Tag: reviews

Hunger

On the not-small list of books coming out this autumn that I’m looking forward to, Vandana Singh’s The Woman who Thought she was a Planet and Other Stories is near the top. It will be published by Zubaan Books sometime before the end of the year; I know this, despite the fact that I can’t find any information about it on Zubaan’s website, because it’s been mentioned in a couple of interviews (for instance this one at the Aqueduct blog), and because Singh’s entry in Interfictions, “Hunger”, is jointly credited as appearing in that anthology and in the forthcoming collection. And I’m looking forward to the collection despite the fact that I haven’t actually read that much of Singh’s work, or perhaps because of that fact, because everything I’ve read has impressed me — the past and future visions in “Delhi”; the intensity of “Thirst”; the feeling of escape at the end of “The Tetrahedron”. The only reason I haven’t read more already is that the stories have been published in such diverse venues that tracking them all down becomes unrealistic.

But all the ones I’ve read have been science fiction. “Hunger”, as mentioned, appeared first in Interfictions, which might lead you to expect it’s a departure. It is and it isn’t. It is lower-key, not science fiction, and barely fantastical (if that); but it is also, ultimately, an argument for the empathic power of sf that is almost embarrassing in its uncomplicated sincerity. It starts with a woman waking up:

She woke up early as usual. The apartment, with its plump sofas like sleeping walruses, the pictures on the walls slightly and mysteriously askew, pale light from the windows glinting off yesterday’s glasses she’d forgotten on the coffee table — the apartment seemed as though it had been traveling through alien universes all night and had only now landed in this universe, cautiously letting in air.

That long second sentence is perhaps trying a little too hard (“walruses” sticks out to my ear, though it’s undeniably a vivid image; and the repetition of “the apartment” feels just a bit too self-conscious), but it does its job. The suggestion of alienation it sets up is elaborated through the first few pages of the story: she (Divya) gradually realises she’s “lying in a strange bed next to a strange beast that she slowly recognised as her very dear husband, Vikas”; she stands in the doorway of her daughter’s (Charu’s) room, thinking about alien universes; she steps cautiously into the kitchen because at night it belongs “to the denizens of another world”, cockroaches and other insects; and most explicitly, when warily looking ahead to the day to come, she thinks “she wasn’t made for such things — she was from another planet, where you danced with trees and ate parathas and read trashy science fiction novels.” The mix of domesticity with a more distanced perspective echoes, in places, Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe“, although not in structure, and Singh’s story is not so feverishly intense.

Only gradually does the setting and do the other characters come into focus around Divya. But like Sarah Boyle, Divya is preparing for a birthday party: her daughter Charu’s twelfth. The shadow hanging over her preparations is one of expectation; Vikas has been promoted, and is now expected to socialise with VPs and CEOs and other abbreviations, all of whom have (Divya knows) homes far more spacious, and in far better neighbourhoods. Divya is nervous to the point of resenting the promotion in the first place. But the preparations run on schedule, with the help of a cook and a cleaner, and in spite of Charu (who would rather talk to the old man who lives upstairs) and Vikas (who is more concerned with putting out poison for the mouse he just spotted in their bedroom). Just before the guests arrive, we get another sfnal nudge, when Divya thinks of the book she’s reading, which has a body-snatchers plot: “she stared wistfully at the lurid cover … the plot had to do with Viraa discovering aliens disguised as humans, living in the town of Malgudi. They were from some planet light-years away. Divya wondered how she was going to survive.” The ambiguity of “she” in that last sentence is, I assume, entirely deliberate.

So with all of that in mind, when the guests have arrived and the party is in full swing, it’s somehow not a surprise that the story’s tone shifts slightly. But it doesn’t become sf; the body-snatching is only a metaphor. What we get are a series of sketches that are broader, a bit more cartoonish than what has come before if not outright farcical; portraits of guests who are larger-than-life if not outright grotesques. It matches how Divya feels about the events whirling around her. If the style of “Hunger” is less dense than that of “Delhi” or “Thirst”, it is no less careful or effective; and it can and does absorb a sudden shift, as when the old man upstairs is discovered to have died. The description of the body is quite sober, if not dignified — “What Divya saw was the old man curled up in a nest of rags, clutching his throat with both hands, quite dead. His hooked nose, protruding from his too-thin face, gave him the appearance of a strange bird; his heavy-lidded eyes were open and staring at some alien vista she could not imagine” — and in this context, the reference to an “alien vista” has an extra resonance. But the guests and their reactions remain buffoons and bluster, respectively:

[Divya] turned to face the Lambas. Mrs Lamba gave a high-pitched cry and fell against her husband, who, not being built to handled the weight, tottered against the wall. Mrs Bhosle took over, muttering words of comfort and calling for brandy, giving Divya an unexpectedly sympathetic look. Mr Lamba drew himself up to his full height. Divya noticed that the tip of his nose was quite pale.
“What is the meaning of this! Who is this fellow?”
“The father-in-law of my neighbour’s servant,” Divya said. “They don’t feed him–”
“I don’t care who he is,” Mr Lamba said. “How can you tolerate having riffraff living in your building? The man could be dangerous! Or have a disease! Like AIDS!”

Mr Lamba’s pronouncements are absurd — AIDS is pretty much the most ridiculous disease he could have chosen, in the circumstances — but reading this passage, what struck me is how neatly those pronouncements are prefigured by one word, earlier in the scene: “tottered”. The one we might have expected to totter, stereotypically, is Mrs Lamba; but no, she solidly falls, and it is her much less large husband who totters. His full height, we suspect, is unimpressive; the shrillness of his complaints, when we reach them, is already half-anticipated. (Although it is Mrs Lamba who, when she has recovered her composure, insists she has never been so insulted in all her life; because obviously, the old man’s death is only important insofar as it affects her.)

As the party breaks up the tone shifts yet again, this time undergoing a more wrenching transition into a harsher realism. The reason for the old man’s death becomes clear, but the police have no appetite for an investigation: “If we launched an investigation each time some old fellow dies of starvation, we would be overwhelmed”, says one, bluntly. (But if it had been Mrs Lambas’ father, we think …) Time skips on. Vikas leaves his job, unhappily, and a silence grows between him and Divya. Charu carries a new sadness within her — “after the incident she could no longer bear any kind of cruelty, nor could she, as a consequence, watch the news without tears” — and a silence grows there, too, although the daughter occasionally tries to bridge it: “There were times when the girl would come upon her mother and give her a fierce, deep hug for no reason at all, and Divya felt Charu was trying to tell her something in some other language, and that she was able to comprehend it in that other language as well.” All of this is building up to the change in Divya, which is the story’s fantastic element, which is that she has become sensitised:

When she looked upon the faces of strangers they appeared to her like aliens, like the open mouths of birds, crying their need. But most clearly she could sense those who were hungry, whether they were schoolchildren who had forgotten their lunch or beggars under the bridge, or the boot-boy at the corner, or the emaciated girl sweeping the dusty street in front of the municipal building.

Two things to note here. The first is that the sfnal imagery has become pervasive, the references coming thicker and faster than they have through the rest of the story — this mention of strangers-as-aliens is immediately after Chura’s attempts to communicate in a different language. The second thing is that the world beyond Divya’s family is a darker, more claustrophobic, less welcoming place: Singh writes of “the hungry and forgotten, great masses of them, living like cockroaches in the cracks and interstices of the new old city”; the contrast with the rest of the story is almost too much to bear, even as we remember the cockroaches that owned Divya’s kitchen when she wasn’t there at night.

And then there’s the ending. We return for a final time to the science fiction stories that Divya reads. There is the sense that now more than before she is finding consolation in them, and that though in part that may be a consequence of her trauma it is, on some level, not wrong. Quite the opposite. It is, as I said, almost embarrassingly sincere (or if you can swallow it, a rallying cry), and it works only because of Singh’s absolute control of tone in this story, the nuanced shifts which I hope I’ve mapped at least a little, enough that to leave you with this last quote won’t seem entirely facile. But it is, when you come down to it, a big reason why I want to read Singh’s collection:

Slowly the understanding came to her that these stories were trying to tell her a great truth in a very convoluted way, that they were all in some kind of code, designed to deceive the literary snob and waylay the careless reader. And that this great truth, which she would spend her life unraveling, was centered around the notion that you did not have to go to the stars to find aliens or to measure distances between people in light-years.

Glory

Today, the lion’s share of my eternal admiration for hard sf, at least the best stuff, at least in principle if not always in execution, goes to its sheer bloody-mindedness, the blatant glee with which it ignores more common modes of aesthetic enjoyment. In a hard sf story, truth really is beauty. Take this paragraph from Greg Egan’s “Glory” (to be found in the Strahan/Dozois New Space Opera):

The world the Noudah called home was the closest of the system’s five planets to their sun. The average temperature was one hundred and twenty degrees Celsius, but the high atmospheric pressure allowed liquid water to exist across the entire surface. The chemistry and dynamics of the planet’s crust had led to a relatively flat terrain, with a patchwork of dozens of disconnected seas but no globe-spanning ocean. From space, these seas appeared as silvery mirrors, bordered by a violet and brown tarnish of vegetation.

There is no poetry in this. With the possible exception of “tarnish”, every word of the paragraph is chosen purely for its ability to explain, to set out the particulars of this planet with as little distraction as possible. Yet the image conjured is wondrous, in a strict sense — it is remarkable; it is extraordinary. It is how the story’s protagonist, a mathematician who’s travelled across a reasonable chunk of interstellar distance, sees the universe. Later in the story, she supposes that an alien race’s drawings and poetry “no doubt had their virtues”, but they seem to her “bland and opaque”; it is a conspicuous refusal of that type of beauty, in favour of the symmetry and solidity of mathematical proof. Sure, you could dress up the facts, translate them into a different form, and sure that could be beautiful in its own way. But equally, in its own way, it’s already beautiful.

OK, I’m exaggerating. That paragraph isn’t what’s great about “Glory”, and neither, really, is what comes after, which is most of the story but which feels a little familiar. (The mathematician has the option of sending a final, wonderful proof, one that explains the significance of everything, to her people, and chooses not to, because seeking after knowledge is, in the end, what’s satisfying.) No, what’s great about “Glory” is the opening of the story, the four pages before that paragraph in which Egan’s dispassionate camera tracks the meticulous unwinding of what is effectively a galactic-scale Rube-Goldberg device. We start with two ingots floating in space, one of hydrogen and one of anti-hydrogen. They are forced together in such a way as to produce a needle of compressed matter and antimatter one micron wide, sculpted such that one trajectory is favoured for the annihilation debris. The needle accelerates to 98% of the speed of light and travels, in the few trillionths of a second of its subjective existence, across light years and into the heart of a star. There, the few million excess neutrons included in the original ingots set up specific shock waves in the star’s plasma, the initial pattern elaborating to create a molecular factory, the products of which are ejected from the star at a velocity just below that needed to escape from the star’s gravity well, on arcs that intersect with the gravity well of the system’s gas giant, which captures them and draws them down onto its third moon. Once landed the machines construct a receiver, just in time to collect a series of timed gamma ray pulses from the needle’s original destination, that contain the information needed to recreate the story’s protagonists in forms native to their new location. (Sympathetic viewpoint characters? Ha! Who needs ’em?)

Two mathematicians arrive, and go about their separate missions:

Anne’s ship ascended so high on its chemical thrusters that it shrank to a speck before igniting its fusion engine and streaking away in a blaze of light. Joan felt a pang of loneliness; there was no predicting when they would be reunited.

Having read through four pages that depict a process that is precisely, spectacularly, absurdly, predictable — more detailed and convincing than my synopsis above — you can understand why Joan might be a little nervous. I almost wish those four pages could be carved off and anthologised in their own right; because their glory, I think, is that just for a minute they make you see the universe through Joan’s eyes.

Human Nature

Of necessity, this will be more of a compare-and-contrast than a review. Paul Cornell’s 1995 novel, Human Nature, is the first Doctor Who novel I’ve read, and almost cripplingly mired in continuity I have next-to-no knowledge of. So if I say that I didn’t like it as much as the recent TV adaptation (as “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood”), in part all that means is that I don’t know the context. The outline of the plot is the same for both versions – the Doctor, living as a human teacher in England, in the months immediately before World War I, watched over by his companion, falls in love, and (unrelatedly) is pursued by an alien family. But the details are different. In both, the companion is the viewpoint character; but I don’t know Bernice Summerfield like I know Martha, and nor do I know Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor.

Some of the changes are cosmetic. Benny is clearly cut from the same cloth as Martha (or rather, vice versa; both are smart, proactive, athletic, funny), and has an equally impressive resume, being a professor of archaeology, not to mention more overtly political in ways that would probably not sit comfortably with the current TV incarnation. In fact, in some ways it’s hard to imagine a more companion-ish companion, and at times Benny comes across as almost too good to be true, in the manner of the characters in The West Wing: you want very much to believe in her, but there’s always a nagging suspicion that people as intelligent, competent, and passionate about what they do as she is are too awesome to really exist. On the other hand the book’s family, never named as the family of blood, are more alien but less threatening than their TV counterparts. In the novel, the family are from a species of shapeshifters known as the Aubertides, who reproduce by budding. The catch is that (apart from their queen) they can only do so for a half-dozen generations, after which point they become (a) a complete family and (b) sterile. To get around this, the particular family in Human Nature want access to Time Lord “biodata” to enable every member of their family to reproduce 13 times — more than enough to form an army. We are told that this will lead them to scourge Gallifrey (among other places), mostly out of boredom (“Don’t knock it,” says one family member. “It’s something to do”). So they set a trap for the Doctor. As fuel for the action of the plot they work well enough, but none of the family members are as well-defined, as instantly sinister, as their TV counterparts.

Other changes between book and TV are more fundamental – surprisingly so, in some ways. The novel takes an impressive risk (if you don’t know what’s coming) by introducing us to John Smith as though he is just another character. It’s only when we see him through Benny’s eyes that we realize he’s the Doctor in human form. (The downside of this, of course, is that we’re not given a chance to get to know the Doctor before the story starts, so without context we don’t know how similar he is or isn’t to Smith; but the same could be said of the TV version, in isolation.) But to my mind, in the end the novel is a somewhat safer work than the TV episodes. For example, it seems that much more of the Doctor remains in Smith, who is never quite as nakedly human as his screen counterpart; when confronted with the truth of his nature, his reaction is not fearful but pragmatic. He attempts to do what the Doctor would do to save the day – albeit never with any intention of letting himself be turned back into a Time Lord. And what changes his mind is not the desire to do the right thing per se, but the appearance of a character who has been lurking in his memories throughout the novel, Verity. As in the TV episodes, the actual decision to change back takes place off-screen, to set up an encounter in which the Doctor bluffs the family. But, not knowing who Verity is, Smith’s choice in the novel feels more than a bit ex machina. In the context of the New Adventures it may all make perfect sense, but coming to it cold it looks clunky. Moreover, a plot contrivance allows Smith and the Doctor to talk to each other before the end, to reach some sort of accommodation; neat in theory, but unfortunately the scene comes across as nothing so much as an attempt to absolve the Doctor of his responsibility for creating a life he only ever intended to destroy, and that’s a shame.

At the same time, the other big difference of emphasis is that there’s much less of Smith in the novel’s Doctor. In “The Family of Blood”, the Doctor tells Joan (Smith’s love) that he’s capable of everything Smith was — including, implicitly, love. In the novel we get the opposite. Smith certainly still loves Joan, but after he has changed back, the Doctor tells Benny, “I can’t love her”; “whatever [love] is, I’m incapable of it” is how he puts it, bluntly, to Joan. On the flipside, this Doctor is more aware of the moral consequences of his actions – in the novel it is he, and not Joan, who raises the issue of how many lives he caused to be lost by choosing this time and place to become human, citing it as a reason he can’t risk changing back. This fits with the more selfish nature of the original choice to become human: as noted above, in the novel the Doctor walks into the family’s trap, choosing voluntarily to become home to take “a holiday from being himself”, rather than undergoing the transformation as a last resort to hide.

Of course, much of the power of Human Nature comes from the contrast of Smith’s love story with its setting – among schoolboys training to be soldiers, on the eve of a singular, terrible, global war. That aspect is the same, and similarly effective, in both novel and TV episodes — if anything, the argument for pacifism is stronger in the original. The epilogue – which, as in the TV version, plunges us fully into the midst of war – is probably the best piece of writing in the book, arguably the only place where the prose aspires to anything beyond the comfortable. But in the novel, Timothy, the boy who finds the Doctor’s essence (which in the novel is stored in a cricket-ball-like pod, rather than a watch) only goes into the conflict as a member of the Red Cross, a choice made as a direct result of his experiences with the pod. Both versions of the story shift focus as they develop, moving the rural idyll from foreground to background, but the extra room to breathe in the novel makes the contrast between quiet, pastoral life and the harsh intrusions of conflict that much more powerful. It’s a contrast that, in the end, perhaps gives us a taste of the Doctor’s perspective, his capacity for what in the novel is called loving “big-ly, not small-ly”; or is that already part of human nature?

Arlington Park

There seems to be something about the shortlists for juried awards that invites explanation. When it comes to the Clarke Award, for instance, spectators will quite often — and often quite confidently — pick out “the core sf book”, “the mainstream book”, and so on, as though the shortlist was an act of design. The truth, of course, is that shortlists aren’t chosen with such considerations in mind; but there is still something about the act of shortlisting that divides, rather than unites. As soon as you’ve said that these six books are the six best sf novels (or whatever) of the year, what separates them becomes more interesting than what they share. When it comes to the Orange Prize, we might tongue-in-cheek say that the slots to be filled include “the historical novel”, “the romance”, and “the domestic novel” — and then put Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park neatly in the latter. But straight away, comparison to, say, The Accidental (which was on last year’s shortlist, and could quite easily be described as domestic, and is enormously different in style and tone) makes it obvious that this apparently-narrow category is, like all literary categories, infinitely divisible.

Conveniently for me, Arlington Park is itself an attempt to make a similar point. It switches between a handful of women, but is set in one place, over the course of one day, a formal choice that says: look at these women, see how they’re all nominally the same but in fact living such different lives. Look how divisible, how capacious, are the categories “wife” and “mother”. The prologue frames the novel with an explicitly panoramic portrait of a generic English city, “its streets always crawling with indiscriminate life … too mercilessly dramatic … to look at that view you’d think that a human life was meaningless. You’d think that a day meant nothing at all” (4-5). But, it is implied, you’d be wrong, and so we begin our tour, visiting Juliet (and husband Benedict), Amanda (and husband James), Christine (and husband Joe), Solly (and husband Martin) and Maisie (and husband Dom) in turn, as they walk their different paths through their Friday, variously taking in a school run, a coffee morning, a trip to a mall (has the Americanism really become so widespread?), a literary club, putting the children to bed, and a dinner party. It’s an uneven novel, sometimes interesting, sometimes less so, but crucially we aren’t allowed to forget that frame. At the half-way mark comes another impersonal panorama, this time of a park at lunchtime, where mothers observe “The whole mechanism of the world, running on, running like a machine … for them, it was a form of agony to watch it … the women were as though snared in the mechanism … every movement caused them pain” (147-8). (Sure, Tiptree said it better and more succinctly, but it’s still a powerful image.) And it’s true: the women of Arlington Park are weighed down by the burdens of marriage and (perhaps particularly) motherhood; but they are stoics, or so it seems at first. The pain never makes them scream.

Closing the frame, towards the end of the book one character experiences “a sense of perspective, of the reach of the universe, of its strange but necessary dimensions. It was this sense of order,” she concludes, “that allowed life in Arlington Park to be what it was” (222). As it is with Arlington Park, so it is with Arlington Park, because the boldest thing about the novel is that most of its characters are boring or unpleasant or both; they represent the smuggest of the smug middle-classes, variously petty, hypocritical, bigoted, bitter, heroically self-absorbed, or some combination of the above (there is the occasional punk hairdresser or peroxide-haired au pair, but such women are distinctly marginal in this town). They refuse sympathy to such an extent that I think Cusk only pulls off the trick — and then only barely — because of the presence of that external perspective, which allows us to acknowledge her women without, necessarily, judging them.

Take Maisie, who as the book’s outsider — she has recently moved to Arlington Park with her husband, in an attempt to escape the London rat-race — might be expected to be someone the reader can take as a guide. No such luck. After another samey day of housewifely ennui, she is so thoroughly ennervated that Dom’s arrival home from work causes her to experience “a vertiginous sense of event” (169); she is so thoroughly dissociated from her life that it feels like a play, as though she and Dom are acting out roles of “husband” and “wife”. But her neurosis has become unreasonable. When Dom offers to get the children ready for bed (because they’re going, like most of the rest of the characters, to a dinner party at Christine and Joe’s place), she says no, she’ll do it; but when he comments on the time (“Did you realise it’s seven-fifteen?”)

She rose, wondering why he didn’t put the children to bed himself if he cared so much what the time was. She guessed the answer was that he had taken her at her word: she had said she would do it. He probably thought there was some important, sentimental reason why, a reason that might even have been himself, tired at the end of his week’s work: if this were so, it struck her as sad that he had to fabricate her generosity towards him out of so little material, or make a point of honour out of something that didn’t really exist. (182)

Bear in mind that Maisie and Dom have just had a reasonably lengthy conversation; that Dom has done the washing-up Maisie created during the day; that Dom has explicitly asked Maisie what’s wrong, and refused to take “everything’s fine” for an answer (but gave up when he didn’t get any further). It is, for sure, impressive that we don’t immediately condemn Maisie for her own stupidity in refusing to talk to her husband — the husband she loves, and who shows every sign of loving her — because Cusk has so effectively conveyed the weight of situation (and perhaps guilt, given that it was Maisie’s choice to leave London) that has put Maisie in this bind. If she’s done so in a rather long-winded and ennervating fashion, well, it could be argued that’s only an accurate reflection of Maisie’s experience. But it’s also an incredibly alienating choice of characterisation, particularly in light of the later strong hints that Dom is not oblivious, that he knows how Maisie feels and is trying his best to be there for her. Maisie’s inability to look up — to see the bigger picture that Cusk reminds us is there, to see the way out of the situation she has created for herself — is, deliberately, infuriating; deliberately pushes us away from sympathy.

The same tension is there with almost every other character. All of them have been trapped, largely by their own choices, into a comfortable life they now chafe against. Some of them despair, some of them have perfected almost Stockholm Syndrome levels of doublethink. But none of them are glossed. All of them come with warts. Amanda’s morbid thoughts are numbing; the rather touching relationship that Solly starts to develop with her lodger, Paola, is soured by the casually racist assumptions she makes when advertising the vacancy. (She advertises for “a foreigner”, because disruptive children underfoot “won’t seem so bad” to them, 114.) The most thoroughly ambiguous character is perhaps Juliet Randall. She nurtures a deep feminist anger about her life, and about what she sees as the casual way in which her husband “[runs] off their joint life as if it were a generator fuelled by [her]” (11), yet never actually does anything about it — never screams out at the pain caused by the world-machine; never, for instance, even talks to her husband about it — and draws only the most extreme conclusions. “All men are murderers … They take a woman, and little by little they murder her.” (It crossed my mind that the confluence of the initials “JR” and this level of anger may not be a coincidence, may be a nod to Joanna Russ and The Female Man, in which all the characters, including a domestically-trapped one are JRs; but if it is a nod, I can’t help feeling it’s a somewhat ambivalent one.) Juliet’s “secret life” is the literary club she runs, one Friday afternoon a month, at the school where she works part-time. Her passion for this part of her life is admirable; her didacticism perhaps a little less so. “They were meant to select the book for the next month’s discussion by committee,” we are told, “but unrepentantly Juliet steered them towards works that represented the truth, as she saw it, of female experience” (154). It’s hard not to feel that Juliet is treating literature, and the reading group, as an echo chamber, seeking validation for her anger, rather than taking the opportunity to look out at the wide world, to see what others have seen. There is a suggestion, late on, that she realises this, that she is going to at last do something to improve her life; but here, unlike with Maisie, Cusk’s characterisation failed me: it’s hard to believe that Juliet really has woken from the nightmare of her life.

This may all sound a little second-hand: it may be meant to. Everything in Arlington Park echoes; everything carries the sense that it has happened before, and will happen again. There’s even a moment of admiration for a plastic bag tormented by gusts of wind, American Beauty-style, although no reference to Desperate Housewives. When Christine, at a coffee morning hosted by Amanda (and deftly choreographed by Cusk, given the number of characters present), exclaims “It’s not what you’d think, it it? I say to Joe, look, it can get really heavy on a coffee morning, you don’t believe me but it can” (70), the reader’s immediate response (or at least, my immediate response) is: oh, it’s exactly what I’d think. Ersatz conversations about ersatz lives. Sure enough, Christine’s relentless positivity (tainted, once again, by various stripes of bigotry) is revealed as something, well, a little more desperate: she feels “the vulnerability of her grasp on the real, the authentic life” (81), except that — oh, black black humour — her version of “the authentic life” is Arlington Park. Christine lives with “dread, the terror of falling into shadow, of going back to where she’d been before” (214-5), and her apparent optimism, which is at first nakedly ridiculous — she claims “the people I see [in Arlington Park] every day are the most diverse, interesting, courageous group of people you’ll find anywhere!”, when everything in the book indicates the opposite — gradually becomes something more tragic. She may not believe in herself, but she believes in her friends, in their lives, in their happiness, or forces herself to believe, and she’s damned if she’s going to disappoint them.

Christine perhaps has more in common with Juliet and Maisie than any of them would suspect (if only they would talk!), or perhaps has just fallen further. They are a category after all, even if divided: all of them are worn down by a daily grind and the resentment it inspires, all of them come to know, to a greater or less extent, that there is more out there, even if it doesn’t know or care about them. Christine’s epiphany, which crowns the novel, actually has some force, despite its drunken belatedness. “You’ve got to love life,” she confides to Benedict, at the party, “You’ve got to love just — being alive.” “But how will anyone know you loved it?” he asks, and Christine replies, with pathetic truth, “Why would anyone need to know that?” (237) If Arlington Park is less than the sum of its parts — and it is; you may have noticed I’ve said almost nothing about Amanda and Solly, and there’s a reason for that — then some of the parts do justify the whole, just about. But it’s a curious experience. We look up from the last page frustrated and fascinated, wanting to scream, both at these women and on their behalf; but, like them, we are too tired.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

Ursula Le Guin is two for two. It was her review of Jan Morris’ Hav that first pointed me in the direction of that wonderful book; and likewise her review that persuaded me to add Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, which turns out to be nearly as good, to my wish-list. It is, of course, a love story, between a young Chinese woman and an older English man. 23 year-old Zhaung Xiao Qiao arrives in the UK one February (2003, I think), nervous and alone, fearing the future, to learn English at a school in Holburn, hardly even understanding why her parents have sent her. A little over a month into her stay she meets a man at a cinema in South Kensington, falls easily and comprehensively in love, and as a result of a miscommunication ends up moving in with him. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is Z’s story over the following year, up to the point where her visa expires. It’s presented as a diary-stroke-language-notebook; Z carries with her a Chinese-English dictionary, and later, a Collins Concise English Dictionary, at all times, and often refers to them in her attempts to understand and describe the world around her. Chapter headings (e.g. “romance”) are taken from the latter, with accompanying definitions (“fantasy, fiction, legend, novel, story, tale; exaggeration, falsehood, lie; ballad, idyll, song”), and the whole thing is written in the second person, addressed to the never-named man.

Which inevitably means that the most immediate thing about the book is the language in which it’s written. Here, for example, is part of Z’s first encounter with a full English breakfast:

What is this ‘baked beans’? White colour beans, in orange sticky sweet sauce. I see some baked bean tins in shop when I arrive to London yesterday. Tin food is very expensive to China. Also we not knowing how to open it. So I never ever try tin food. Here, right in front of me, this baked beans must be very expensive. Delicacy is baked beans. Only problem is, tastes like somebody put beans into mouth but spit out and back into plate. (17)

I concede this is probably the prose equivalent of Marmite, but I love it: particularly the innocent directness, the seeing-for-the-first-time-ness of it. Leaving aside the question of taste for a moment, however, there might also seem to be a question of authenticity. On the one hand, the artifice of this sort of writing, bad in very specific ways, is obvious: for example, it’s hard to believe that Z’s grammar would be so bad while her spelling is impeccable (although a few artfully misheard nouns are dropped into the text every so often — “rocksack”, “peterfile”). On the other hand, the book apparently grew out of a diary Guo herself kept when she moved to London (Concise Dictionary is her first novel to be written in English, although her seventh in total), which raises various questions but does at least suggest that the portrayal of the learning process is likely to be accurate. And an aspect that may seem the most contrived — the present tense; bear in mind that these are not Z’s thoughts as she is having them, they are entries written later in her notebook — is a consequence of incompletely translating Chinese thought into English. “Chinese, we not having grammar,” Z explains. “We saying things simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes. We bosses of our language” (24). The fact that Guo conveys the difficulties of translation so lightly is one of the most impressive things about the book, for me, and I think you have to respect at least that, even if you find Z’s voice to be nails-down-chalkboard grating. She does, of course, learn over the course of the year, but her position as a naive teller of truths never changes. This, for instance, is another breakfast, in Berlin:

The early morning air feels cold, like autumn coming. Occasionally, one or two old mans in a long coats walk aimlessly in the street, with the cigarettes in their lips. Under the highway there is bridge. By the bridge there is a sausage shop, lots of large mans queue there to get hot sausages. Gosh, they eat purely sausage in the morning! Even worse than English Breakfast. The morning wind is washing my brain, and my small body. This is a city with something really heavy and serious in its soul. This is a city which had big wars in the history. And, I feel, this is a city made for mans, and politics, and disciplines. Like Beijing. (218)

Again, it’s characteristic of Z’s writing — the fresh phrases that seem careless (“The morning wind is washing my brain”), the odd but valid word choices (“Gosh”), the unabashedly obvious observations (“This is a city which had big wars in the history”). There is something memorable on nearly every page of the book. Walking home one night, Z observes that “Also, the robbers robbing the people even poorer than them. In China we believe ‘rob the rich to feed the poor’. But robbers here have no poetry” (42). They may not, but Z does – the poetry of an acute observer, plain in everything from her descriptions of a pub to her consternation on discovering that her man is a vegetarian, to her reaction to a David Lynch double bill. In a number of ways, Z is not an easy character to love — apart from anything else, she is stubborn, and rude – but she is always sharply aware and, at least from a reader’s remove, inescapably charming.

Which is not to imply that this is always a comfortable book, though it is one with an extremely generous view of human nature (certainly in contrast to, oh I don’t know, The Inheritance of Loss). By far the majority of the people Z encounters are good-hearted, even if they sometimes can’t resist teasing her; only twice, during a solo jaunt around Europe, does she encounter someone who tries to take advantage of her, and while the encounters are unpleasant, they are not irretrievably horrific. And if Z is frequently baffled by the world she finds around her, she is not intimidated by it. In fact, she is often indignant in the face of it. “English is a sexist language … always talking about mans, no womans” (26), she observes — although despite this awareness her view of what constitutes a relationship is extremely conservative (at least in our terms; more on this below). Moreover, she’s always conscious of the distance between herself and her man: “You a man of free world. I am not free, like you” (113); “In the West, in this country, I am barbarian, illiterate peasant girl, a face of third world, and irresponsible foreigner” (153); “You are boss of yourself, so you have dignity” (184). Strung together like that, such moments look obtrusive, but in fact they are more often grace notes to scenes about other things. Which is to say that they describe the reality of Z’s life — we’re put in her man’s shoes; we can’t ignore what she says — but not the extent of it. (Again, the contrast with Desai’s novel couldn’t be more striking.)

The fear at the heart of such worries, though, inevitably informs her relationship. Here we come back to love. A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is built around a distinction expressed with particular elegance, to my mind, in KJ Bishop’s The Etched City, between love that exists “as a mutal sentiment or not at all” and implies “a voluntary blending of identities”, and love that denotes “two travellers meeting, enjoying each other’s company, then parting and moving on.” Z and her man do love, with joy and vigour, but — it becomes increasingly clear — in different ways, ways that have an awful lot to do with their differing backgrounds. To Z, love is a mutual act, a commitment that abolishes privacy and (for example) entitles her to read her man’s diaries, and enables her to blithely tell him that she’s done so. Love is about creating a home, a family, and a future: the three are inextricably related, aspects of an incompletely translated cultural inheritance, and lead to the conservatism I mentioned earlier. Love as security, as community. But the man Z has fallen in love with is more casual — as Z notes, he can afford to be. He is something of a bohemian, an artist who’s drifted through his life believing “the future only comes when it comes”, that nothing is forever; he values his independence. To him, love is about the preciousness of the present moment, not the promise of the future.

In other words, the lovers occupy positions opposite to those staked out by their native languages, an irony that defines their relationship. Z is so engaging that we badly want to see her grow into a more complete sense of self: but we fear that in doing so she will almost certainly doom her relationship, despite the fact that said relationship is the original catalyst for her growth. In fact it is specifically the physical relationship that is the catalyst. Z’s descriptions of sex, whether going right or going wrong, are as refreshingly matter-of-fact as her descriptions of everything else; and though her initial understanding, both of the act and the emotional paraphernalia it requires, is limited, she’s a quick study. She goes to a peep show, and has a lot of sex with her lover, and starts to explore her own body, and along the way she begins to believe in her own independence. More and more, this (as we feared it might) hems her into an absurd, uplifting, heartbreaking paradox: a catch-22 of love. Almost miraculously, Guo finds an honest resolution — one good enough that the other books shortlisted for the Orange Prize are going to have to go some if they want to replace A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers in my affections.

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.

The World Has Gone Wrong: Specimen Days

Maybe we’ve been spoiled. The past few years have given us a series of novels that were published outside the genre, were commercial and critical successes, and that were — let’s not be ashamed to admit it — good sf as well. Margaret Atwood might call it the wrong thing, but she knows what it is. David Mitchell, as demonstrated in Cloud Atlas and his other novels, clearly knows the old stories intimately. Audrey Niffenegger has confessed to reading sf as a teenager; Kazuo Ishiguro probably hasn’t, but he’s obviously thought carefully and deeply about the implications of imagined worlds for the stories he wants to tell.

Now here comes Michael Cunningham, with a book that aspires to tell the myth of America. As in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours (2002), a literary giant looms behind the story. There it was Virginia Woolf; here it is Walt Whitman, the man who wrote “the poem that was the United States.” (145) Also like The Hours, Specimen Days involves three stories linked across time. The differences are of focus and structure. Specimen Days does not stay in the 20th century, it ranges from 1850 to 2150, and its stories are not intermingled, they are arranged in chronological sequence.

Further comparisons are equally inevitable. Like Cloud Atlas (2004), for example, Specimen Days reeks of design; its stories echo and interact. Cunningham is not the master ventriloquist that Mitchell is — all three tales are told in variations of the same cool, clear voice — but he moves between genres with something of the same enthusiasm. The oldest story, set in the industrial revolution, is a ghost story; the contemporary tale is a thriller; and the final piece appears to be science fiction. There are similarities, too, with Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). Specimen Days takes place within our history, not alongside it, but it employs the same trio of characters in each time period: Simon, a man; Catherine (or Cat, or Catareen), a woman; and Lucas (or Luke), a boy. Each character becomes the viewpoint for one of the stories. As in Robinson’s book, the world may be a variable, but souls are a constant.

Lucas’ story is first. “In The Machine” is set in a New York in the throes of industrialisation. Lucas’ older brother, Simon, has been killed in a factory accident, and Lucas is to inherit his job and support their parents. He has inherited also (or so he feels) his brother’s adoration for his bride-to-be, Catherine. Lucas is strange, earnest and innocent. He does not really understand people, or the world around him, and that’s not just because he’s a child. His parents — ill or idle — are little help, and Catherine looks at him with pity, not as an equal. Lucas’ only guide to life is an early edition of Whitman’s repeatedly-revised book, Leaves of Grass. In the book he finds understanding and support; indeed, in stressful moments the poetry will take him over, leading to involuntary, and sometimes inappropriate, recitations. Through the poetry, however, he gains an answer about where Simon has gone, an answer that can reconcile Catherine’s contradictory insistences that he is in heaven, yet with them still. Simon, per Whitman, has gone into everything: into the grass, and into the machine.

“In The Machine” is a claustrophobic story, and conveys well the sense of how dehumanising technological change can be. To Lucas, the factory seems to literally be another world. The men in it have “relinquished their citizenship […] their former lives were dreams they had each night, from which they awakened each morning at the works” (29). Moreover, Lucas becomes convinced that Simon is not just in the machine, but trapped in it. Unable to make Catherine understand, he resorts to drastic, tragic measures. The story is a lament for the loss of innocence: by a boy, and by the world.

Skip forward to today or tomorrow, and innocence is harder to find. In Cat’s New York, the hazy edge between sleeping and waking “was as close as it got to collective innocence” (114). Cat herself is doing ok, mostly: she’s a 38 year-old African American detective, living in a small but somewhat sought-after apartment on fifth avenue. She works in terrorism deterrence; she’s the person the crazy people call when they want to rant at someone. And in this time, she and Simon — working in finance, trading in futures — are together, but Lucas is absent.

But the rest of the world, the post-9/11 world, is ugly and dystopic. Cat asks a colleague, “It’s getting harder to see the patterns, don’t you think?” (155) and with that question the story becomes a bleak inversion of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003): all noise, no order. Like the world in Gibson’s novel, the world in “The Children’s Crusade” is not yet science fiction, but it does seem an exaggerated reality, in this case exaggeratedly negative, every pessimistic hypothetical made manifest. This is a time when children can walk up to adults, seemingly randomly chosen, hug them, and detonate the bombs strapped to their chest. And yet, there has been some progress. Cat is acutely aware of the sexism and racism that surround her at work, but in her personal life, in her relationship, the balance of power is ambiguous. She is wary of Simon’s white, middle-class nature, but she loves him, and believes he loves her; and when her work intrudes on their time together she reflects that he is “a spectator […] a wife if you will.” (139)

The intrusion is a lead in Cat’s investigation into the child terrorists, which itself leads to more ambiguities: these children seem to have taken Lucas’ obsession with the book to terrifying lengths, adopting Whitman’s words as a prescription for change. Here the effectiveness of the book’s structure is highlighted for the first time, for this story’s Lucas turns out, unsurprisingly, to be one of the bombers. If we had not spent the previous hundred pages inside his head — if we did not understand his desperate need to make the adults understand — then he would be an alien creature indeed. And yet, this sympathetic quality is also troubling. It comes close to endorsing a crusade which seems, at heart, to be sincerely anti-technological. The children were raised by a woman they call Walt Whitman, who may be the reincarnation of the poet. Cat tracks her down, and asks her why:

“Everybody wants a reason, don’t they? Let’s say this, then. Whitman was the last great man who really and truly loved the world. The machinery was just starting up when he lived. If we can return to a time like Whitman’s, maybe we can love the world again.” (188)

The slyly unsettling trick of characterisation-by-association is repeated in “Like Beauty”, the only story in which all three characters are alive and interacting simultaneously. This time it is Simon’s eyes through which we see; this time Simon is a simulo, a made man, working as a rent-a-thug in Old New York, hired to give tourists a thrilling fright (it is interesting that having been killed by the future in the first story, and paid to surf it in the second, now he ignores it entirely, and works in the past). This time Catareen is an alien, “a four-and-a-half-foot tall lizard with prominent nostrils and eyes slightly smaller than golf balls.” (199) In Simon’s eyes she is exotic and terse and enigmatic — but we know what goes on in her mind. We know the restless, cynical intelligence that lies behind her orange eyes, and because of it we see Simon’s well-meaning but patronising affection for what it is. More troublingly, the two of them are closer in station — her a refugee, he stolen property — than in either of the other two stories, and yet they still do not fully interact as equals. If anything, they fix in traditional power structures more firmly than they did in our time.

The success of Catareen’s characterisation highlights one of Cunningham’s themes, that everything is connected, human or alien, self or other; but it is the first failure of Cunningham’s future as a literal world. As soon as we realise Catareen is comprehensible as a human, by definition she ceases to be an alien. She becomes a symbol — a metaphor, in the Star Trek tradition — but is no longer a believable nonhuman intelligence. It is difficult, therefore, to read the story as full science fiction.

Nor, after a while longer, do we want to do so. Cunningham’s future has, as Michel Faber noted in his review of the book for The Guardian, “the usual demerits of mainstream science fiction.” It is old and faded, and feels like unwitting reiteration rather than homage; it looks backward, recreation of Central Park and all. The backdrop is by-the-numbers political fragmentation and environmental meltdown. The details are either superficial (the drinks and the clothes are unusual colours) or embarrassing (children are named tomcruise and katemoss). Matters are clarified somewhat when Simon’s artificial nature becomes clear: he is no more than a tin man, and this is not truly science fiction, it is mythic fantasy. This future is Oz. “I want something. I feel a lack” (232), Simon tells Catareen, as they set out on their quest; but it is an unrevealing revelation that serves only to pave the way for a predictable narrative escape trajectory, first from the city and then, perhaps, from Earth itself.

Through it all, of course, there is Whitman. Like Lucas before him, this Simon involuntarily spouts Whitman in times of stress. The poetry, we are told, is part of his programming; it regulates his spirit, he is told, makes him “better able to appreciate the consequences of [his] actions” (281). Whitman binds these characters together, and infiltrates their thoughts. ‘In The Machine’ is the only story in which he appears directly — as a guide to Lucas, in a curiously soft-focus scene that sketches the poet as a sort of spiritual Santa — but he informs both “The Children’s Crusade” and “Like Beauty”. In each time Simon, Lucas and Catherine are characters bewildered in different ways by the failure of the world and Whitman, perhaps, offers an answer: a lullaby of a world-that-was. Specimen Days repeatedly demonstrates that it is a regressive book, one that looks back to a pre-industrial age of peace as mythical as the post-industrial landscape through which the last Simon wanders. The industrial revolution is bad because it disconnects people from the world; the present is dystopian because urbanisation and technological progress have poisoned the well; the only viable future is to look to the past.

Most egregious is the suggestion that all of this should be accepted on instinct, without discrimination, because “if you insist on too much focus here or there, you miss the larger point.” (147) Whitman’s veneration of the everyday is used as a justification for simplistic reasoning, for an argument that values feeling about thinking, sentiment over intellect. And from such reasoning comes guilt: through our choices we have destroyed the innocence of the world. We should undo them, refill and close Pandora’s Box — or worse, abandon this project and start over. Reach back to the twentieth century, before the old world ended and the towers came tumbling down. If this is the myth of America it is empty, and it is a shame that Cunningham’s undoubted skill — the first two novellas, at least, are worthwhile — should be used in service of a message so obviously banal. It is also the novel’s ultimate undoing, because such clumsy logic does a disservice to Whitman as much as to the reader. By the end, a great poet is not so much a reference point as a crutch for a narrative that emphatically rejects complexity; and such a crutch can only leave splinters in the reader’s hand.

This review first appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction #210 (February 2006)

The Siege of Earth

Writing about favourites is always hard. Not — at least for me — because it’s hard to be critical, but because it’s too easy. Writing about something I really like, I often feel somewhat self-conscious, and try to compensate by pointing out all the flaws before anyone does. And when we’re talking about a writer like Stephen Baxter — who started publishing just as I reached the golden age of twelve, who I keep thinking I should try to write about in some vaguely substantive way, and who remains one of my favourite writers — it has to be admitted that there are flaws to be pointed out. Baxter stories are full of passages such as this, from “Last Contact” (in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, ed George Mann). Caitlin is visiting her mother, Maureen; at this point, on the second page of the story, all we know about the larger situation is that Caitlin is about to deliver news about something called the “Big Rip”:

It was just a scrap of lawn really, with a quite nicely stocked border, behind a cottage that was a little more than a hundred years old, in this village on the outskirts of Oxford. “It’s the first time I’ve seen this properly.”

“Well, it’s the first bright day we’ve had. My first spring here.” They walked around the lawn. “It’s not bad. It’s been let to run to seed a bit by Mrs Murdoch. Who was another lonely old widow,” Maureen said.

“You mustn’t think like that.”

“Well, it’s true. This little house is fine for someone on their own, like me, or her. I suppose I’d pass it on to somebody else in the same boat, when I’m done.”

Caitlin was silent at that, silent at the mention of the future.

It’s that last phrase — “silent at the mention of the future” — that grates, a clumsy intrusion into Caitlin’s thoughts. And it seems both unnecessary — we don’t yet know for certain that we’re reading an end-of-the-world story, but we could have made an informed guess without that sort of nudge — and premature. Why not build up the atmosphere of unease just a bit longer?

Baxter’s writing is never going to be lauded as beautiful, exactly (although more often than not he has a good eye for description), and I think this sort of infelicity is part of the reason why — the sort of thing that, even if entirely intentional, looks like it would have been caught and removed if there’d been one more draft. Of course, there are compensations, most commonly the sort of cosmological vistas that almost nobody else is writing right now. Which is why I was so glad to read, and so dazzled by, “The Siege of Earth”. It’s been over year since I read a really mind-expanding Stephen Baxter story — Transcendent, the third of the three novels that make up what is probably Baxter’s most consistently impressive (if somewhat unfortunately named) sequence of novels to date, Destiny’s Children. “A Siege of Earth” is another pure hit of no-apologies, no-compromises science fiction.

It’s the closing story — and the only original story — in Resplendent, a (very) loosely linked collection of short stories which was published as “volume four” of Destiny’s Children. All four books are set in Baxter’s well-established Xeelee universe, a future history in which godlike and eternally-offscreen aliens deliver as thorough a kicking to the idea of a manifest destiny for humanity as you could wish for. Moreover, all four track the fate of humanity over evolutionary timescales, but in truth most of the stories in Resplendent add little to arguments already made in the novels. In particular, many of them read as pendants to the second Destiny’s Children novel, Exultant. Some of the stories explicate events referenced in the novel — as part of a Grand Tour of the solar system, for instance, Exultant’s protagonists visit the site of “Reality Dust”; you don’t need to know that, but if you do the scene in the novel acquires an additional resonance. Most of the stories are also set in roughly the same period as the novel — give or take ten thousand years, and on the scale Baxter’s working to you can give or take ten thousand years quite easily — and share a predominantly militaristic tone. “The Siege of Earth”, though, is a leap forward from the rest of the book, more elegiac in tone, and set almost four times further in the future than its nearest neighbour, “Between Worlds” (AD 27,152). Admittedly this may seem rather inadequate by the standards of something like “The Baryonic Lords”, which capped Baxter’s previous Xeelee collection, Vacuum Diagrams, and which takes place more than four times further into the future again; but it’s still deep enough into time for the solar system to be virtually unrecognisable, and well past the events of Transcendent, noted in Resplendent‘s timeline as “the high water-mark of human destiny”.

Most of Baxter’s Xeelee stories have a specific date attached to them, but the date of “The Siege of Earth” is tidier than most: 1,000,000 AD. Such an ostentatious declaration of futurity can’t be accidental, and nor, surely, are the associations raised by the oh-so-familiar image in the story’s opening line: “The canal cut a perfect line across the flat Martian landscape, arrowing straight for the crimson rim of sun at the horizon.” Not for the last time, the writing trades openly on a presumed familiarity with earlier sfnal visions to gain emotional power. (With a commendably broad scope of reference; one character even says, in so many words, that “Earth got used up”, albeit to an extent far beyond that implied in Firefly.) The three paragraphs immediately following that opening sentence establish the tone of the story more firmly:

Walking along the canal’s bank, Symat was struck by the sheer scale on which people had reshaped the landscape for a purpose — in this case to carry water from Mars’s perpetually warm side to the cold. Of course the whole world was engineered, but terraforming a world was beyond Symat’s imagination, whereas a canal was not.

His mother had always said he had the instincts of an engineer. But it wasn’t likely he would ever get to be an engineer, for this wasn’t an age when people built things. A million years after the first human footsteps had been planted in its ancient soil, Mars was growing silent once more.

Symat was fourteen years old, however, and that was exactly how old the world was to him. And he was unhappy for much more immediate reasons than man’s cosmic destiny. He stumbled on, alone.

Plainspoken these may be, but they achieve an impressive amount nonetheless, taking us with satisfying economy through several different understandings of what the story is going to be about. Depending on the reader, the “Of course” in the first of the above paragraphs is either a slight jolt (how casually such grand work is mentioned!) or an expression of trust (yeah, you know what Mars is going to be like in 1,000,000 AD). The next paragraph swiftly punctures any hopes we might have been harbouring that this is a time of human prosperity: Mars is “growing silent”. But we’re not given time to fully absorb the implications of that, either, because the next paragraph focuses the story down onto Symat, the boy-engineer, and his much more mundane unhappiness. He has, in fact, run away from home.

The first part of the story continues Symat’s exploration of Mars, gradually unpacking some of the other implications of those opening paragraphs. Through his eyes, we start to see a solar system not just engineered (Mars no longer rotates) but prematurely aged (the sun has swollen into a red giant before its time, and has already swallowed Mercury and Venus). The towns and cities through which Symat passes are magnificent but empty. He encounters some other children, and befriends one in particular, a girl called Mela. But none of them are true humans; they’re Virtuals, holographic projections of Mars’s own artificial mind (which is in turn part of a galactic-scale assembly known as the Conclave), created as surrogates by a human race so broken it seems to have forsaken the future altogether. This turns out to be more of a literal truth than we might expect; in fact, it’s another iteration of evolutionary destiny, probably the grimmest anywhere in Destiny’s Children. The forces shaping human development in Coalescent, Exultant, and Transcendent were (loosely) family, war, and religion: here it is ultimate defeat that provides a selection pressure. The humans of “The Siege of Earth” live between the might of the Xeelee on one hand, humanity having become enough of an annoyance that they merit being dealt with permanently, and the inevitability of the sun’s death on the other. “The trap of history”, we are told, “closing in Symat’s lifetime.”

“The Scourge has been continuing now for three hundred thousand years. To the Xeelee the Scourge is a conscious project. To humans it has become our environment.” Mela’s voice was neutral, her words not quite her own, Symat thought. “A steady force applied to a population for long enough becomes a selection pressure. In such an environment those able psychologically to accept the reality of inevitable defeat will prosper. And that is why you are prepared to walk trustingly into the booths, even without knowing what lies beyond. Your ancestors have learned to accept similar bolt-holes without question, far back into your history. You’ve been preadapted to accept the booths for ten thousand generations! Perhaps even that was part of the grand design of the Scourge.”

As evolutionary theory this may not be entirely convincing, even with godlike aliens to help the process along, but it’s a powerful starting point for a story. Of course the reason Symat is the protagonist of the story, it transpires, is that he’s different. He has, as his mother says, the instincts of an engineer, the engineer’s urge to investigate, find out, solve; which is a shorthand way of saying he has the instincts of someone from our own time, that he is someone we can safely identify with in this alien deep time. The very last thing Symat wants to do is walk into a “transfer booth” of uncertain origin, even if it does ostensibly lead to a pocket universe that might be a sanctuary for humanity. (And others: one of the story’s multiple grace notes establishes that booths have also been provided for the solar system’s other indigenous intelligences, such as those identified in Baxter’s 1993 story “The Sun-People”. Another sidebar notes that Saturn’s moon Titan, now warmed by the sun, is finally blooming into life, an idea Baxter spent more time on in his 1996 novel Titan.)

In pursuit of an alternative ending, Symat and Mela embark on their own Tour of the solar system. Revelations come thick and fast, producing repeated shocks of perspective in Symat, and the cumulative effect is powerful, even if some of the surprises are easily enough anticipated by readers familiar with the shape of the Xeelee timeline. There are still some immortals (described, perhaps too cutely, as “Ascendents”) trying to save humanity from the transfer booths. The plan involves saving the Earth, over the course of millennia — although given the state of it, you’d be forgiven for wondering why they’re bothering. The Earth Symat imagines, our Earth, is a “story-book vision”. In reality, “The mountains were worn down”, and “the air seemed thin, supporting only wispy traces of cloud. And though a few cities still glittered, the ground of Earth shone brick red, the red of Mars, of rust and lifelessness.” The ecology is even more radically reconfigured than this suggests, imported alien species gone wild having developed a new balance with the native flora and fauna. Even the gravity has been reduced. It is through such dramatic aftereffects, rather than direct effects, that Baxter most effectively conveys the scope and power of the forces which have worked on the solar system over time.

There is an extent to which a good-sized chunk of Baxter’s recent sf, and certainly a story like “The Siege of Earth”, can be read as grappling with the challenge of personalising cosmic-scale events. Primo Levi’s recent story notwithstanding, a date like “1,000,000 AD” is not meaningless — quite the opposite. Such a great vista of time, so effortlessly stated, is invested with an almost overpowering amount of meaning. The challenge, for a writer, is to draw that meaning out, and shape it into something resembling a readable story. “The Siege of Earth” is arguably not entirely successful, if you object to being told things by fiction: it contains great gobs of backstory to explain the mighty ruins that Symat finds around him, such as the changed Earth noted above, either exposited by other characters, or by the omniscient narrator. What makes it work, I think, is the impersonal tone with which such information — and the story as a whole — is delivered, the casual mentions of immense projects, and the contrast between that tone and Symat’s emotional, excitable reactions.

Ultimately, as you may already suspect, the story’s resolution involves a choice made by Symat that only Symat can make (in flat contradiction of an earlier assertion by Mela that “every important choice was made long ago”). The setup is a black inversion of the robots-poison-Earth dilemma in Asimov’s Robots and Empire: here, the Ascendents know how to save Earth, but like the robots they need to have their solution authorised, and to do that they have to get around a restrictive definition of “human” that prevents them enacting their solution. So, R. Giskard invented the Zeroth Law; and Luru Parz, first Ascendent, spent several millennia selectively breeding herself a throwback human to fool an ancient machine. The whole situation is so extensively and coldly rigged — not to mention fail-safed, since if things don’t go the way Luru wants, she’ll just start again from scratch; she has time, after all — that the only response left to the reader is a kind of bleak awe.

I don’t know of any contemporary writers as skilled at evoking this sort of vertigo of perspective as Baxter, from the cold immensity of Ring to the dizzying well of futurity in Time to the epic sweep of Evolution. Like the vast emptiness that suffuses “The Siege of Earth”, it’s something that can’t be trivialised, can’t be reduced to something within normal human experience by refiguring it as a metaphor; it simply is. It’s the sort of choice that results, Baxter seems to be saying, when you look the universe as it really is in the eye and don’t blink. It’s also a choice that kills Symat. The story, however, lives on: in the last few pages, it becomes apparent that Luru Parz’s vision of an “Old Earth” is one that Baxter has already started exploring. A sequence of stories beginning with “PeriAndry’s Quest” (2004) has explored a world encased in a pit of spacetime that isolates it from the universe outside, where time runs faster the higher you climb — an extraordinarly resonant setting for all sorts of stories. Symat’s choice is where “The Siege of Earth” ends, where Resplendent ends, where Destiny’s Children ends; but not where the story ends. We’re only in 1,000,000 AD, after all. There’s plenty of time left on the clock yet.

Salon Fantastique: La Fee Verte

I’m pretty sure the fault is in me rather than in Delia Sherman’s story, but as I read the first few pages of “La Fee Verte” I kept thinking of the pilot episode of Angel. As Our Heroine, Victorine, is approached for no apparent reason by the title character (“exquisitely thin … dark eyes huge and bruised in her narrow face”; her name is never translated in the story, although the frequent references to (a) absinthe and (b) green silk should be enough to jog most peoples’ memory), and recoils in astonishment as the enigmatic woman relates events from her past, I kept thinking of the half-demon Doyle appearing out of nowhere and doing the same for Angel. So I was all ready for Victorine to turn around and say, “Okay, you’ve told me the story of my life which, since I was there, I already knew … why aren’t I kicking you out?” (Or, given the setting, some 19th-century Parisian equivalent). Instead:

When the tale was done, La Fee Verte allowed her tears to overflow and trickle, crystalline, down her narrow cheeks. Enchanted, Victorine wiped them away and licked their bitter salt from her fingers. She was inebriated, she was enchanted. She was in love.

I very nearly gave up on the story then and there, because the moment felt unjustified and overwritten, and because it seemed highly unlikely that a character who fell in love on such dubious grounds was someone I was going to enjoy spending the best part of fifty pages with. (“La Fee Verte” is, I think, the longest story in Salon Fantastique.) But I didn’t give up, because many other people have spoken highly of the story, and in the end I’m glad to have read it: I think it’s quite far from being one of the best stories in the book, but it’s enjoyable, with a few moments that raise it above the ordinary.

The first promising moment, in fact, occurs only a few paragraphs later, when it transpires that the stories La Fee Verte tells of Victorine’s past aren’t quite true. “Little by little,” we are told, “Victorine came to depend on [these revisions], as a drunkard depends on his spirits, to mediate between her and her life.” The explicit parallel with drunkenness is probably unnecessary, but the conceit of an addiction to a seer’s visions — not to mention a seer who enables such addiction — is an interesting one. Things between the two women quite quickly sour, though, as La Fee Verte becomes entangled with a (male) client, a writer “of novels in the vein of M. Jules Verne”, to whom she divulges clearly absurd visions of the future, such as a man on the moon who “plants a flag in the dust, scarlet and blue and white, marching in rows of stripes and little stars.” Since this was the US flag at the time the story is set, it’s perhaps a little surprising that La Fee Verte doesn’t recognise it, but the moment serves its purpose, such that when the seer tells Victorine that she is destined to be loved, we know that she is telling the truth.

Gradually Paris as a place asserts itself, and some of the best parts of the rest of the story contribute to a portrait of a city in flux. The story takes place between winter of 1868, when Victorine and La Fee Verte first meet, and autumn of 1870, when Paris is besieged by the Prussian army. Victorine has a succession of lovers, and through her eyes we see the effects that the change in government and fortune is having on the city and its people. At one point, during a relationship with a colonel, Victorine finds herself at an extravagant dinner that “belonged more properly to last month, last year, two years ago”, and feels herself “lost in one of La Fee Verte’s visions, where past, present, and future exist as one.” Such feelings of instability, brought about by the rigid class divisions in the city, are almost eerie, as is the lingering sense — reinforced by La Fee Verte’s periodic appearances — that though Paris too is destined to be loved, the course will not be a smooth one. Which (indulge me) I suppose you could say parallels how I feel about Salon Fantastique. I haven’t been writing about the stories in order; and this is my last post, although “La Fee Verte” is, in fact, the first story in the book. So I know that for anyone who reads the book through, there will be ups and downs, but I think it is probably destined to be loved. There are stories here worth loving.

Salon Fantastique: Down the Wall

In the season four West Wing presidential debate episode, “Game On”, there’s a rather nice running joke about a Republican, Albie Duncan, who Toby thinks they should use in the post-debate spin session, to counteract the fact that the Republican candidate has a Democrat “shilling for him on defense”. CJ and Toby have the following exchange:

TOBY: This is why I’m talking to you. You’re going to use Albie Duncan.
CJ: He’ll do it?
TOBY: Yes.
CJ: Duncan?
TOBY: Yes.
CJ: He will?
TOBY: Yes.
CJ: Look at me. He’s not a little bit crazy?
TOBY: Albie Duncan?
CJ: Yes.
TOBY: No. No. No. [beat] A little bit.

Give or take Richard Schiff’s ever-marvellous delivery, that’s sort of how I feel about Greer Gilman’s story “Down the Wall”. It’s not because of Gilman’s much-discussed use of language, or not specifically. Here’s the opening of the story:

Stilt-legs scissoring, snip-snap! the bird gods dance. Old craneycrows, a skulk of powers. How they strut and ogle with their long eyes, knowing. How they serpentine their necks. And stalking, how they flirt their tails, insouciant as Groucho. Fugue and counterfugue, the music jigs and sneaks. On tiptoe, solemnly, they hop and flap; they whirl and whet their long curved clever bills. A sly dance, a wry dance, miching mallecho. Pavane. They peacock, but their drab is eyeless, black as mourners, black as mutes. They are clownish, they are sinister, in their insatiable invention, their unending.

As I had been led to expect, this is certainly careful, formidable writing — the unfamiliar words (“miching”), the words verbed (“serpentine”) or nouned (“drab”), the striking phrases (“the music jigs and sneaks”), the oddly placed cultural reference (“insouciant as Groucho”), the rhythms — but it doesn’t require significantly more unpacking than the writing of, say, Margo Lanagan, or even Catherynne Valente or Hal Duncan in full flow. What impressed me was what happened next. When the long paragraph (at least double the amount I quoted) ends, we have an extremely vivid image of the bird gods’ dance in our minds, and we think we know what sort of fantasy story we’re reading. And then we’re confronted with one phrase — “the birds are phosphor in a box” — which forces us to reframe everything we thought we’d learnt. The second paragraph continues:

The birds are phosphor in a box. They sift and sift across the screen; they whisper. They are endless snow or soot, the ashes of the old world burning. Elsewhere fire. The hailbox whispers, whispers. There is no way to turn it off. No other channel but the gods. All day and night it snows grey phosphor, sifting in the corners of the air. The earth is grey with ash.

The birds are images seen in the static of a dead tv. And quite suddenly, it starts to become apparent that “Down the Wall” isn’t fantasy at all. There’s a tv the characters can’t, or don’t know how, to turn off; they think of the static as “the ashes of the old world burning”; it all sounds very much like post-apocalyptic science fiction.

I think I’m right in saying that nothing in the story later contradicts this interpretation. The bird gods, it transpires, have an existence beyond static, but it’s an existence in stories of this time. The world of “Down the Wall” struck me very much as world where the horizon has drawn closer, where the giants have been kicked out from under the characters. They describe lightning, for instance, as “godlight”; the bird gods themselves are described so lyrically it’s hard to be sure, but I think we are meant to understand that they are the projections of a people scared by a world they no longer comprehend, and not a literal reality. Which is to say that I think they are wind and sticks and storm, but I could be wrong.

What makes the story — which involves a brother and sister going out from their home, into the world — so decidedly odd, though, isn’t this shift, it’s the way in which the world is rendered. For one thing, the characters all have names — Spugget, Harpic, Fligger, Theek — straight out of Peake, which makes them sound grotesque, although there’s little indication that they actually are. For another, when they speak they say things like “Hush. Nobbut an awd busker. I’ll fend” and “Gerroff wi’ yer. Left, left, down close and top o’t stairs”, which frankly makes them sound like they came from the North of England and brought all their cliches with them. It was all I could do not to imagine the lot of them wearing flat caps — not exactly a common image in sf. But in the end, if the story’s construction feels a bit patchwork, and if its ending is somewhat arbitrary, there’s no denying its urgency or imagination — the descriptions of the gang of children running world are particularly impressive. Later in the West Wing episode I mentioned above, defending Albie Duncan further (the Democrats do eventually use him), Toby says, “Look, he’s Albie Duncan. […] If he’s crazy, then I don’t want to be sane.” Sanity sounds overrated when reading “Down the Wall”, too.