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The Inheritance of Loss

If I wanted to give a habitual science fiction reader a novel that would reinforce all their prejudices about the world beyond the ghetto walls, I don’t think I could do much better than to give them a copy of The Inheritance of Loss. Kiran Desai’s second novel starts well enough: the first chapter, with its evocation of a mist-shrouded house in the northeastern Himalayas, builds a world (in exactly the way a good sf novel does, in fact) by carefully layering observation on incident. In the foreground is Sai, 17, reading National Geographic, musing on love and her affair with her maths tutor, Gyan; in the background are a judge and his cook, both stripped of names (except when we get access to their thoughts, later). It is the start of 1986, a few months before the Gorkhaland National Liberation Front organises a demonstration calling for a separate state (the region, we are told, “had always been a messy map”, 9); a few months before two years of disruption and violence. There is a symptom of the troubles to come: a gang of boys come to the house and steal the judge’s guns. The incident is troubling and tense.

A few days and two hundred pages later, a drunk is accused of the theft, arrested and beaten. In between and afterwards there is relatively little present-tense action; the focus is on a succession of elegantly interleaved flashbacks. This structure is actually the best thing about the book, although for Desai to highlight one character’s foolishness by having her express a preference for “Old-fashioned books […] Not the new kind of thing, no beginning, no middle, no end, just a thread of … free-floating plasma” (217) is perhaps a little too knowing for my taste. We dip in and out of the lives of the characters we’ve met, and a few more we come to know, and occasionally take a trip to America, where the cook’s son, Biju, is scrounging a living. For most of its length, this latter strand is extremely effective: every chapter in the novel is a collage of short scenes, most only a few paragraphs long, and the cut-and-paste effect suits the unsettled nature of Biju’s life. He’s squeezed from one to another New York kitchen, every kitchen equally grubby, equally detailed, and equally stuffed to the gills with migrant workers wrapped up in their own schemes and rivalries. Biju himself is consistently dazzled by the world — “How,” he wonders, “had he learned nothing growing up?” (22) — and his life is dismayingly credible; it certainly highlights, for example, the frictionless nature of a not-dissimilar migration in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission.

It’s back in the subcontinent, with the other characters, that the troubles with the novel set in. The beauty to which Desai’s prose aspires is a civilised beauty: long, languid sentences, gentle and descriptive. Sometimes it works; too often, to my mind, it feels overworked. Of Sai and Gyan’s courtship, which starts during tutorials, Desai writes, “how delicious the pretense of objective study, miraculous how it could eat up the hours.” Fine so far. But then: “as they eliminated the easily revealable and exhausted propriety, the unexamined portions of their anatomies exerted a more severely distilled potential” (125). This is, perhaps, an attempt to recast their courtship in the physical-science terms Gyan is teaching Sai, but it seems to me far too coy, far too self-aware to take seriously. Later, a character “traversed along flat main roads” (181): traversed? Really? Could he not, more specifically, walk or run or ride or drive? And earlier, a mother having bid her son farewell “was weeping because she had not estimated the imbalance between the finality of goodbye and the briefness of the last moment” (36): does that really get to the heart of a mother’s grief, or is it — as I can’t help thinking — just a long-winded way of stating the obvious? Worse still is some of the dialogue, notably some of the exchanges between Gyan and Sai. Here is one during a rumbling argument:

She yawned again, elaborately like a lion, letting it bloom forward. Then he did also, a meager yawn he tried to curb and swallow.
She did–
He did.
“Bored by physics?” she asked, encouraged by the apparent reconciliation.
“No. Not at all.”
“Why are you yawning then?”
“BECAUSE I’M BORED TO DEATH BY YOU, THAT’S WHY.”
Stunned silence. (163)

Stunned silence from Sai, at least; snickering from this reader, at such a spectacularly inept — and jarring, in context — depiction of late-teen sulkiness. To be fair, Gyan is not the only character who gets to speak in block capitals. Later on, for instance, we get this

“WHAT ARE YOU SAYING????!!!” the judge yelled. (319)

He’s drunk, of course, and has every right to be angry, but I can’t help thinking that if a writer needs to resort to block capitals and italics and eleventy-one style punctuation to make that point clear then their actual words aren’t doing as much work as they should be. (Or at the very least, they don’t need to tell us that the person talking in block capitals and italics with eleventy-one style punctuation is yelling.)

Maybe I’m being too harsh: The Inheritance of Loss is a very inward-looking novel, with far more internal monologues and passages of description than exchanges of dialogue, which despite the rough patches mentioned above plays to Desai’s strengths. Here is Gyan falling in with the GNLF, just a few pages before the exchange of dialogue above:

As he floated through the market, Gyan had a feeling of history being wrought, its wheels churning under him, for the men were behaving as if they were being featured in a documentary of war, and Gyan could not help but look on the scene already from the angle of nostalgia, the position of a revolutionary. But then he was pulled out of the feeling, by the ancient and usual scene, the worried shopkeepers watching from their monsoon-stained grottos. Then he shouted along with the crowd, and the very mingling of his voice with largeness and lustiness seemed to create a relevancy, an affirmation he’d never felt before, and he was pulled back into the making of history. (157)

This, I think, does convey the tentative fervour of a youth desperate to live a life that signifies: Gyan floating, not walking (or traversing), torn between his longing and the immediacy of the real, that “lustiness” tellingly close to “an affirmation he’d never felt before”: good stuff. But it’s immediately followed by ruminations of a kind repeated by almost every character in the novel at one time or another, on the desire for and impossibility of escape, “free from family demands and the built-up debt of centuries.” Which leads to another reservation.

For the characters in The Inheritance of Loss, escape is impossible and misery is birthright. Sai’s parents — before they die — are filled with the same loneliness as their daughter; the son whose mother was bidding farewell earlier in this review botches his goodbye, and we learn that “Never again would he know love for a human being that wasn’t adulterated by another, contradictory emotion” (37). (The son grows up to be the judge, arranged into a loveless marriage that descends into rape and other abuses.) The cook is an old man with no fulfillment in his own life, desperate that his son do better than he did; this pressure is eventually Biju’s undoing. Sai’s tutor before Gyan is Noni, a spinster who “never had love at all” (68). And so on, for the entire cast. It’s an old story: “Certain moves made long ago,” we are told, “had produced all of them” (199). They are, if you like, variations on an absence of dignity: children, criminals, and buffoons. And too often that’s all they are — or at least the rest is hidden, the civilised sheen of Desai’s prose obscuring the extent of the violence done to their lives by circumstance.

It is not entirely surprising to me that the inhabitants of the real Kalimpong have objected to their counterparts’ portrayal in the book. The cast of The Inheritance of Loss are buffeted and bewildered by the world, with no initiative to speak of, nor (apparently) any capacity to learn; quite often they’re not even paying attention. Sai and Gyan completely miss “the important protest”, which is to say they miss the defining moment of the novel’s historical context. Whatever my reservations about the generosity with which a book like, say, Geoff Ryman’s The King’s Last Song treats its characters, it’s hard not to prefer such an approach to one that ultimately comes to feel capriciously mean. Desai tries her best to convince us that her characters are “just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation” (259), and that this justifies their fatalism. But the litany of misfortunes that make up the book’s final fifty pages verges on parody, manipulative in the extreme but too obviously controlled to really sting; imagine I ARE SERIOUS BOOK stamped on the cover and you’ll be thinking along the right lines.

It’s not that Desai scrupulously avoids offering an answer, or answers, to the problems of global inequality that gives me trouble — to do otherwise would arguably be presumptuous, and she mines good material from her stance, such as one character’s painful realisation that he can only live a Western life by cutting off his countrymen, “or they would show up reproachful, pointing out to him the lie that he had become” (306). But The Inheritance of Loss denies even the possibility of meaningful change. Over and above the inconsistent loquaciousness of the prose, the near-absence of narrative drive, and the passivity of the characters (a consequence, I can’t help thinking, of the book’s ideologicial fixedness), this is what I expect would stick in most sf readers’ craws. And rightly. Sai’s ultimate epiphany — “The simplicity of what she’d been taught wouldn’t hold. Never again could she think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself” (323) — is pitifully empty, not just because any half-awake reader will have got there at least a couple of hundred pages earlier, if not before they ever open the book, but because Desai has so thoroughly drummed home that there’s nothing Sai can do to change her fate. All Sai’s achieved is to wake up to the same awareness that the rest of the book’s characters have been struggling with: her life does not belong to herself, because the West distorts and robs all those who come into contact with it, now and forever: the end.

Compare and Contrast

Alastair Reynolds interviewed by the BBC:

“The common complaint now is that science fiction is already outmoded because we are living in a science fiction universe,” says Mr Reynolds. “I’ve got some sympathy with that. Only the other day I was in Amsterdam airport and I noticed security guards nipping around on Segways with machine guns.

“If you had been transported from 1997 into this year, you would be incredulous and think of it as science fiction.

“But we accept it as part of the fabric of our world.”

Mr Reynolds believes that the pace of change makes science fiction essential reading, now more than ever.

“Society has probably always felt this way. To some extent this is when science fiction should thrive – when the world is changing at a bewildering pace.

[…]

He also draws on the rich heritage of real science in fiction established by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, two of his favourite childhood authors.

“I am playing in a playground that’s already been played in. I am always aware that a lot of the furniture in science fiction is second hand.”

Francine Prose reviewing The Pesthouse:

Crace can write amazingly well, as he did in “Being Dead.” When he’s on, as he often is here, the results are stellar. But that highway across the ravaged future has been traversed so frequently that keeping us on course requires a level of invention as high as the one that gives the Finger Baptists their eerie fascination. We’ve witnessed too many scenes in which our de-evolved descendants puzzle out the use of some low-tech archaeological relic — here, a pair of binoculars. And we’re too easily distracted by minor plot holes and slight tears in the web of illusion. I stalled each time characters acted counterintuitively in a world where survival depends on instinct, and again when I’d wonder why American primitives should sound like refugees from a Thomas Hardy novel.

My mother-in-law, who was a fountain of folk wisdom, used to say that World War III would be fought with sticks and stones. When she said it, I believed her. But it wasn’t like reading Dante. You can’t help wanting more from art, and from Jim Crace. You can’t help wanting something new, something beyond an inspired melding of science fiction and the horrors we ourselves dream up in the dead of night. It’s disorienting and a little dispiriting — like some sort of odd déjà vu — to read about the hell of the future and feel that we’ve been there before.

Jo Walton on mundane sf:

SF is becoming the work of the third artist. The first artist goes out and paints from life. The second artist copies the first artist. The third artist copies the second artist. (I’ve usually seen this analogy applies to fantasy, with Tolkien as the first artist.) The first artist put things in because there were there, or in the case of SF, because they were new cool speculation. The second artist put them in because they were trying to get close to the first. The third artist put them in because heck, that’s what you put in. By the time you get to the third artist, using things like FTL and uploading yourself and aliens isn’t speculating or asking “what if”, it’s playing with furniture in a doll’s house. Going back to where we actually are and starting again, with the techniques but not the tropes of the genre, is trying to become a new first artist.

I’m sure that’s what Geoff Ryman meant, and what that manifesto meant, and it makes sense even if you don’t agree.

There’s nothing wrong with entertainment for its own sake. But SF used to be something that made people think, rather than something comforting and familiar. Is SF becoming a genre in the way fantasy and mystery and romance are, where what you’re getting is a variation on a theme? Kathy Morrow says for most people, most reading is comfort reading. I don’t know if that’s true, but it seems to me that the first reading of any SF novel isn’t — shouldn’t be — a comfort read. (Re-reading is different.)

Pick of the Peasants

As a result of some sf writer infighting you need to neither know nor care about (though if you have a desperate urge to find out, see here and here), today has been given the extraordinarily irritating title of “International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day”. The good thing about this is that it means many sf writers (and other sf types) have been posting samples of their work online for free, gratis. There are roundups here and here; my picks:

In keeping with the spirit of the day, I’m going to put up a review I wrote for NYRSF. For bonus marks, see if you can spot my tics.

As Others See Jim Crace

I know, I know: symptomatic of the genre’s neuroses, you’ve seen it all before, and a science fiction novel just won a Pulitzer, for heaven’s sake. But sometimes I can’t help myself. Here’s Joyce Carol Oates on Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse:

Long the province of genre entertainments—science fiction, dystopia fantasy, post-apocalyptic movies—the future has been boldly explored in recent years by such writers as P. D. James (“The Children of Men”), John Updike (“Toward the End of Time”), Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Oryx and Crake”), Doris Lessing (“Mara and Dann”), and Cormac McCarthy (“The Road”). Now comes a grim prophetic fable by the much admired British writer Jim Crace, who in previous novels—“The Gift of Stones,” set at the dawn of the Bronze Age; “Quarantine,” in the time of Christ—has shown a flair for imaginatively evoking the past. Kingsley Amis once remarked that there isn’t much point to writing if you can’t annoy someone; it might be said that there isn’t much point to writing about the future unless you can frighten someone. Certainly, most fiction about the future—not least the famous dystopian works by Wells, Huxley, and Orwell—is designed to unsettle and provoke. These novels are fundamentally didactic; their authors have crucial lessons to impart. Contemporary “speculative fiction” shares that aim; it extrapolates from current conditions and urges us to confront the consequences.

Bobbins, start to finish. I might just be persuaded to let her get away with “most fiction about the future is designed to […] provoke”, but I point and laugh at “it might be said that there isn’t much point to writing about the future unless you can frighten someone”, and her attempt to potrary McCarthy, James, Atwood et al as a band of brave pilgrims, bringing civilisation to the wilderness.

De Lint on Mieville

The April F&SF arrived today, which puts me back on track (or at least, it arrived when I expected it to arrive; I’m now not expecting anything until the June issue towards the end of June, having long since given up on ever seeing the January issue). It’s a Gene Wolfe special, which may prompt one of my periodic attempts to get to grips with said writer, but of course what I flipped to first were the reviews. This issue, Charles de Lint reviews China Mieville’s latest. The review is notable for two reasons: one, it’s almost the only negative review I can remember de Lint giving — to be fair, his column is called “books to look for”, not “books to avoid” — and two, it’s almost the only negative view of Un Lun Dun I’ve seen so far. An excerpt:

What doesn’t work?

Unfortunately, the characters are all flat. This is an “events” novel from start to finish, one event leading breathlessly into the next, and that’s the book’s other problem. It’s much too busy.

Those fabulous ideas I mentioned earlier? Every time we just start to get interested in something — a character, a situation, some new odd and wonderful place — we’re already moving on to the next. And often, that’s the only time we see them.

[…]

I think the real problem with Un Lun Dun can be found in the interview that was in the back of the galley I read. When asked by the interviewer if this is a YA book, Miéville says, “Absolutely,” then goes on to add, “There’s a certain kind of fairy-tale logic you can use in a YA book that you can’t in an adult book, or at least not without tipping into a kind of mannered fabulism that, in adult fiction, I don’t love. I couldn’t use a character with a bottle of ink for a head in an adult book.”

I couldn’t disagree more. YA books aren’t a place where anything can happen. A belief such as that just shows a disrespect to your audience. Teen readers are as smart and savvy as adult readers — some of them more so. And adult novels can have all sorts of whimsical and dark oddities in them.

They aren’t “mannered fabulism” in the right hands. Readers will accept many things when they start a book, but no matter how outlandish the things we meet in its pages might be, the good author roots it all in believable characters. Characters that live and breathe and grow as the story unfolds.

And that’s where Un Lun Dun fails. Miéville’s characters are differentiated only by their physical attributes. They act a certain way, because they look a certain way. I think he was trying for an Alice in Wonderland quirkiness, and that might have worked in a smaller book, or perhaps one with longer scenes. Even Carroll spent more time in his scenes than Miéville does, and while Alice is an innocent to whom things happen, Miéville’s Deeba isn’t. She’s a doer, but we’re always told what she feels and why she does the things she does; we don’t actually get to know her.

His criticisms of the book may or may not be valid (I haven’t read Un Lun Dun, but I recognise the slog of relentless events from at least the first section of Iron Council), but I’m not sure he’s interpreted Mieville correctly; or at least, I’m not sure “fairy-tale logic” is equivalent to “anything can happen”.

Going to Sheffield

As has become traditional, the Science Fiction Foundation and BSFA are organising a one-day event around their AGMs. This year, however, it’s happening outside London. Tony has the initial details:

The date: Saturday 16 June
The location: Sheffield
The venue: The Old Queens Head

The full programme will be announced later, but it’s worth keeping the day free if you think you’ll be able to make it; these things are usually quite fun. (Programmes for the last two events here and here.)

The State of the Blog

“Reviewing is a social occasion, run by people staking out turf; honest intellectual discussion is something else, and nearly extinct.” — George Zebrowski

In another week, I’d write a post about that. In fact, in another week I’d write posts about all sorts of things: about Drive and what I like about it, even though Abigail makes some good points; about Greg L. Johnson’s assertion, as noted by Jonathan Strahan, that “Hard science fiction, and space opera, are styles of SF that tend to work better at lengths longer than short stories”; about Ian R. Macleod’s novella in the May F&SF, “The Master Miller’s Tale”, and about Holly Phillips’ story in the June Asimov’s, “Three Days of Rain”; about Sunshine and why it was a disappointment (although fortunately Adam Roberts has written that one for me, and it’ll appear at Strange Horizons next week); about Alan DeNiro’s three Strange Horizons stories, none of which appear in his Litblog Co-Op-picked collection, Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead; about reading Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye and London Orbital by Iain Sinclair, except I haven’t got far enough in either; about The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay, which I finished weeks ago and haven’t had the time to organise my thoughts on; and about re-reading, and how we should do more of it, and what I most want to re-read (I’ve been meaning to go back to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge for, literally, years).

But unfortunately, I don’t have the time or energy to do any of the above at the moment. The critical-reading part of my brain is focused on getting through the Clarke shortlist, in advance of the judging meeting on May 2nd; and the rest of my brain is focused on my day job, which is going through a particularly busy period at the moment. (Not that it’s ever quiet, exactly.) So things around here will probably continue to be link-focused for a couple more weeks yet, I’m afraid.

Further Adventures in Clarke Reviews

This time, a review of the whole shortlist by Farah Mendlesohn at Strange Horizons:

The Arthur C. Clarke award comes around but once a year, and as ever the judges have done sterling duty working their way through the best and worst of the British publishing scene. Their trawl is not limited to the SF publishing houses and their definition of SF is wide. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes, as this year, it seems to have offered little Added Value. There are three clear genre science fiction novels, all from Gollancz (as Gollancz is the premier UK SF publishing house, this should be understood as a bias in the field, not in the jurors), all of which are excellent in their own way. Then there is a weak piece of nuclear rapture fiction, a pale allegory, and, from one of our best SF small presses and one of our best SF writers, we have a 1970s Playboy cod-psychological battle of the sexes.