Girl Reporter

The Fountain Award carries a prize of $1000, given annually to a speculative short story of exceptional literary quality. The award is judged by a select jury, and chosen from work nominated by magazine and anthology editors.

Juried short fiction awards are a good thing, and awards with actual prize money are a good thing, so the Fountain Award is more or less a good thing; and I only say ‘more or less’ because of the reflexive cringe that I get from the phrase ‘speculative literature’. I agree with, for example, Sherwood Smith, in that I think ‘literary’ is so loaded that its deployment almost always does more harm than good. And in this specific case it seems redundant: surely the award could just be given to a speculative short story of exceptional quality?

The previous two winners, “The Specialist” by Alison Smith and “The Annals of Eelin-Ok” by Jeffrey Ford, are both worthy— neither was my favourite story of its year, but both are strong choices, and defensible choices as award-winners. This year I find myself somewhat baffled. “Girl Reporter” by Stephanie Harrell has a straightforward conceit: meet the woman behind the hero. Names are never named, but it’s clear that the titular narrator is Lois Lane, and that the proto-hero she strikes up a relationship with is, or becomes, Superman. Except that this version of Superman is a lunkhead, given to talking about himself in Duffman-like third person pronouncements, and lacking the strong moral sense of the hero we’re familiar with. He saves the girl, if she’s blonde; and it doesn’t occur to him until prodded to divert the satellite that’s hurtling down on the city. He wants a better image, but lacks the imagination to come up with one for himself, perhaps because all he wants is the image, rather than to genuinely change. So he asks the girl reporter to help, and because she’s fallen for him, against her better judgement she obliges. Soon enough she realises that creating a hero might be as troublesome as creating a monster. Some way further down the line, our hero writes his autobiography, Flights of Justice, which it’s implied is the version of the Superman story we all know, and among other things it misrepresents the girl reporter. Now she wants to set the record straight.

The story doesnt do a lot for me, but it’s taken me a while to pin down why. Technically it’s fine, or better than fine: well-paced, frequently clever, with a distinctive and complex voice. It’s an easy read, but asks questions about how we construct identities for ourselves and others that are worth asking. All it lacks, it seems, is that ineffable something: soul.

Partly this is personal preference. I’m wary of re-imaginings of existing stories at the best of times (please, no more Lovecraft crossover fanfic), and the more so when they seem designed, in part, to make a political point, however necessary that point may be. But even taking “Girl Reporter” on its own terms, it doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly interesting or challenging re-imagining. An examination of the ‘helplessness’ of the comic-book heroine is a big, easy target, as is Superman. Which is not to say they shouldn’t be targeted—I’ve no particular attachment to the character—but that fact is we all already know he’s a bit of a lunkhead, and the psychology of the type has been dissected and parodied pretty extensively (and not least by comics themselves, from Watchmen to The Authority). “Girl Reporter” does what it does with wit, but what it does is not particularly new—certainly not in the way that, say, “The Annals of Eelin-Ok” made the fairy story new.

But more than that, I find myself frustrated by the ending, when we suddenly come to this:

As for me, you’ll want to know my diagnosis. Superhero-envy, textbook case. Every gal knows, never fall for someone who can leave the earth, who can fly, who is not bound to the laws of physics you’re bound to. All of my investigative abilities have led to this little revelation. I didn’t just fall for him, I wanted to be him, and under those moon blue nights he was the one who could fly, streak away, leaving me on the cracked cement sidewalk with my trench coat and scoop.

I’m not sure whether this is intended as a twist, exactly, but assuming we take it seriously (which I think we are meant to do; there’s plenty of self-diagnosis elsewhere in the story, but this seems like something more), however I read it, it leaves me cold. I can come up with two possible interpretations of this paragraph, neither of which I much care for.

The first is that the girl reporter has a genuine psychological disorder, and that the story we’ve just read therefore cannot be trusted. This seems to me to weaken the story quite significantly: I didn’t particularly like the narrator to start with—it seems to me she’d be right at home at a party for media luvvies; give me Smallville‘s take on Lois, one of the few things the later seasons of that show have got right, any day—but if you’re going to write her story, surely you should follow it through to its logical end. Undermining her removes the sting of the story’s critique.

The second interpretation, which occurred to me after a second reading, is that the girl reporter doesn’t have a disorder, but has been diagnosed with one as a result of her actions, either deliberately or conveniently, to discredit her in the eyes of her potential readers, but not in the eyes of us, Stephanie Harrell’s readers. This would be a neat trick, if it worked; unfortunately it doesn’t quite. It’s too extreme to sustain my suspension of disbelief.

Because, in the end, “Girl Reporter” is a conservative story. It is too neat, too comfortable; nowhere does it contain the sort of fantastic dazzle that characterised Ford’s story last year, or that can be found in a number of the stories listed by the SLF as honorable mentions—particularly Darryl Gregory’s “Second Person, Present Tense”, M. Rickert’s “Anyway”, and Joe Hill’s “Best New Horror”. It’s enough to make you look again at that ‘literary’ caveat, and wonder whether it’s not just an empty adjective; whether, if it comes down to it, the Fountain Award will go to style over structure, technique over imagination. Probably, especially after looking at the list of judges, this is just my bafflement speaking, because in reality the winner should combine all those qualities, inseperably; but there is still a similar coolly respectable polish to all the winners so far, I think, and that’s something of a shame. I can’t help hoping next year’s winner has explosions (or is even an all-out epic).

Tributaries

I was a little surprised to realise, the other day, that I’ve been talking about River of Gods for two years now. There are a number of reasons why this is the case: publishing accident (the US edition has only just come out, after all); awards buzz (which I wouldn’t be surprised to see continue with a Campbell nomination next year); and, not least, the fact that it’s simply a good book worth talking about.

But it also doesn’t hurt that Ian McDonald has started publishing stories set in the same future. There have been two to date–“The Little Goddess” last year and “The Djinn’s Wife” this year, both novellas, both in Asimov’s—with, I gather, a few more to come. I usually resent, or at least am healthily sceptical of, authors returning to the same well too many times—there are very few worlds other than our own that really support multiple stories—but McDonald has, so far, gotten away with it. In part this is because I know there’s a new novel, a new world, coming soon, so I know he’s unlikely to draw this well dry; and in part, so far, it’s simply because he’s told more good stories worth talking about.

And he hasn’t just recreated the novel. The points of comparison are many, and the fractured future India is recognisable (if less intense: the tipping point has not yet been reached) but these stories can’t do what River of Gods did. The writing is as fluid and vibrant as ever, but simply by virtue of the fact that these are individual stories rather than a knot of ten tales bound together, they show less of the world, and are more immediately graspable. And I think McDonald knows this, because he turns it into an advantage: both are told in the first person—one direct, one reported—thus constraining their focus, personalising this future in a way that the novel can’t match. At the same time, however, neither story can be fully decoded without a certain familiarity with the bedrock of the novel. Both are clearly picking up ideas that River of Gods touched on, but perhaps didn’t explore in as much depth as they could stand; but because one person sees less of the world than ten, there are some things we never find out. This is from the start of “The Djinn’s Wife”:

I was born in Ladakh, far from the heat of the djinns—they have walls and whims quite alien to humans—but my mother was Delhi born and raised, and from her I knew its circuses and boulevards, its maidans and chowks and bazaars, like those of my own Leh. Delhi to me was a city of stories, and so if I tell the story of the djinn’s wife in the manner of a sufi legend or a tale from the Mahabharata, or even a tivi soap opera, that is how it seems to me: City of Djinns.

(Both stories, I feel obliged to say, are blighted by the patronising italics evident in the above quote. There’s no reason for them—both narrators are natives—and given the extent to which McDonald mixes up idioms and jargon, as anyone who has read River of Gods will be able to appreciate, such highlighting becomes rapidly annoying, and at times outright absurd.)

The last comparison is the most significant. The Djinn of the title is, as we expect, an aeai, AJ Rao—a diplomat, but also a player in India’s prime-time soap opera hit, Town and Country. In River of Gods, that show and all its players turned out to be part of a superintelligent aeai, tools by which that being attempted to understand how humans story their lives. In “The Djinn’s Wife” Town and Country is the background, the reflection of the surface tale—but knowing its deeper purpose gives events greater resonance. AJ Rao’s marriage to Esha, a dancer, is told in larger-than-life terms at least partly because the narrator (we do learn their identity, at the end of the story) is used to seeing life as large, as soap. So the couple meet; they court; they have the wedding of the season; they are pulled (are driven) apart. They act out the expected stages of their romance for us. How much they have been stage-managed is an open question.

Similarly, the little goddess, a future reincarnation of the Kumari Devi, is drafted to serve as the end of someone else’s story. She has, for the early years of her life, no story of her own: no caste, no village, no family, no home; not even, unless I missed it, a name. She is raised to believe that the myth of others is her myth, and when she loses her divinity (on first bleeding) it’s a hard fall. She, like Esha, ends up in Delhi, but not as a dancer. Instead she signs on at a marriage market. Men outnumber women four to one in this future: now it’s husbands that pay the dowry. But the little goddess turns out to have a disappointingly low market value, until she catches the fancy of a Brahmin, one of the genetically blessed children of this India, a boy-king who lives twice as long as the rest of us, aging half as fast. A new god, we are told, and the irony is not lost. He is gifted with the youth that betrayed the little goddess to her humanity.

It’s clear, then, that both “The Djinn’s Wife” and “The Little Goddess” are not just limited slices of this future, but are about situations that embody a similar sense of constraint; or, looked at another way, that they are both about cases that test the boundaries of their society. River of Gods featured only one marriage, and that of cold convenience, between the strait-laced Krishna Cop Mr Nandha and his quiet country wife Parvarti. These stories play variations on that theme: in “The Djinn’s Wife”, we are asked if love can find a way, while in “The Little Goddess” we are asked to consider the fate of those who don’t fit the system.

As in the novel, these questions are authentically bedded in Indian culture. The protocols that deal with them already exist (an elderly relative tells Esha that marrying Rao is “like marrying a Muslim, or even a Christian […] not a real person”), but McDonald challenges them with new situations, connecting the human dilemmas of his stories intimately to the changing technologies available. The little goddess, for example, is warned that “the kind of special it takes to be Kumari means you will find it hard in the world”, and so it proves. To withstand the trials of being a goddess, she withdraws into herself to the point of becoming autistic, and develops a dissociative disorder that separates her self and her otherness for the sake of her sanity.

Yet “The Little Goddess” turns in the end on the difference between disorder and adaptation; while for Esha and Rao, who learn to make love in unorthodox fashion, part of what dooms the relationship is a resistance to change. The fate of both progatonists is determined by how far they are willing (or unwilling) to integrate with the aeai that surround them on a daily basis, how far they accept the future that permeates their lives. They are, in that sense, not just variations on Parvarti, but variations on Aj, the driftwood girl at the heart of River of Gods—the girl who was, like Town and Country, a tool for aeais trying to understand humanity.

These stories balance their big brother in one final way: their location. River of Gods took place primarily in Varanasi, the capital of Bharat. In “The Djinn’s Wife” and “The Little Goddess” we see events leading up to one of the novel’s key events from the other side, the neighbouring state of Awadh. Both stories end in tension, on the brink of a water-war, near or after the day when Awadh signs the USA’s Hamilton Acts and outlaws any aeai above a 2.8 (indistinguishable from human 95% of the time; it is the godlike gen-threes, seeking refuge in the data-havens of Bharat, that drive River of Gods). In doing so they make Esha’s husband an instant rogue and the little goddess an instant fugitive. The world intervenes. We have free will, these stories seem to say, but we don’t have free choice. Our stories are part of one story: we are all tributaries. We flow together, our fates bound up in the current.

Beyond Black: Three Approaches

I recently read Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, which is a fine book. I found myself wondering around half-way through though, in a genuinely puzzled fashion, why I was still bothering to read it. Not in a ‘I’m not bothered about reading it, so why don’t I just stop?’ sort of way, but in a ‘I am bothered about reading it and I want to know why’ sort of way. I was thoroughly caught up in the book, but recognised that what I’d been caught by was something different from what usually catches me when I’m reading and wanted to figure out what it was. What was pulling me through Beyond Black was not plot, or narrative momentum, or a sense of moving through a story, as is often the case with the science fiction books I read. What was pulling me through, in this case, was a liking for and an interest in a character, a desire to know and understand her better.

Beyond Black is about a professional medium, Alison Hart, and her colleague Collette. Alison is a clairvoyant who earns her money through stage shows and tarot readings, and who is accompanied in her daily life by her spirit guide, Morris. Morris is a dirty little man, a “low” spirit, one of the “fiends” that haunt Alison from her horrendous childhood. The book covers a seven year period in Alison’s adult life during which Collette works with/for her, as her manager and personal assistant. But Beyond Black isn’t about those seven years, and it isn’t even really about Alison and Collette. It’s just about Alison; her life, who she is. And although it is about her past, present and future, it’s not about telling the story of the path from her beginning through her middle to her end, it’s about understanding who she is now in the light of who she was then and who we hope she will eventually become. Alison is the key to Beyond Black; if you don’t much like her and aren’t interested in her then there is no real point in continuing to read the book. Where science fiction often uses narrative to draw a reader through a novel, Beyond Black uses characterisation, so I would imagine that if you approached it as if it were science fiction (not that I consciously was, but I suppose that sf is what I habitually read, so part of me may have been subconsciously looking for the things I’m accustomed to looking for in fiction when I was reading it) then it would seem somewhat pointless.

Approaching Beyond Black as fantasy probably wouldn’t work either, precisely because the book presents the fantastic as being thoroughly and truly mundane. The spirits Alison encounters, and the “airside” realm they belong to, are both mundane in the sense of ordinary, but also mundane in the sense of worldly. Airside is not the heaven (or the hell) of all our stories, in fact, it’s not that much different from earthside. Yes, some spirits from airside are dangerous and to be feared because, let’s face it, some people are dangerous and to be feared, and that’s what spirits are, just people, in some cases just spiteful, cruel, stupid, thoughtless people. Who happen to be dead. For Alison, the spirit world is ordinary, everyday, the spirits in it are the vandals of her neighbourhood, the dossers, the idiots on the bus. They talk about pickled eggs and get drunk and bicker. Fantasy tends to expect a reader to recognise a difference between the mundane and the fantastic, which Beyond Black does not. Or at least, if fantasy doesn’t expect a reader to recognise a difference, it usually does expect them to view the mundane through the lens of the fantastic, whereas in Beyond Black the reverse happens, the reader is encouraged to see fantastic as mundane.

An interesting way to approach Beyond Black is, perhaps, to approach it as horror. And the horror here isn’t in the fantastic elements of the book, it’s in the grotesquerie of the some of the all too human specimens it depicts. Morris is a truly nasty little piece of work, and his compatriots can be even grosser and more despicable than he is. It’s not their status as spirits that does this, it’s the fact that they were thoroughly obnoxious, immoral, selfish, and vicious human beings. Morris and the rest of “the fiends” are horrific in the sense that they embody some of the worst qualities people can possess. They are abusers, rapists, criminals, murderers, sleazy, and mean, and violent. For the most part we don’t see those qualities in action, but we know what the fiends are like, and the horror comes simply from their persistent, inescapable presence, the fact that they’re just there, being who they are. The horror comes from the glimpse this book gives us of what it must be like to have truly horrible people lurking in your life, in your house, in your body, in your head, and to not even know how to go about thinking about how to exorcise them. There is an astonishingly effective scene in the novel in which Morris grubs his way around a motorway service station, and he’s seems so ugly doing it, and his poking around is so unpleasant that it makes your skin crawl just imagining him being there, invisibly salivating over truckers’ breakfasts. I think one of the undercurrents in Beyond Black is the thought that there are horrible people in the world and sometimes you can’t escape them. It’s not a nice thought at all.

I don’t think Beyond Black needs to be thought of as belonging to any particular genre; it has many excellent qualities that certainly don’t need to be appreciated through any specific genre-related literary lens. But I do think that approaching it as horror may enhance a reading of the book, whereas approaching it as science fiction or fantasy would almost certainly be detrimental to it.

More First Impressions

Three more reviews have just gone up on the Vector website, this time from issue 246.

Mark Morris’ Nowhere Near An Angel reviewed by Martin Lewis:

There’s another problem, though not one with the book itself. PS Publishing has a remit covering sf, fantasy, horror and crime/suspense; Vector does not. Nowhere Near An Angel is a dark thriller in the vein of Iain Banks’ Complicity. In his introduction to the book Stephen Gallagher says “This book isn’t, by any obvious definition, a horror novel, but I’d be willing to contend that it’s the kind of novel only a born horror writer could have produced.” That’s debateable but it is certainly true that no definition used by the BSFA would encompass it. Still if a book like A Thread Of Grace by Mary Doria Russell can get reviewed in these pages then there is definitely room for Nowhere Near An Angel.

Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection reviewed by me, Geneva Melzack:

The classification of these stories as being fantasy and/or horror could be seen as a narrowness of scope, an attempt to wall fantasy and horror up into the genre ghetto. But again, the diversity of the markets these stories have been taken from belies this argument. Datlow, Link and Grant haven’t just looked at fiction published under the banner of fantasy and horror; they’ve also included stories originally published in mainstream or young adult markets. Indeed, publishing stories such as Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Guts’ — originally published as mainstream fiction — in a fantasy and horror collection actually adds an extra layer to the story, which provides a new method for appreciating it.

Keith Brooke’s Genetopia reviewed by Ben Jeapes:

Genetopia is set in a low-tech world of genetic engineering gone bonkers, and it is convincing precisely because it’s so low tech. The simplest effects available to the people of this world are way in advance of anything we can do now, but they are still very hit and miss. You expose people to changing vectors, maybe pray a little, and see what happens.

Author Keith Brooke will be interviewed by Molly Brown at the BSFA meeting next Wednesday 28th June.

More reviews and features to come when international issue 247 comes out.

A Conversation About The King’s Last Song

Today at Strange Horizons, Abigail Nussbaum reviews The King’s Last Song by Geoff Ryman. Go and read it, because it’s an excellent review, and because if you don’t the rest of this post will make no sense at all.

Back? OK. After Abigail turned in her review, I finally got around to reading the book myself, and wrote my own review. I can’t post that right now, because hopefully it’s going to appear elsewhere (at which point I’ll link to it); the short version is I liked the book a good deal more than she did, despite the fact that I agree with her about a lot of its specific strengths and weaknesses. What I can post is a cleaned-up version of the conversation Abigail and I had afterwards, which I think among other things makes an interesting follow-up to Geneva’s post yesterday. We start with a quote from the review:

Ryman’s earlier novels reveled in the wildly fantastic and the outright bizarre—lesbian polar bears in the far future, Oz’s Dorothy as a bitter victim of sexual abuse, a retelling of The Spoon River Anthology for the modern, commuter era—which he couched in playful, experimental narratives. With his most recent and extremely well-received novel, Air: Or, Have Not Have, Ryman moved away from these tonal and stylistic excesses. Air‘s prose was transparent and precise, its narrative largely linear and, apart from one technological innovation, set in a world much like our own. The King’s Last Song completes this transition—it is a thoroughly naturalistic novel (no biologically unlikely pregnancy in sight), and by far the most subdued thing Ryman has ever written.

Niall Harrison: This is obviously a point you refer back to a few times. Unfortunately, while I’ve read early Ryman (Unconquered Countries, The Warrior Who Carried Life) and later Ryman (253, Air), I haven’t read much from the middle (so not The Child Garden or Was). But I’m not certain that Air is as much a departure in terms of tone and style as you suggest.

Abigail Nussbaum: I’m exactly the opposite, but you’re right that in something like “The Unconquered Country” Ryman’s language and tone aren’t as adventurous as they would later become.

NH: Although to undercut my argument completely, there’s a story in the same collection as that story called “A Fall of Angels”, of which about half is a conversation between two posthumans and a being that might or might not be an alien, carried out entirely through pictograms. But something like The Warrior Who Carried Life, his first novel, certainly has the storybookishness you mention with regards to TKLS’s historical segments—it feels like Ryman is trying to strip out as much window-dressing as possible, and get down to the pure story. Which is very imprecise, but I can’t think of a better way of putting it right now. It’s wildly fantastical, but the fantasy is deliberately described in plain, matter-of-fact terms, and avoids the high tone of most such ‘epic’ stories. The characters are (IIRC explicitly) archetypal, rather than being individual and nuanced. And so on.

AN: This is precisely what he does in the historical segments of TKLS, especially the characters. The really puzzling thing is that you’d expect an author who retells an epic story in, as you put it, plain terms to be aiming for psychological realism. But then he turns around and makes the characters inhuman, so that they feel completely out of place and all emotional resonance—the emotional pull of the epic story and the empathy we might develop with realistic characters—is lost. I have no idea what he’s trying to do.

NH: I wonder if it isn’t in some way deliberately symbolic. Most fantasy isn’t deliberately symbolic—indeed most fantasy aims for the opposite, I would say, burying its symbolism under worldbuilding. I wonder if Ryman might be trying to point out the artificialiality of history, or the risks of making fantasy out of it. Or something.

AN: I think I’d be very unhappy to think of Ryman trying to manipulate his readers in this manner. I, for one, read the historical segments expecting them to attempt some version of realism—clearly Ryman can’t tell me exactly what happened, but his speculation can have the ring of psychological and political truth. It’s a little disturbing to consider that Ryman might have been lambasting me for something I had never intended to do.

NH: You could also say it’s the side of Jayavarman’s life that the leaves don’t tell us (since the two accounts clearly, and I think deliberately, conflict), but that brings us back to your problem of the lack of verisimilitude. Alternatively, I wonder whether it’s meant to be the version of the past that, say, Map remembers before reading the leaves. Its message is essentially that Jayavarman existed, but everything inevitably fell apart after him, and even he wasn’t perfect, just as everything always falls apart and nothing is perfect in Cambodia. The leaves, precisely because they leave out the real person, provide the sort of aspirational hope that myths provide. They reclaim the past as something to believe in—in contrast to, say, the 20th-century memories of Map and others.

AN: Are you sure that Map doesn’t know how things worked out for Jayavarman and his heirs? When the book is found, there’s a second, smaller, packet of golden leaves that’s separately wrapped. I had assumed that this was the crippled son’s tragic epilogue, although I don’t remember whether Luc translates it as well as the book itself.

NH: Yet another thought: you say in your review that it’s “by far the most subdued thing Ryman has ever written”—and in terms of being extravagant/fantastic, that’s spot-on, but in terms of emotion…? It occurs to me that one reason Ryman’s books work the way they do is because he is unashamed of extremes of sentiment—very good and very bad things happen to his characters all the time–but tells them in a very matter-of-fact way. I thought Map’s recollection of his time in post-Khmer Rouges Cambodia was one of the strongest parts of the novel for precisely that reason. (And it occurs to me that that section, which effectively operates as a novella within the novel, is set at about the time that ‘The Unconquered Country’ was written—must compare the two at some point.) On the other hand, while I agree that the impact of the historical strand isn’t what it might have been, I’m not sure I agree that Jayavarman’s story is uninspiring; the portrayal of the city he creates, for instance, was awe-inspiring, almost like a utopia I never knew existed—which I’m sure was Ryman’s intent.

More generally, you also say “the novel’s primary function seems to be to act as a guided tour”, and I think this may be the key to the book—tourism keeps coming up, both as a way people make their living and as an evil, or at least damaging, influence on Cambodia’s attempts to become a whole country. I think the casting of the reader as tourist is vital: I got the feeling that at times Ryman was very deliberately saying to a presumed Western audience, this is not your story.

AN: That’s a very nice observation, but it’s not as if Ryman is telling the Cambodians’ story either, is it?

NH: Because he’s not Cambodian? I don’t know; he certainly spent a lot of time there while writing it. I’m not sure I buy the argument that no author can ever accurately represent a culture other than their own—it’s too close to saying an author can’t write about people who are different to themselves.

AN: No, I meant because he’s more interested in convincing us that Cambodians are good, kind, and hospitable people than in genuinely talking about them as complex human beings—he’s telling the story of Cambodians as he wants us to see them. His politics, however well-intentioned, keep getting in the way of his subject.

Have you read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow? It’s a novel that questions the wisdom of writing political novels and the viability of art in the service of a political agenda, no matter how well-intentioned. The book ends with the author asking one of the characters if he has something to say to his (Western) readers. The character responds “If you write a book set in Kars and put me in it, I’d like to tell your readers not to believe anything you say about me, anything you say about any of us. No one could understand us from so far away.” The act of placing an intermediary between ourselves and the people we’re reading about inevitably blurs the resulting image (although another plot strand in the book also deals with problems in face-to-face communication. It’s an excellent read by the way – meaty and dense). Ryman ignores, and even purposefully sublimates, this complexity in favor of his political agenda.

NH: You said that about the characters in the book, but I don’t think they’re politically uniform so much as they’re morally uniform. Or to put it another way, I haven’t read a book which believes so completely in the fundamental decency of people for ages. And on one level this is good—the book is brilliant at showing how society crushes and twists people like Map and Rith, and leaves them misunderstanding each other. And then they find a degree of reconciliation, even while I strongly suspect they would disagree with each other on matters of policy and justice. On the other hand, precisely because it’s so optimistic it seems a bit unreal, and therefore at times a little patronising.

AN: Which is actually worse, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want to claim moral superiority for my nation, but are we really going to ignore—is Ryman really expecting us to ignore—the systematic murder of 1.7 million people by the same people that Ryman would have us believe are morally uniform and fundamentally decent? The civil war and its atrocities are the boogeyman in Cambodia’s closet. They poison the lives of people who never experienced them, and yet when Ryman references them, he refuses to assign personal responsibility, to consider that there are Cambodians living today who were intimately involved with this slaughter, who might not be nice people. Even Map, a former Khmer Rouge, is only joined by the narrative after he’s left that group. We’d be up in arms if the novel offered this kind of wholesale apologia for Europeans—Germans during WWII, for instance.

NH: No, clearly he doesn’t expect us to ignore it—the Cambodia of TKLS is clearly damaged at every level by the actions of the Khmer Rouge. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s apologia to argue that terrible things can be done by good people. To an extent, I think the novel suggests that any attempt to assign personal responsibility would be meaningless; it’s by taking collective responsibility for their past that Cambodians can move forward.

AN: I actually see the novel as offering a collective amnesty – not ‘we’re all responsible’ (which I would have problems with as well) but ‘no one is responsible’. I don’t have serious problems with the notion that good people can do terrible things, or that a person who has done terrible things might deserve compassion, but that’s not what Ryman is doing—rather, he deliberately ignores the fact that there are people who are responsible for these atrocities. In the debate about offering forgiveness to mass murderers and war criminals, there has always been one universally agreed-upon truism—that forgiveness cannot be offered without a full accounting and acknowledgment of responsibility. Also, the one true moment of catharsis in the novel comes when Map takes personal responsibility and confesses to William.

NH: Yes, and William’s immediate realisation is that he is a part of the war as well, that he (and by extension every Cambodian) has to face up to his country’s past. I would say.

AN: Face up to their victimhood, not their culpability. That’s what’s insidious about Ryman’s approach. All Cambodians are victims. No Cambodians are victimizers. We acknowledge the atrocity but not the people who committed it. (And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the one person we see truly recognizing their connection to the war is the one person who is completely innocent of any wrongdoing.)

NH: The last thing I wanted to talk about is the ending. I think it works—again, if you like it’s symbolic, giving Cambodians back their history as common knowledge—but you felt it was contrived?

AN: It’s a device that falls flat for me. In spite of the fact that he has roots in science fiction, in spite of the fact that he’s written a novel like Air, Ryman chooses to ignore the fact that information, once set loose, can never be contained. Once the translation exists, the book’s physical location ceases to matter.

NH: Aren’t we saying two different versions of the same thing, here? I think the point of the ending is that the information is no longer contained—but because it’s equally available to all Cambodians, because it’s being passed on by word of mouth, it’s outside Western control. Whereas if the book had been taken and put in a museum, it would have been in some sense gatekeepered, distanced from Cambodians, even if the actual translation was still made available.

AN: See, it’s that last part that I find unconvincing. If the translation is available, why does the book’s location matter? It’s practically the crux of the novel, and Ryman fails to sell me on his outlook on the situation.

NH: Simply because symbols matter, I think; because ownership matters, because information isn’t always independent of its context. My knowledge of the cultural heritage of other countries isn’t what it should be, but I’m pretty sure there are various priceless artifacts locked up in the British Museum that come from countries who would quite like them back, please.

AN: True, although only to a point. It’s also something that I think Ryman should have worked harder to stress in the novel (if that is indeed his point) rather than hoping we wouldn’t notice the thoughtless conflation of the physical object and the text.

You know, I think we mostly agree about the book’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s just that, as you say, you seem to find its flaws less problematic. I think for me the issue was plotlessness and manipulation. One or the other would have been OK, but not both. I would have been able to accept a novel whose purpose was to guide us through Cambodia, but in that case I can’t accept Ryman’s propaganda work. And manipulative novels are usually much more effective when they offer the readers something to grab onto, such as a tight plot.

Have You Ever Been Here?

This train of thought originally started life as a comment responding to something Matt Cheney said in the thread on this post, but it seems to have gone walkabout, so I’m redirecting it over here. Of M. Rickert’s work, he said:

… in general I’d say what has most impressed me is the complexity of the narratives, the openness to ambiguity within them, which, when it works, creates a rich reading experience (at least for me). […] In her best stories, the prose is not sloppy at all, but it can feel that way if you’re only looking at one of the levels of the story–every sentence does have a purpose, every word a function, but the purposes and functions are often toward different goals.

This isn’t quite what does it for me. I come to this just having read Rickert’s “You Have Never Been Here” in James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel’s Feeling Very Strange anthology, and on my way to the conclusion that it’s one of my favourite Rickert stories to date. It’s told in the second person, and “you” find yourself disconnected from reality: looking around, you don’t see people, you just see bodies. You’re on a train, and then you’re in a mysterious hospital, on the waiting list for an ambiguous operation. It could be a dream, or a delusion, or real–it’s a fantasy of equipoise, then, although a fantasy about a science fictional possibility, which adds a distinctive zing to the proceedings. But that’s not what makes the story so impressive to me.

I’m not saying that ambiguity can’t be impressive: either ambiguity of plot–the surreal resolution of, say, “Stone Animals” by Kelly Link–or ambiguity of setting–such as is found in many of Margo Lanagan’s or Carol Emshwiller’s stories, where nothing overtly fantastic takes place, but there’s a strong sense that it could–can be extremely powerful. These are stories that cannot be resolved; they exist in balance.

And you could certainly read Rickert’s stories in that way. But for me, crucially, they’re often not so much in balance as in tension, and that, I think, is down to the emotional weight placed on the presence or absence of the fantastic. A story like Lanagan’s “Wooden Bride” is unerringly strange because it keeps threatening to turn into a fantasy, but in a sense it doesn’t actually matter whether it does or not. In Rickert’s stories, it matters, often hugely. In “Anyway“, the fate of the world depends on it.

More overtly fantastic stories that ask us what we want to believe in are relatively common. Lucius Shepard’s “Trujillo“, for example, is a story about demonic possession, but stops short of confirming that that’s actually what’s happened. We are left wanting desperately to believe in the supernatural explanation–to believe that something terrible has been done to the likeable protagonist, that it wasn’t simply something black and rotten in him–but with the nagging doubt that to do so would be an act of denial. Similarly in “Foundation”, China Mieville tells the story of a town built on the corpses of murdered soldiers: we don’t have to read the story as fantasy, but we want to. We want to believe that the soldiers are reaching out from beyond the grave, because we are angry on their behalf; we want them to have a voice. Much, or perhaps even most, supernatural horror takes the opposite tack, of course, leaving us wanting to believe that the supernatural is not real, that the nightmares will go away.

At the end of “You Have Never Been Here”, we are left wondering which level of the fantastic we want to believe in. Do we want to believe that the entire story is a dream? That the dream-within-the-dream is real? Or would that, we wonder, be an abdication of responsibility? This is ambiguity, yes, but it’s not the sort you can mine limitlessly; rather, it’s a series of carefully constructed choices, under tension, pulling against each other.

Of all things, I find that this reminds me of a moment in a recent episode of Doctor Who. Specifically, the moment in Steven Moffatt’s “The Girl in the Fireplace” where the Doctor, having frozen one of the bad guys, starts to examine it. He is astonished and enchanted by what he finds under the shabby disguise:

Field trip to France, some kind of basic camouflage protocol … nice needlework. Shame about the face.
[pulls off the mask]
Oh! You. Are. Beautiful!
[puts on glasses, peers at the revealed robot]
No, really, you are, you’re gorgeous!
[to Rose and Mickey]
Look at that! Space-age clockwork, I love it! I’ve got chills!
[to the robot]
Listen, seriously, I mean this from the heart–and, by the way, count those–it would be a crime, it would be an act of vandalism to disassemble you …
[beat, holds up sonic screwdriver, serious]
… but that won’t stop me.

Because, of course, Matt’s right that every part of an M. Rickert story is essential. They are marvels of 21st-century clockwork. Clearly no good writing can truly be summarised–if what a story does can be achieved in some shorter way just as effectively, it’s not much of a story–but there’s a difference between describing the arc of The Sparrow and trying to write about a story like “You Have Never Been”. In the former case, it’s possible to comfortably convey the feeling that Russell’s novel is a perfect crescendo, knowing that you won’t diminish the effectiveness of that crescendo when actually read; in the latter, it almost feels as though to write about the story is not just to somehow flatten it, but to actively violate it. It is to dismantle an artifact of dark beauty, wondering if the damage is irreparable.

The miracle of the story, of course, is that on re-reading it’s as good as new.