setting, dragons, wizards etc.) with what can only be described as a penchant for those darkest aspects of Weird fiction-inspired horror.  The protagonist, Ged, is a young wizard who, in an ego-driven attempt to impress his classmates, hubristically summons a face-less, name-less, tentacular black monstrosity from some unknowable cosmic place of panic and violence: it would sit comfortably within Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.  And it’s this monstrosity summoned from within, rather than any invading dark wizard with his deformed armies of foreign others, that stands as the primary antagonist.  The book is essentially a bildungsroman; Ged’s quest to locate and overcome this dark, passion-ridden and uber-brutal creature stands as a metaphor for the suppression of the id and his arrival into adult life and responsibility.

Only one man’s life is at stake; and, as I’ve stated, there’s no mad, demonic force trying to destroy the world without ever quite explaining how it is they’d benefit from such an endgame.  While this offers a pleasing alternative to the standard fantasy plot, the tight focus on one individual does come at the cost of weaker characterisation elsewhere.  The majority of the book’s characters play to familiar type: there’s the pederastic old wizard-mentor, the homosocially charged relationship with a loyal best friend, the parents who aren’t themselves magical, and the usual given allotment of tavern maidens, dragon kings, helpless villagers and taciturn knights.  So although A Wizard of Earthsea wilfully experiments with the praxis conventions of epic fantasy, it remains very much enamoured of the base aesthetics of the genre: it’s still a rollocking good medieval Fantasy at heart.

So, yeah, A Wizard of Earthsea stands as further testament that it tends to be within the constraining vagaries of short form Fantasy that the genre is at its most experimental and subversive.  The book isn’t a radical genre departure, nor is it dismissive of its roots, but if like me you’re feeling more-than-a-little fatigued with “epic” fantasy, I recommend you give short form a try – and this is as good a place as any to start.

Tomcat