Tag: literature

Success and secrets: Will Storr and Beatrice Hitchman

14th March 2013 / / 0 Comments

Will Storr, The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone (2013)
Beatrice Hitchman, Petite Mort (2013)

Killian Lone used to be one of the world’s greatest chefs (he tells us this from beyond the grave, so you can guess how well that turned out). His fascination with food began as a child, learning recipes from his Great-aunt Dorothy, one of whose ancestors was burnt at the stake for (it is said) producing food that drove people mad. Killian went on to study catering at college, and displayed such a rare talent that his teacher was able to land him a six-week placement at King, the restaurant of his idol, celebrity chef Max Mann – something unheard of for a lad of Killian’s background.

Max Mann had a reputation as the ‘Gentleman Chef’, who never let an apprentice go; Killian soon discovered why – Mann could wield silence where others might resort to threats. Just about the only bright spot amid the seemingly relentless hazing was Killian’s fellow-apprentice Kathryn, who would eventually become his wife. And Killian would go on to greater success as head chef of a rival kitchen, once he’d uncovered the true secret of his family’s cooking – but, like I said, you know how well it turned out…

Perhaps the scenes that most stand out most in Will Storr’s first novel are those depicting the ritual humiliation of Killian in the kitchens of King (such as the time Mann and his underling give Killian conflicting instructions over quality control, then alternately berate him for doing the ‘wrong’ thing). These scenes are excruciatingly vivid; Storr says in his closing note that they’re based on factual accounts, which only makes them seem more extraordinary. The author paints other emotions in similarly broad strokes, which can sometimes feel overly unsubtle (from the way Killian builds up his rosy preconception of Max Mann, it’s all too obvious that the chef will turn out to be a bastard), but is nevertheless always engaging.

But what really makes The Hunger and the Howling of Killian Lone shine for me is the way that Storr parses Killian’s ambition through his use of the Lone family secret. We’re so focused on the helping hand Killian gets that it takes a while to realise that he’s become like Max Mann. It’s a very effective way of showing someone being corrupted, unawares, when power goes to his head, because it puts the reader in the same position as Killian.

***

The protagonist of Petite Mort, Beatrice Hitchman’s debut, dreams of making it in another world whose outward glamour may mask a darker reality: the world of early cinema. Adèle Roux’s life changes in 1911, when she first sees a moving picture, and is caught by the allure of its female lead, known as Terpsichore – more than that, she wants to be her. Two years later, Adèle journeys from her provincial village to Paris, determined to become an actress; she does end up working for Pathé, but as a seamstress.

Yet, as we learn from a parallel plot-line, Adèle did indeed become a star, of sorts. In 1967, a journalist named Juliette Blanc seeks to interview her about her 1914 film Petite Mort, never seen and thought destroyed, until a print turned up with a scene missing. Back in the 1910s, we read, a special effects pioneer named André Durand plucked Adèle from her costuming work, gave her a job – and embarked on an affair with her. Adèle became the assistant of Durand’s wife:  none other than Terpsichore – and a ménage à trois soon develops.

Petite Mort is a novel of masks and secrets, whose protagonists have all been able to reinvent themselves: Adèle the village girl; André the boy from a Louisiana orphanage; Terpsichore the girl of noble birth, sent away at the age of six after being involved in a riding accident – each, to an extent, can leave their past behind in the film world. The theme of secrets carries through to the plot, which revolves around the mysterious print of Petite Mort. Hitchman juggles a good number of individual plot strands; but, whatever she’s writing about at any given point, the pages always demand to be turned.

Despite the hooks of the plot, though, the true heart of Petite Mort is perhaps the relationship between its three main characters As in Storr’s novel, we have a portrait of ambition and power, but this time mediated primarily through the changing balance of its characters’ relations. It’s a technique that leaves you wondering just how this will all end. Both of these books also leave me wondering where their authors will go next – and keen to find out.

“They’d never see it coming”

3rd March 2013 / / 10 Comments

Ken MacLeod, Intrusion (2012)

The thing about choice is, there are so many variables. In the future of Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion, there is a “free and social market” to give people a hand with all that choice. As the protagonist’s MP explains:

For the market to be really free, it has to work as if everyone involved had perfect information…This is where the social side comes from – the state…steps in to allow people to make the choices they would have made if they’d had that information. Because these are the really free choices (p. 147, italics in original).

This sort of pernicious rhetoric has pervaded government and society in the novel: licensed venues don’t allow music or swearing (“Creating a hostile environment,” p. 28); hand-delivering a letter to your MP is considered a possible act of terrorism (who knows what could be inside, and why didn’t you use the official channels?). It’s absurd, but this is the world in which MacLeod’s characters find themselves all the same.

The particular development which provides Intrusion’s impetus is a pill called “the fix”, which a pregnant woman can take to safely eliminate genetic defects from her developing baby. I say “can”, but talking the fix is on its way to becoming compulsory in England, unless you have a legitimate objection. Faith-based objections are fine, and there are various acceptable humanist justifications available; so more or less anyone who objects to taking the fix has a way out. No problems, eh?

No problems, that is, unless you don’t really have a reason for objecting to the fix – unless you simply don’t want to. This is the situation of Hope Morrison, expecting her second child, who can’t honestly commit to any of the stances that would permit her not to take the fix. The saying goes that nature abhors a vacuum, and the authorities in Intrusion abhor people like Hope, because they cannot put these individuals into boxes, and hence cannot understand them – and who knows what such people might do?

The main engine of Intrusion’s plot (particularly in its latter half) is the Morrison family’s attempt to escape London for a now-independent Scotland (where Hope’s husband Hugh was born) – but it is in MacLeod’s portrait of his future society that the novel shines most brightly. Several times, we see how the authorities cross-reference online traces and other seemingly-unremarkable points of data, and infer that someone might be a security risk – and the first they know of it is when the police come for them. This mirrors the novel’s sense that isolated bits of rhetoric have cohered invisibly to form the framework of government ideology; which can also be a net to trap the unwary, as Hope and other characters discover. The ending of Intrusion is also built on the idea of isolated details coming together unexpectedly, which is a satisfying touch.

Perhaps what’s most chilling about Intrusion is its quietness. As terrible as the society and events of MacLeod’s novel can be, its prose treats them largely as banal, which is quite fitting for the insidious way they’ve come about. Intrusion is likewise a book that creeps up on you – and stays there, just out of sight, waiting.

This book has been shortlisted for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Click here to read my other posts on this year’s Award.

Reading B.S. Johnson

24th February 2013 / / 3 Comments

The first time I came across B.S. Johnson’s name was in 1999, when I came across a copy of his then-recently republished 1969 novel The Unfortunates (his “book in a box” whose chapters, bar the first and last, can be read in any order). It was a bit out of my price range, so I didn’t buy it; and Johnson joined the long list of “authors I mean to read one day”.

Johnson took his own life in 1973, but 2013 would have been his 80th year. To mark the occasion, Picador have reissued four of his other novels, as well as publishing Well Done God!, a large volume of his drama and prose. They kindly sent me a set of these books, so the time was right to investigate Johnson’s work. I left Well Done God! for the time being, but read the four novels – in order of publication, because I wanted to see how Johnson’s style developed. It has been a fascinating experience (and I should say that the new covers, designed by La Boca, are lovely).

Johnson wrote that “telling stories is telling lies”, and that feeling is embodied time and again in his work. Albert Angelo (1964; the earliest of the reissues, but actually Johnson’s second published novel) is a great snarl of frustration at the form’s limitations. Johnson tells of Albert, a trained architect who has been forced to make ends meet by working as a supply teacher. Albert is thwarted in his ambitions to be a professional architect, still dwelling on an old relationship, and hated by the children he teaches. And the novel is as ill-at-ease as Albert, with Johnson constantly switching technique: first-, second- and third-person;  a two-column format, with speech on one side and thoughts in another ; there’s even a hole cut in a couple of pages to recontextualise a few lines.

Albert Angelo is a raw novel, in terms of both tone and style. That makes it interesting to read (especially, I think, if it’s the first Johnson you read), as you can never be sure what will be on the next page, and there is nothing you can take for granted. But it also leaves you wondering where else its author can go, whether he’s put all his eggs in the one basket and thrown it with all his might.

The answer, it seems, is that Johnson went off to find more eggs, as it were. He spent three weeks as a passenger on a deep-sea fishing vessel; the result was Trawl (1966), whose narrator goes on a similar journey, where he alternately ruminates on his memories and observes the trawlermen at work. I find myself liking the idea of Trawl more than the end result: I appreciate its portrait of inertia, but it hasn’t affected me as deeply as the other three of these books.

After Trawl, we jump over The Unfortunates, and there seems to me a definite change in the second pair of Johnson’s novels. I can’t be sure of his thinking, of course; but it feels to me as though Johnson not so much made peace with the novel as found a way to make it dance to his tune. Both Albert Angelo and Trawl give the impression of an author trying to fight against the novel – by, respectively, throwing all sorts of techniques at it before hacking it apart, and rejecting fiction and narrative in favour of an introspective stasis. In contrast, the second pair of Johnson’s novel carry the sense that he is subverting the form from within, as it were.

House Mother Normal (1971) – my favourite of these novels – consists of eight 21-page sections, each the monologue of a resident of an old people’s home, followed by a concluding section narrated by the House Mother. Each monologue tells of the same events, but the cognitive functioning of the residents grows progressively weaker, until we end up with a chapter which consists largely of nonsensical syllables scattered across the page – apart from harrowing moments of lucidity:

I am a prisoner in my

self. It is terrible. The movement agonises me.

Let me out, or I shall die

This is the most piercing moment in the novel that conveys a sense of loss, but such a sense is there throughout, in different ways. The monologues are digressive, as the characters switch back and forth between their memories and the present; this underlines that all the varied lives these people have led are gone, and they’ve all ended up here, in this rather ignominious situation. As each character reveals only certain details, it’s only gradually that we realise all the House Mother is putting her residents through (a “joust” using dirty mops, for example). Her closing monologue reveals the full contempt in which the House Mother holds the people in her care; but it also shows that there is a nasty surprise lying in wait for her, in the shape of a dormant brain tumour. So the unyielding structure of House Mother Normal leads us inexorably through an ever-deeper tale of decline – until Johnson breaks the frame to remind us we’re reading a novel. This is a bleak book with inevitable touches of exuberance, as all of Johnson’s stylistic and typographical idiosyncrasies work towards that end of evoking loss.

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), the last of Johnson’s novels to be published in his lifetime, is perhaps the most refined of these four books – which is to say that it’s the one where his concerns are most fully masked by the veneer of the novel. Christie Malry is an accountant who devises his own morality-based system of double-entry bookkeeping. For every slight the world visits upon him, Christie resolves to take a commensurate revenge; so, for example, when an office block prevents Christie from walking where he like (a Debit), he makes a scratch in its facade (a Credit) – and the moral balance is restored.

This novel looks like a fairly conventional narrative, but Johnson is constantly stopping to wryly point out its workings (“Meanwhile, they were both perfectly happy. Well, this is fiction, is it not? Isn’t it?”). It’s as though Johnson is goading his readers, saying: “You wanted a novel? Well, you’ve got one, but you’ll have it on my terms”. The kind of self-referentiality on show in Christie Malry’s actually feels over-familiar from more recent works, which makes it less bracing to read than a book like Albert Angelo – but this novel’s effect is subtler.

The key point about Christie’s bookkeeping system, I think, is that it’s arbitrary – he can decide what constitutes a Debit and Credit, and what an action is “worth”, without having to justify it to anyone but himself. Christie takes advantage of this to give himself licence to commit increasingly violent acts. It’s all absurd – and I think that Johnson is implicitly suggesting that so is a novel. Like Christie’s double-entry, a novel imposes a framework on the world that’s conjured up out of a person’s mind; it’s not really there, it doesn’t work – and perhaps it could lead you astray.

So that was my first, fairly extensive, sampling of B.S. Johnson’s work. Perhaps what strikes me most is the exuberance of it, after everything. Considering the reservations Johnson expressed about the novel and the concept of fiction in general, it would seem that he found a good deal of usefulness in them as well; and the tension created by this permeates his work. It’s a great loss that Johnson’s life was cut short, but I am grateful that his work remains – and even more so that I still have more of it to read.

See also
Alan from Words of Mercury has been reading Johnson as well, and blogs about Albert Angelo and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry.

Robot stories: vN and Black Mirror

16th February 2013 / / 3 Comments

Last week in Strange Horizons, I was disappointed with Rosa Montero’s Tears in Rain. But I actually read that book a month or so ago; more recently, I’ve come across two more pieces of fiction that have caused me to continue the train of thought I started in my SH review. The first is vN by Madeline Ashby, which I read because I saw it being discussed as one of the likely novels that missed out on the BSFA Award shortlist.

For the first few pages of vN, my impression was favourable. We’re introduced to Jack Peterson, whose wife Charlotte and daughter Amy are both self-replicating androids (von Neumann machines, or vN). Right from the start, ethical complexity is at the front and centre: all vN from the same clade (‘family’) look identical, and this will also be trur for Amy and Charlotte; so, Jack wonders, “what if one day, years from now, he kissed the wrong one as he walked through the door?” (p. 8). There’s no chance of that yet, though, because Jack is deliberately refraining from feeding Amy a full diet of vN food, so that she can grow up at the same rate as a human child. But, as Amy’s principal points out, this may not be such an appropriate thing to do: “She is not a kindergartener, and has not been one for years” (p. 22). The stage is set for a thought-provoking read.

By the end of the prologue, I was feeling less enthusiastic. At Amy’s kindergarten graduation, her grandmother Portia appears and tries to kill her. A boy dies in the ensuing scuffle, and a ravenously hungry Amy eats her own grandmother, which causes her body to grow into that of an adult. In the context of another book, I’d probably like this offbeat spirit; but here it set alarm bells ringing that cartoonish violence might win out over the more thoughtful material – and so it proves.

Amy spends most of the novel on the run, pursued by members of her own clade and others besides. She’s of interest to them because her failsafe (which stops vN from harming humans, but also induces nausea in them if they witness human injury and suffering) no longer works. This chase plot allows Ashby to show more of her future society. There’s further exploration of the place of vN, and how their presence has changed things. it is certainly much more searching and satisfying than the examination of ideas in Tears in Rain – but, for all that, it’s  clearly playing second fiddle to the action.

And, despite some striking images (such as Amy being set upon by crowds of vN who look just like her), much of the novel is quite uninvolving, Partly this is down to the prose, which never seems to catch fire again as it did in the first pages. But mostly I think it’s because the sense of place is so very sketchy. The backdrop of Tears in Rain may be generic, but at least it has an atmosphere, however ready-made; too often, the events of vN may as well be taking place in front of a blank wall (a sequence set in a museum of the city of Seattle really shows up the limitations of the rest). As a result, Ashby’s book is lacking in the detail and context that would help to give the action dramatic weight. By the time the final plot revelations came, I just didn’t care any more.

***

My other recent robot story is ‘Be Right Back’, the first film in the new series of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. We meet a young couple, Martha (played by Hayley Atwell) and Ash (Domnhall Gleeson). He heads out to return a courtesy car to the garage; she, an illustrator, stays at home to work on an urgent new commission. But Martha experiences a growing sense of dread that the worst has happened to Ash – and her fears are swiftly confirmed. At the funeral, Martha’s friend Sarah offers to introduce her to “something that will help”. At first, she doesn’t want to hear it; but soon finds herself signed up for – and swiftly drawn into – a service that uses a dead person’s online traces to reconstruct a virtual version of their personality. Martha moves from messaging ‘Ash’, to speaking to his construct on the phone – before paying for it (him?) to be downloaded into an artificial body.

As a fully rounded piece of drama, ‘Be Right Back’ has its shortcomings, particularly that the opening section establishing the couple’s relationship is that bit too compressed for one to become fully invested in it emotionally. But ‘Be Right Back’ is weighted towards its ideas, and there it works better. I actually found it the most satisfying of these three robot stories, because it’s best able to achieve what it sets out to do, and reaches furthest into its issues.  ‘Be Right Back’ is content just to focus on the relationship between two individuals, which is quite a refreshing change in a contemporary work of science fiction. We see Martha’s changing reaction to Ash, shifting from the delight of being able to hear his voice again to the despair of the uncanny valley as she realises that this is not him – that the robot looks and sounds like Ash, but doesn’t sleep, breathe, or react like him. The surface is there, but not the spark.

In the great scheme of things, ‘Be Right Back’ may not go as deep as it could (it’s not as searching or elegant as Chris Beckett’s ‘The Turing Test’, for example). But where it does go is still worthwhile: in one of the film’s later scenes, Martha – now at her wit’s end – has taken the Ash-robot to the cliffs, and instructs it to jump. At first, ‘Ash’ is calmly accepting of this, until Martha remarks that he would be afraid – at which point the robot slips seamlessly into the role of crying, pleading Ash. It’s a stronger moment than anything in vN or Tears in Rain – and just the sort of touch that a story like this needs.

Strange Horizons review: Rosa Montero, Tears in Rain (2011/2)

7th February 2013 / / 0 Comments

Today, Strange Horizons publish my review of Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero (translated from the Spanish by Lilit Zekulin Thwaites). The book came from the SH review pile, and I was especially interested in reading it because it’s a work of science fiction in  translation – and we don’t see nearly enough of those in Anglo-American publishing. It’s not just the case that sf imprints don’t often publish translations; publishers who specialise in translated works don’t often cover science fiction (with the odd exception like Haikasoru).

So when a translated work of sf does come along, it is still something notable. Sadly, though, Tears in Rain is not a good book.

It’s a common enough view (one for which I generally have little time) that “mainstream” writers who use sf tropes recycle them unimaginatively because they’re unfamiliar with how they have been used in the past. What concerns me more is when sf writers who do know the tropes are still content to just go through the motions – and this latter is what Tears in Rain feels like to me. But I would not consider Montero a genre sf writer, so why does her novel have such an air? I tried to explore something of this, albeit indirectly, in the review.

In my mind, I kept coming back to the idea of “off-the-shelf futures” that came up in the discussion of Paul Kincaid’s LA Review of Books piece (see the comments for his use of that term). I think that’s what we see in Tears in Rain: a kind of science-fictional future which is so familiar as an archetype that you don’t need to be steeped in knowledge of sf to draw on it – and one so familiar that it has no purchase on the imagination. This – coupled with a thriller plot that doesn’t thrill – is what’s at the root of Tears in Rain’s weaknesses.

Click here to read the review in full.

“Nowhere is exactly as you think it’s going to be”

31st January 2013 / / 9 Comments

Sam Thompson, Communion Town (2012)

Communion Town has a quote from China Miéville on the front. That’s handy, because it is just the sort of book I could imagine having a quote from China Miéville on the front – which is to say that it’s a speculative novel  (collection?) which is intensely about the city and the experience of urban life. In some ways, it is a conceptual opposite of Hawthorn & Child: where Keith Ridgway’s novel is all about thwarting and denying story, Sam Thompson’s debut is built on the premise that everyone has their own story – and, in a city, they all jostle up against one another.

So, we have ten stories/chapters, all set in the same fictional city (unnamed – Communion Town itself is one particular district, but the name also signals the idea of disparate people coming together in a single place). It’s a non-specific city, but feels less like a bit of everywhere thrown together than like a version of London whose reality has been stretched and twisted: there’s a metro rather than a Tube, and olive groves in the surrounding countryside, but the whole patchwork atmosphere of the place is very reminiscent of London. Thompson has a knack for coming up with evocative place names – Sludd’s Liberty, Cento Hill, Rosamunda – that further enhance the sense of untold stories taking place out of sight.

But what of the stories within sight? The first, entitled ‘Communion Town’, has echoes of Miéville in its tale of two asylum seekers interrogated by an unknown agency, a terrorist plot by a group called the Cynics, and talk of ‘monsters’ beneath the city streets. This is the first of many perceptual ambiguities in the book, and I have to say it’s one of the most harrowingly effective that I’ve come across in some time. Depending on what you interpret the ‘monsters’ to be, the implications of the ending range from uncomfortable to downright shocking.

Then we move to the second chapter, ‘The Song of Serelight Fair’, and suddenly we’re in a different world – or, rather, the same world, but filtered through the perspective of such different characters that it might as well be different. This is more of a love story, in which a student moves into the circles of a girl from a more privileged background, and soon finds himself out of his depth.  But, again, there’s that added fantastic dimension, this time waiters who appear and behave like automata, right down to having music emanating from their chests. Are they mechanical? People forced to wear costumes? Or – perhaps most chillingly – is this the way that the privileged set perceive those lower in the social order?

So the book continues, with each chapter providing a different window on this city, making the place anew in the process. ‘The Significant City of Lazarus Glass’ is a distilled golden-age detection, in which the city becomes a web of riddles and outlandish crimes – that’s if it isn’t just a giant memory palace. ‘The Rose Tree’ is a tall tale told down a café, which paints the city as a place of dark corners, where strange transformations await the unwary. ‘The City Room’ tells of a bright (though possibly haunted) childhood world, where the city of Thompson’s book may or may not be a boy’s home-made model.

Like, I suspect, many people, I first heard of Communion Town when it was longlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize. I hope that won’t be the last we hear of this fabulous kaleidoscope of a book – that its full story has yet to be told.

See also

  • Nina Allan’s review of Communion Town for Strange Horizons
  • Aishwarya Subramanian’s review at Practically Marzipan
  • Maureen Kincaid Speller’s review for WeirdFictionReview.com

January in Japan: Yoko Ogawa and Natsuo Kirino

25th January 2013 / / 8 Comments

Yoko Ogawa, Hotel Iris (1996/2010)
Translated by Stephen Snyder

Seventeen-year-old Mari is working at her mother’s hotel when a middle-aged man and a prostitute are thrown out for rowing and disturbing the other guests. Mari is drawn to the man, and starts to see him regularly; he tells her that he’s a Russian translator – the heroine of the novel he’s working on is even named Marie. The two enter into an intimate, masochistic relationship – which, naturally enough, can’t last forever.

Hotel Iris is a quiet book, and all the more powerful and disturbing for it. So thoroughly does Ogawa create the viewpoint of Mari as she’s drawn into the translator’s orbit, it’s a real jolt to be reminded that this man’s intentions are questionable at the very least. But what makes the novel particularly challenging to consider is that Ogawa is clear on the affair’s positive consequences for Mari, as well as the negative ones: it gives her an escape from being put-upon by her mother, however dangerous it might turn out to be. Hotel Iris is an uncomfortable read, in the best possible way.

Natsuo Kirino, The Goddess Chronicle (2008/12)
Translated by Rebecca Copeland

The latest title in the Canongate Myths series is inspired by the Japanese myth of Izanami and Izanagi – which isn’t a story I know, so inevitably I’m going to miss out on something here. But the intriguing thing for me is that The Goddess Chronicle is written by Natsuo Kirino, and at first glance seems quite different from a gritty urban novel like Out. But look closer, and similarities emerge: both books focus on female characters who try to escape a system designed to hold and define them.

Our narrator is Namima, whom we first meet as a servant of the goddess Izanami in the Realm of the Dead; Kirino’s novel is the story of how she got there. Namima is born on a tiny island, granddaughter of its spiritual leader, the Oracle. It’s a hereditary position, though Namima’s older sister Kamikuu is destined to become the next Oracle – and it’s not until Kamikuu takes over that Namima learns her preordained role as the Oracle’s sister: to watch over the island’s graveyard for the rest of her life, with no human contact. Namima tries to escape the island with the boy she loves – but tragedy strikes, and she finds herself in Izanami’s realm.

A number of stories overlap in The Goddess Chronicle. There’s Namima’s childhood on the island, which has a measured clarity tempered with a touch of strangeness. There is Namima’s sojourn in the world of the living as a wasp, a fine ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale. And there is the story of Izanami and her brother/lover/enemy Izanagi, which now has Namima as a witness. Their story provides a point of comparison and contrast with Namima’s own. All is wrapped up in clean prose that gives this engaging novel a mythic feel of its very own.

January in Japan is a blog event hosted by Tony’s Reading List. Click here for the index of my posts.

January in Japan: Project Itoh

20th January 2013 / / 4 Comments

Project Itoh, Harmony (2008/10)
Translated by Alexander O. Smith

I couldn’t take part in a theme month like January in Japan and not investigate some speculative fiction. The book I’m looking at today comes from Haikasoru, an imprint specialising in English translations of Japanese science fiction and fantasy.

First, in case the author is unfamiliar, some background: Project Itoh (real name Satoshi Ito) was a web designer and writer who died from cancer in 2009 at the age of 34, after many years of battling the diseade. He was working on Harmony whilst being treated in hospital, and questions about health and medical treatment are central to the novel.

After a cataclysmic event that devastated the world’s population, human life has come to be seen as the ultimate resource – so much so that traditonal governmental structures have largely been replaced by ‘admedistrations’, and most adults are injected with WatchMe, a nanotechnology which monitors the body and repairs all damage and illness. To abuse one’s health is, in effect, to vandalise public property.

But children don’t yet have WatchMe, and Tuan Kirie, its inventor’s daughter, has a friend who’s keen to take advantage of that. Miach Mihie wants to rebel, to retain soverignty over her own body – and the ultimate expression of that wish for Miach is to take her own life. She persuades Tuan and another friend to enter into a suicide pact – but only Miach succeeds.

As an adult, Tuan works for the Helix Inspection Agency (“the elite soldiers of lifeism,” p. 41), policing the good health of the world. But she’s partial to the odd cigar or other indulgence, and has a fake WatchMe that lets her get away with it. She can’t remain in glorious isolation forever, though, and invstigating a mass suicide leads Tuan to confront realities that cut uncomfortably close to home.

The great strength of Harmony is its capacity to dramatise questions of personal responsibility versus the common good (and who gets to decide what those terms mean), authoritarian intervention versus individual choice – and ultimately, perhaps, the question of what a life’s purpose should be. Every ‘side’ in the novel has a point, but each view also has its limitations – and the charachters’ actions may subtly turn them into the opposite of what they profess to want.

In some ways, the plot of Harmony may come across as overly simplistic, serving mainly as a vehicle for characters to meet and discuss the novel’s key issues. But it could also be seen as a sign of how deeply Itoh’s characters are enmeshed in a wider system, that what they do runs along these broadly generic lines that they can’t perceive. There’s also an equivalent of HTML for emotions peppered throughout the text (a chunk of narration might be bookended with and , for example. This is a further indication that, however much they may talk of determining their own destinies, Harmony‘s characters are trapped in even deeper ways than they can imagine.

More than any other book I’ve read since… New Model Army, actually, Harmony gave me the grand thrill of contemplating challenging ideas. It has stayed with me since I finished it, and I’m sure I will return to it in future. I’m also sure that I’ll want to read more by Project Itoh.

See also:
Adam Roberts’s review of Harmony for Strange Horizons, which also reflects on the place of medicine in modern science fiction.
The index of my January in Japan posts.

Finding a way out: Andrew Kaufman and Viola Di Grado

14th January 2013 / / 3 Comments

Andrew Kaufman, Born Weird (2013)
Viola Di Grado, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (2011/2)

I enjoy fantastic literature in all its forms, but to my mind there’s a unique elegance to works that bring the lightest touch of fantasy to the mundane, and do it well. It takes a fine hand to make that slight supernatural element feel essential but not inadequate. Andrew Kaufman has that sort of hand, and his new novel Born Weird might be his most fully achieved work yet.

When the Weird siblings were born, their grandmother Annie gave each a blessing: Richard would keep safe; Abba would have hope; Lucy wouldn’t get lost; Kent would win a fight; and Angie would always forgive. As is so often the way, though, these ‘blessings’ turned out to troublesome. Now, Annie Weird knows that she is about to die, and instructs Angie to bring her brothers and sisters together in the hospital at Annie’s moment of death, when she will undo her work.

Born Weird then becomes a novel about being trapped in your family’s shadow, which manifests in a very tangible way for the Weirds. Angie is angry with her grandmother in the hospital at first, but forgives her as soon as she’s down the corridor – not because she wants to, but because she can’t help it. Likewise, the other Weird siblings have been constrained in some way as to what they could do or who they could be – by both mundane and supernatural phenomena. The dexterity with which Kaufman moves back and forth across that line is a delight to behold.

The author also deploys humour and eccentricity with great effect. When Angie unites with her sister Lucy, she is struck by the latter’s bizarre haircut. We soon find out where it comes from: Nicola, the Weirds’ mother, has dementia, and believes herself to run a hair salon in her care home; her children may be customers, but she no longer knows them. This is the flipside of the supernatural: an all-too-real fantasy world from which there will be no return.

The Weirds’ lives may have a thread of magic, but their familial frictions (and joys) are very much grounded in reality. Born Weird is alive to the strengths and limitations of both approaches, and balances the two wonderfully.

***

Viola Di Grado’s first novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool (translated superbly by Michael Reynolds), also has a protagonist who feels trapped by her family situation, and, though there’s nothing overtly supernatural about it, the book has a hallucinatory quality all its own. Our protagonist is Camelia Mega, a young Italian woman who has lived in Leeds ever since her journalist father brought the family over to England a decade earlier – the same father who subsequently left to live with his mistress and then died in a car accident.

Camelia feels stranded in Leeds, and has the sense that winter just drags on and on:

Leeds winters are terribly self-absorbed; each one wants to be colder than its predecessor and purports to be the last winter ever. It unleashes a lethal wind full of the short sharp vowels of northern Englishmen but even harsher, and anyway, neither one of them speaks to me. (p. 9)

Whether it really is always winter in this version of Leeds is beside the point, because Camelia’s perception is what counts here. That paragraph I’ve quoted shows how fluidly her narration slides between the outside world, her inner world, and ruminations on language itself. Camelia has woven herself a kind of net out of language, and she can’t get out – she keeps comparing things to her father’s accident, as though she can’t bring herself to move on from it.

There is a glimpse of light on the horizon, though, in the shape of Wen, a boy from a local clothes shop who takes it upon himself to teach Camelia Chinese. This is a different kind of language for Camelia, where a word can change its meaning entirely depending on the tone in which it’s spoken. This gives her a sense that she can look at (and be in) the world differently, though Camelia doesn’t necessarily find it easy to let herself do so.

The Chinese system of writing with ideograms is also an ironic companion to the way Camelia communicates with her mother Livia: after her husband’s death, Livia became mute; she and Camelia now communicate via looks – though it’s not clear how much of it is really two-way, and there is the sense throughout that Livia mother is living her own life beyond her daughter’s knowledge, which contributes to Camelia’s sense of lacking control. Di Grado paints an incisive portrait of a character caught between holding on and letting go, unsure which is worse.

January in Japan: Ryu Murakami and Natsuo Kirino

4th January 2013 / / 17 Comments

Ryu Murakami, Piercing (1994/2007)
Natsuo Kirino, Out (1997/2004)

Kawashima Masayuki, the protagonist of Ryu Murakami’s Piercing (translated by Ralph McCarthy), stands over his baby daughter’s crib with an ice pick, testing his resolve not to use it. The full darkness beneath Kawashima’s outwardly happy family life is soon revealed, as we learn that he once stabbed a woman with an ice pick, and he’s afraid he’ll do so again to the baby. He convinces himself that the only way to deal with these feelings is to stab a stranger instead. So he checks into a hotel, calls for a prostitute, and waits.

The young woman who arrives is Sanada Chiaki, who has had her own demons to face in life, and is perhaps more than anything just looking to feel once again. What follows, in a chapter taking up fully half of this short novel, is a tense and fascinating game of power-plays. Our perspective shifts back and forth between Kawashima and Chiaki, as does the upper hand in a battle they don’t (at first) even know they are fighting. Both characters have their strengths and weaknesses, their resources and defences, and one can never be sure how this game will end. Piercing is deeply uncomfortable reading, certainly; but, as a portrait of two deeply damaged individuals, it’s also compelling.

Where Piercing is short and tight, Natsuo Kirino’s Out (translated by Stephen Snyder) is long and (relatively) roomy, but it shares a focus on individuals at extremes of behaviour. Four women work nights on the production lines of a boxed-lunch factory. In the heat of the moment, one kills her husband, driven to her wit’s end by his abuse. One of her colleagues, Masako Katori, takes charge of disposing of the body, gradually drawing the other women into the secret. Then the pressure is on to keep the killing hidden, from the police and other prying eyes.

For me, the character of Masako is the great strength of Kirino’s novel: psychologically, she’s quite ‘blank’ – even she doesn’t really understand what drives her to do what she does – which gives the book a similar sense of uncertainty to that Murakami achieves in Piercing by coming from the opposite direction (his protagonists are ‘known quantities’, but he creates uncertainty by bringing them together). As a thriller, Out has the same narrative momentum, and is perhaps even more dynamic as it shows greater change in its characters’ lives. But I find myself leaning towards Piercing as the more intense reading experience, with a study of character that bit sharper.

January in Japan is a blog event hosted by Tony’s Reading List.

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