Tributaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bobby Conroy Comes Back From The Dead

Bobby didn’t know her at first. She was wounded, like him. The first thirty to arrive all got wounds. Tom Savini himself put them on.

Her face was a silvery blue, her eyes sunken into darkened hollows, and where her right ear had been was a ragged-edged hole, a gaping place that revealed a lump of wet red bone. They sat a yard apart on the stone wall around the fountain, which was switched off.

So begins Joe Hill’s most recent story (the only one I’ve seen to be published after 20th Century Ghosts). He didn’t have to do it this way. He could have swapped the paragraphs around, started with a poker face and then given us a little jolt. If the urge occurred to him, it is to his credit that he resisted it, but it might not ever have been on the table. Graham Sleight, reviewing Hill’s collection, rightly observed that he demonstrated a “mastery of the rhetoric of endings”; but in truth most of Hill’s work has that feeling of close control, from the very first sentence.

You could describe this as stage-managing the elements of a story, and it’s never been more appropriate than here. As the presence of Tom Savini hints, we are on the set of George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, back in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, circa 1975. Bobby is a down-on-his-luck comedian turned actor, back home after failing to break the Big Apple. The girl sitting next to him, he suspects and hopes, is Harriet Rutherford, who co-captained the Die Laughing Comedy Collective with Bobby back in their school days. His intuition is correct, but to start with she bluffs him, in exactly the way that Hill didn’t try to bluff us. And then she confesses, and they hug, and for about fifty words everything seems a-ok.

Hill has demonstrated a knack for sentiment without sentimentality, however—as in the sublime “Pop Art”—and in this story he does so again, hinting at and then closing off the easy routes to emotion. Harriet has a kid, Bobby jnr, but he wasn’t named after Conroy. Harriet’s married to Dean; Bobby thinks it’s because Dean’s an easy audience, but in fact it’s because he’s a good guy. And Bobby and Harriet were never high school sweethearts, only high school never-quites. Their reunion awkwardness turns out to mean that nothing’s changed:

And for a moment they were both smiling, a little foolishly, knees almost touching. They had never really figured out how to talk to each other. They were always half-on-stage, trying to use whatever the other person said to set up the next punch-line.

It’s noticeable that the story gives itself several cues—points at which you think, Aha, I know what sort of story this is going to be—and then refuses them. The above is one; since they’re both literally half-on-stage for the whole of the story, we think this is going to be a story about them learning their lines. In addition, although the story happens at a time and place that probably only a writer versed in the history of horror could pull together with such apparent ease, it never becomes itself a horror story. Nothing terrible happens, and nothing magical either. The film set is just a set, and playing dead inevitably turns out to be a lot like playing alive, for Bobby; either way it mostly involves waiting around for his number to come up. And similarly, although both Bobby and Harriet are funny people, it’s not a comedy. They tell jokes to each other, not to us.

That, perhaps, is the key to controlling this sort of tale. Hill lets us pretend that we’re not reading the story that, deep down, we know we are; he makes us complicit in his sleight-of-hand, and in so doing lets us give ourselves permission to be surprised, and moved. And when it matters, he doesn’t pull his punches: the bitter moments are properly sharp, the sweet moments properly soft, the gory moments (because c’mon, Dawn of the Dead) properly unpleasant. They all hit us where it counts. Bobby Conroy comes back from the dead, all right, but not for brains: for the heart.

Have You Ever Been Here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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