Dead Water – Simon Ings

Having queried yesterday whether Sheri S Tepper’s The Waters Rising is in fact science fiction, one could pose the same question about Simon Ings’ Dead Water today. Certainly it does not immediately signal itself as such; in fact, if anything it looks more like a low-key thriller as the story gradually reveals a complex web of deceit involving the concealed movement around the world of shipments of toxic waste. Indeed, it is entirely possible to read the novel at this level, though I suspect anyone trying to do so will be more than a little irritated by the choppiness of the storytelling, as Ings moves back and forth through time, from character to character, place to place.

That choppiness, those waves of interference, form the central motif of this novel for they cannot be avoided even as the reader sinks down through the layers of storytelling. The story opens with the crash of the airship Italia after its successful crossing of the North Pole. The gondola splits open, depositing men and their equipment onto the ice. In an extraordinary act of heroism, the chief engineer, Arduino, empties as much in the way of supplies onto the ice as he can before he, the airship and the remaining crew members are swept away, never to be found. His quick thinking ensures that at least some of the survivors will hang on long enough to be rescued. However, one who will not return is Lothar Eling, the expedition’s meteorologist, who perishes during an attempt to fetch help.

His notebook is returned to his friend and mentor, Professor Jakob Dunfjeld, the man with whom he has been working, trying to understand how to model the weather.

*In Norwegian waters the difference between water layers is so marked, as regards their temperature, salinity, and density, that is a simple matter to determine their boundaries, as well as their respective movements. (10)

Elling has noted this during experiments which involve jumping into Arctic waters, clutching a weight, then rising upwards through the layers, but it is only on the point of death that he realises that waves also occur at the interfaces between individual layers. More than that, he realises that cavitation – the failure of a propeller to work properly as it passes through the the air/water interface – also occurs as the propeller passes through sharply differentiated layers of water. It chops them up but the boat will make no headway, trapped as it is in the waves between layers of water. ‘Dead water’, the sailors call it. This insight he writes down and it is later promoted by Dunfjeld as a development of his own work, the Dunfjeld Circulation Theorem:

*If it is unbounded – wrapped, say, round a globe, where every forward impulse is also a return – then pertubations will disrupt even an ideal frictionless fluid. (12)

This, then, is the elaborate metaphor which underlies the stories of three people: Roopa Vish, a private investigator; Eric Moyse, a shipping magnate, and David Brooks, a former British intelligence agent whose current occupation is not entirely clear. The connections between the three of them are not immediately clear but gradually, as the story progresses, as the reader rises and falls through the layers of narrative, through the layers of dead water, she begins to realise that an almost incomprehensible deception is being carried out, though only a small part of it is ever visible to the people involved.

The form of the deception is ingenious. After World War Two, Eric Moyse, inspired by something he saw in wartime London, has begun to develop the idea of container shipping, buying ex-wartime vessels , stacking them with metal storage boxes and slowly but surely moving cargo round the world. He has also come to realise that empty space, something he often has in abundance, is a useful way of concealing things, and thus he develops his own private enterprise, Dead Water, to conceal those things that nations want concealed, such as toxic waste. Secretive, refusing to divulge the details of his scheme to anyone, Moyse has built up a secret shipping line within the publicly visible company. After Moyse mysteriously vanishes, the waste continues to travel around the world until one of Moyse’s ships is hijacked by pirates.

Moyse concealed information on his business in a red notebook, the same red notebook which Eling took to the Pole with him, and which Moyse acquired from Vibeke Dunfjeld, with whom he had been helplessly and unrequitedly in love. The red notebook bobs up in the book time and again, floating on the tide of story, a marker for the circulatory currents which shape the narrative. We see Moyse take the book when, having finally located Viebeke, on a housing estate in Wales, his ill-advised visit is suddenly interrupted by a flood. The journal passes briefly to his adopted son, Vibeke’s natural son by another man, before returning to Moyse. Moyse himself disappears, only to reappear thirty years later when a container is washed ashore after the 2004 tsunami, splitting open to reveal his mummified body.

Roopa Vish has spent most of her adult life trying to track down and destroy a crime syndicate spread across India, first as a police officer and then, later, disgraced and also disfigured, as a private detective seeking revenge as much as a resolution to her case. The reader knows what Roopa does not, that her adversary is long since dead, and that try as she might, she can never finally resolve the case. Her rage drives her own, with great tenacity, although her life has already been destroyed by her determination to have justice. The reader trails her through a horrifying landscape of corruption, contamination and violence, in which life seems unbelievably cheap and no one cares. In many respects, it is only her ignorance that keeps Roopa alive, because the nature of what she is chasing has changed so much in the time she has been chasing it. She does not know it but like Moyse’s containers, she is being circulated. But by whom?

David Brooks is a sharp operator, having spent his life babysiting Arab sheikhs in exile and undertaking other unpleasant little tasks. Affable, slightly boring, he is the quintessential ex-pat; hard to believe that he can be anything else as he wanders through the Middle East and Far East like some sort of latter-day Lord Jim, always moving on along. What he is to the Moyse shipping line and it to him remains unclear; is he exploiting it, or blackmailing it. Like Roopa he is in circulation, but seemingly under his own steam.

There is no end to this story, of course. The novel covers only a part of it, because every forward impulse, as already noted, is also a return, and for every Roopa lost, every sailor and small-time operator discarded, there will be another. No one, not even Eric Moyse himself, was invulnerable; he could be put out of circulation as easily as he kept other things in circulation. Others can exploit his knowledge so long as they have sight of the red notebook.

This is an extraordinarily complex novel – I really felt I should be annotating it with flurries of multi-coloured post-it notes, to track the swirls and eddies of the narrative as it moves through the layers of plot, looping round on itself all the time. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of momentary encounters between characters, each slight movement pushing the story on. What is clear as the novel comes to a conclusion is the terrible inevitability of what is happening throughout. People struggle to act according to their own desires but they are already a part of a much deeper pattern of movement over which they have no control. They are becalmed or swept along, turned back on themselves, or else suddenly, inexplicably dashed onto the shore. There is no end, only deaths, casualties and more participants to be swept out to sea.

Is Dead Water science fiction? I think so. Not, obviously, in the classic genre mould, using instantly recognisable tropes, but science fiction nonetheless, because of this apprehension of deeper things moving and the use of meteorological theory to account for it, the sense of the world itself as some sort of strange entity.

The Waters Rising – Sheri S Tepper

Where to begin with Sheri S Tepper’s The Waters Rising? Where to begin, indeed. I have yet to come across anyone with anything positive to say about this novel. It seems to have been universally panned by critics and readers, and its appearance on the Clarke Award shortlist was greeted with disbelief, not least because many people are convinced that it is fantasy rather than science fiction.

Certainly, as the novel opens, it does indeed look like a fantasy novel. Abasio, helpfully described in the ‘Cast of Characters’ as ‘a wanderer with a mysterious mission’ and his horse, ‘Big Blue’, described as ‘a horse with a history’, are travelling along a road, observed by a troop of supposedly hidden archers. Blue is the talking horse with a taste for bad puns whose presence seems to have exercised so many commentators; and yes, the puns are pretty awful, as is the arch backchat as he and Abasio make their escape from the troop of archers. We are presumably to understand that this is an old established relationship, a couple who are comfortable with one another. Talking horses also suggests Narnia, and one might think of Blue as a descendant of the vain and silly Bree in The Horse and His Boy. However, I found myself thinking about Christopher Stasheff’s The Warlock in Spite of Himself, Rod Gallowglass and his talking robot horse, Fess, and for much of the early part of the novel I waited for Blue to do something more … well, significant, because what is the point of creating a talking horse if you aren’t going to do something amazing with it?

Abasio and Blue are traversing a strange, empty semi-flooded landscape as they make their way to a place called Woldsgard. Their conversation suggests that water levels are rising fast, though the cause of this rising seems to be uncertain. (Indeed, I was never quite clear of the explanation for this flooding as it seemed to originate not with the melting of polar icecaps but had more to do with water deep underground being released, which made not a jot of geological sense so far as I could see, not least because water does find its level.) The wilderness is exchanged in short order for a bucolic landscape, a castle with grounds and a vegetable garden, and placenames that sound as though they’ve come from a William Morris fantasy, or indeed from Mirrlees Lud-in-the-Mist. The names of the people – Oldwife Gancer, Crampocket Cullen – do little to dispel this sense of having stumbled into a once and future England.

And then Abasio encounters a ‘small brown person’ sitting in a tree. Shades of Puck of Pook’s Hill, perhaps? Then comes an enigmatic paragraph.

*He blinked, He saw a child. But he also saw something  … as though the child stood within some larger, older embodiment, crystalline, barely visible … invisible. He blinked again. It was gone. One of those temporal twists that sometimes proved true? Or not? (4)

So, child with hidden secret suggests fantasy, while something larger, older, crystalline, suggests something more science-fictional reinforced by the mention of a ‘temporal twist’, which is not the kind of comment one expects in a fantasy novel. It positions Abasio as someone unusual, as if the presence of a talking horse and the comment in the Cast of Characters hadn’t already done that, yet this paragraph is followed by a lengthy sequence in which Abasio assists the small brown person, revealed as Xulai (and she goes to great lengths to explain to Abasio how her name is pronounced in ‘our language’, to establish herself as ‘other’, thus confirming that ‘brown’ does indeed refer to skin colour), as she carries out a task for her mistress, the Woman Upstairs, who is dying.

This task involves a journey from the castle into the woods, in the dark, to fetch something from a mysterious shrine. It is a dangerous task for a small child and Abasio determines to help Xulai, although not without first delivering a homily about overcoming one’s fears. Needless to say, with Abasio’s silent help, Xulai completes her task, and is then concealed by him when they encounter Alicia, Duchess of Altamont and her confidant, Jenger, searching the woods. And somewhere in all this, Xulai has suddenly acquired a talking chipmunk, which now resides in her pocket.

By this point it is already becoming difficult to take this novel seriously, but one perseveres as Xulai confidingly takes Abasio back to the castle with her and to her mistress’s room. There is the sense that Abasio already knows what is going on but the authorial focus has suddenly shifted to Xulai. This is the first instance of a trick that Tepper will pull several times during the novel, casually discarding a viewpoint character as her interest moves elsewhere. It leaves the reader gasping, feeling oddly cheated.

By this point it is, however, clear that there is something odd about Xulai, and something odd about the manner of Xu-i-Lok’s death. The assumption is that she has been cursed, but it would seem that her death has been willed by Alicia, Duchess of Altamont, for purposes that aren’t initially clear. Xulai was brought from Tingawa as a young child to take on the role of soul carrier when it became clear that Xu-i-Lok was dying, and now that Xu-i-Lok is dead, she must carry out her task. The suggestion too is that Abasio has not arrived by chance, not to judge from the ease with which he assimilates himself into the Duke’s household. It comes as no surprise, therefore, when almost immediately the Duke determines to send Xulai away from Woldsgard, first to Wilderbook Abbey, and then home to Tingawa. This reinforces the idea of The Waters Rising as a classic fantasy novel, with Xulai as the special child marked by a destiny, surrounded by a dedicated group of supporters, blessed with talking familiars and sought by her enemies.

However, it is also clear that this is not quite a classic fantasy world. There are many references to the Before Time, and to ease machines and manuals, to killing machines, to a belief that two of the moons are artificial satellites, and references to what is clearly genetic manipulation (which puts the business of the talking horse in a new light). And what about Abasio’s so-called library helmet? So is this novel a science fantasy, along the lines of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon books. It might be, or it might not be. And this is one of the novel’s major flaws. Tepper doesn’t seem to have been able to make up her mind whether this is a novel in which the characters gradually make discoveries about this mysterious ‘Before Time’ of which they seem only vaguely aware, or whether The Waters Rising is a novel in which the characters are well aware of what they have lost and are working to recover that knowledge. Instead, we have this uncomfortable halfway house in which characters intermittently use the language of complex technology without seeming to be fully aware of what they’re talking about while apparently also being very clear what it is they’re doing, even if they have cutesy names for the machines that no longer quite work. One is almost left with the sense that the characters have been playing dumb for the reader until, caught off guard, they suddenly slip out of their roles and start showing they know precisely what they’re about.

On top of this, and this becomes much more evident as the novel unfolds, the recovery of knowledge is placed mainly in the hands of one race, the Tingawa, who act for the good of all humanity, dealing with the dangerous technologies of the past. It doesn’t seem to occur to Tepper that she has effectively created a group of Magic Asians, skilled in technology, rescuing the ignorant white-skinned from their own technical follies. One can only presume that Tepper thinks she is sidestepping certain stereotypes by standing them on their head, so to speak, but in doing so she actually reinforces the othering she is apparently trying to avoid. Not that there was much chance of avoiding this as Xulai is already firmly positioned in the text as being different in almost every way you can think of.

If the racial element weren’t bad enough, there is the issue of just how old Xulai actually is. This has been a source of uncertainty since the beginning of the novel when the child appears to be variously four or five, seven or eight, nine or ten, and Abasio, when he comforts her, frequently comments for the benefit of the reader about the oddly inappropriate feelings he harbours towards her. One wondered quite why and indeed how Tepper would deal with this apparent latent paedophilia until it is revealed that Xulai is in fact much older but has been concealing this fact through some sort of unexplained magical skill in order to hide from her enemies. Thus, as she’s really twenty, it’s been fine for Abasio to feel as he does because he instinctively knows she is much older than she looks. Again, I am quite sure this is not what Tepper intended but it comes over as frankly very sleazy indeed.

The narrative is already struggling to keep itself together when the party is despatched to deliver Xulai to Wilderbook Abbey where she will supposedly continue her education. The journey is tedious, as is the account of the journey, with a complex series of separations and reunitings as the party seeks to avoid detection by Alicia, Duchess of Altamont. The problem for the reader is that it is so perfectly obvious what is going on one wonders why on earth Tepper needs to go through this elaborate charade to demonstrate the reality of it to the characters. Indeed, pacing will prove to be an issue throughout the novel as the narration becomes progressively slower and slower. The journey from Woldsgard to Wilderwood is also distressingly reminiscent of various lengthy journeys in Lord of the Rings, a similarity enhanced by the way in which Xulai’s protector, the Great Bear of Zol, is persuaded to betray her, only to redeem himself through death much later on.

Wilderwood Abbey is less a place of sanctuary than one might anticipate. The size of the place is extraordinary – supposedly, it houses 8,000 people, though where they all come from and how they are supported in a countryside populated with tiny hamlets and small towns, is anyone’s guess. There is a whole sub-plot in which it is revealed that the Prior is in cahoots with Alicia while the inevitably kindly Abbot is clueless as to what is happening but is protected and assisted by others among the Elders. It is here that Xulai is kidnapped by Jenger, Alicia’s confidant, but assumes her powers and escapes with Abasio, fleeing for Merhaven. By this time, however, the narrative viewpoint has shifted again, to Precious Wind, Xulai’s tutor, who is suddenly revealed to be a competent fighter and tactician, not to mention being cognisant of how some of the machines to which Alicia has access actually work. It is she who organises the removal of Prior Robert and Alicia’s other supporters before she leaves with the wolf pack she has meanwhile been training, also heading for Merhaven, where a Tingawan ship awaits.

Already, the novel has drifted a long way from its opening chapters. Although it is clear that Xulai is indeed special in some way she seems to be only one player in a vast web of conspiracy. Indeed, it is clear that Alicia and her mother Marimi are plotting to take control of the world, through a series of strategic marriages. The final part of the plan had been for Alicia to marry Justinian, although, anticipating trouble, he has already gone into hiding. Beyond that, Alicia seems to be hell-bent on derailing Mirami’s plans because she is obsessed with the presence of the Tingawa and is distracted into a sub-plot involving killing all Tingawa in Norland.

One might suppose that the Tingawa having escaped Norland, taking with them Abasio and Justinian, who suddenly reappears, the story is at an end. Xulai’s purpose will be revealed and everyone will live happily ever after within certain parameters involving the rising sea levels. However, Tepper seems unwilling to end the story, which now takes a sharp turn from the messy and disorganised towards the simply deranged. Tepper has been prone throughout the novel to have characters deliver lectures and homilies but this is taken to a whole new level when, having finally reached ‘home’, Xulai is summoned to meet the King of the Sea People, a kraken, who delivers a long and impassioned speech about the future of humanity once the sea levels rise, and how experimentation has been carried out to determine which animals might best survive surgery and genetic manipulation in order to take to the seas again (this apparently explains why Blue is a talking horse, though not so far a swimming horse), before revealing that Xulai has the ability to live on land or on sea, and can change herself into a cephalopod. More than that, as she produces sea eggs, she has the capacity to help others change too. I could go on but the science of this is so questionable as to be utterly risible. Is Tepper seriously suggesting this as a way forward if sea levels rise? God alone knows but it makes very little sense in either fictional or scientific terms. This might also be the place to note that tweeness sets in irredeemably as the Sea king shows Xulai around his world. The cuteness burns, it does. 

As if that weren’t enough, the party has to return to Norland in order to finally despatch the Old Dark Man, the mysterious mentor of both Mirami and Alicia, who turns out to be a relic of the Before Times, a slaugherer – and this incidentally involves another long moral tale about how the world fell apart in the Before Times. Will this novel never end? It does in fact finally draw to a close in a brave new world in which those who swallow sea eggs can sire merfolk, and one assumes everyone lives happily if soggily ever after.

It’s hard to find any redeeming features in this book. It’s too long and the prose is very poor. To take one sample near the beginning ‘a dilapidated ferry teetered on the wavelets’, leading one to wonder just what kind of water they have on this world. A little later, Abasio’s wagon is ‘hung all over with a jangle of ladles and vats that should have clanked like an armorer’s workshop as the wagon had come towards her if it hadn’t all been tied down’. It’s like this all the way through the novel.

Tepper seems to have only the haziest idea of how her world is put together. On the one hand we have the post-catastrophe bucolic Norland, with its place names drawn from Morris and Tolkien and other English fantasies, set against the faux-Asian Tingawa or Thousand Islands. But to confuse matters Abasio lets slip at one point that Norland was once composed of countries called things like Florda, leaving one to wonder exactly how the USA underwent this transformation. Is this a fantasy world or a far future Earth in denial?

As already noted, Tepper seems to have an equally hazy idea of plotting and storytelling. There is actually a story of sorts in here, one that deals with the survival of technology that is now being used and abused by trial and error, mainly abused, the result being that technology is bad, except when the good people use it, whereupon it is alright after all, but the villains mustn’t be allowed near it. There is a vague stab at portraying Alicia, Duchess of Altamont as a young woman who has herself been used and abused, more to be pitied and despised, but not so much that she can be offered redemption. Only the intrinscally good can receive that. The bad guys must and do die; the moral landscape is that crude and basic.

However, what comes over most strongly is a sense that Tepper is picking things up and putting them down when she gets bored with them. She wanders from character to character, telling a bit of their story and then moving on to something and someone else. The story’s pacing is so slow as to be unendurable. One longs for excitement. Even the big dramatic set-pieces, such as there are, continue at the same funereal pace, and more than once the story suddenly jumps over an event from beginning to aftermath, without dealing with the bit in the middle.

In the end, I am forced to conclude that with a good following wind, in a bright light, and if you squint in the right way, The Waters Rising is just about categorisable as an sf novel, if only because it is impossible to ignore the quantity of technology that turns up in it. But I’d be lying if I said it was a good sf novel, much as I’d be lying if I said it was a good fantasy novel. What it is doing on the Arthur C Clarke Award’s shortlist is anyone’s guess.

Osama – Lavie Tidhar

With hindsight, I did not do justice to Lavie Tidhar’s Osama the first time I reviewed it. I loved it – it was one of my favourite novels of last year – but I did not do it justice, rather as I suspect I am about to fail to do it justice all over again.

A feature of those of Tidhar’s novels that I’ve read so far is the way in which they draw on his own prodigious knowledge of genre fiction, and not just science fiction. Intertextual references abound in his work; at times it can be like taking part in a literary treasure hunt, though at other times one can walk away feeling like an ignorant fool. In The Bookman and its sequels, the references are blatant, not surprisingly, given the nature of the eponymous character, and there is a sense that the reader is engaged in a pleasant battle of wits with the author to collect the set.

But in Osama Tidhar’s engagement with fiction in general and genre in particular is an altogether more serious business, though this doesn’t prevent him from once again playing intertextual games. And here I should note that while it is possible to manage without spotting most of the references, it would have helped me first time around had I been just a little more familiar with Philip K Dick’s The Man In The High Castle.

Joe, the novel’s central character, is a private detective in Vientiane, Laos. We learn very little about him other than that he is fond of the Osama novels by one Mike Longshott. They’re clearly a generic series, Longshott is probably a pseudonym, possibly even a team of writers. Anyone familiar with the history of genre writing knows how this works. Excerpts from the novels are interspersed between chapters; terse, laconic descriptions of actions and events, recognisable as bomb outrages that have occurred in the reader’s world, suggesting some odd connections already.

Then a woman arrives in Joe’s office, asking him to search for Mike Longshott and Joe begins a curious odyssey across the world, hunting for a man who has covered his trail well, so well one might wonder whether he exists at all. I use the word ‘odyssey’ advisedly, because it seems that there are certain similarities between these two wanderers, undergoing strange adventures but somehow never quite coming closer to the truth, or finding a way home. There is a touch too of Orpheus about Joe, descending into some private underworld, hoping to bring back … who? The strange fading girl he encounters first in Paris, as he searches for Longshott’s publisher, Papadopoulous? Someone else.

And what of Joe himself, this fictional everyman, plagued with memories of having been to places before though believing himself not to have previously visited them. Gradually we come to realise that Joe’s world is not ours but an alternative world, but how many worlds are there. He seems to be slipping from one universe to another, most of them similar, distinguishable from one another and from the home world of the reader by small details and discrepancies, easily missed or discarded.

When Joe himself employs a private eye to help him in London, he describes Mo as having a ‘grubby, well-used look, like a paperback’.  We might even wonder then if this whole adventure is an act of imagination by a Vientiane detective with time on his hands and a penchant for reading genre fiction. Is any of this happening or does Joe still have his feet up on his desk at home as he places himself in one of the novels he loves so much. Given I have mentioned The Man in the High Castle, readers familiar with it may have worked out by now what seems to be going on and guessed that there is a reason why Joe seems to have little ‘reality’ beyond what is happening to him at any given moment. One could of course lay out a case for Joe’s having come to some sort of self-awareness within the fiction he inhabits and he is now literally trying to find himself.

There are, though, other things going on in this story. The novel’s name is a powerful indicator of this. One perhaps feels a slight sense of shock at seeing a novel named after the great bogeyman of the west. What light does it shed to see him cast as the ‘hero’ of a series of novels? It perhaps reminds us that however abhorrent his acts might seem there is more than one side to this story, and in this instance Joe literally stands on the other side of that story, although the veil between the worlds seems to be thinning all the time.

And that perhaps is the most interesting thing about this novel for me, the way in which it engages with theories of genre and reading, through the form of the novel itself. At least, I think that is part of what Tidhar is doing. The novel constantly collapses in on itself, like a wave on the shore, only to return again and again, building gradually to a revelation that is as inevitable as it is shocking. What delighted me so much about this novel when I first read it was its shape-shifting quality, the way in which it constantly reinvented itself. I liked too the way in which the novel explored how readers engage with the fiction they love. There is even a convention for fans of the Osama books, where people gather to speculate about the identity of Mike Longshott and deliver learned papers on the topic.

That is one form of fantasy, of course, and we have already speculated that the novel may indeed be Joe’s own fantasy, but similarly, the possibility remains that we are ourselves trapped in a book, looking out of the pages into a very different world. In the end, how can we ever know? The refusal to permit certainty lies at the heart of this novel as Tidhar posits a series of interleaved worlds that from time to time bleed into one another, complicating the reader’s perspective. It’s an ingenious and very subtle utilisation of that old sf trope of the alternate world, invigorated by the energy of Tidhar’s storytelling.

Cyber Circus – Kim Lakin-Smith

The circus and the carnival seem to be very popular subjects in sf again at present, perhaps in part because of the recent reinvention of steampunk. There has been a whole slew of novels , among them Geneieve Valentine’s Mécanique, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, Robert Jackson Bennett's The Troupe, and Kim Lakin-Smith’s Cyber Circus.

Cyber Circus is something of a misnomer for what appears to be a steam-powered flying vessel which is also a fully equipped circus. It does not appear to be an airship but neither is it a plane. The cover illustration suggests a ship with the big top acting also as a sail, which only goes to show how strangely difficult it is to visual so extraordinary a object, particularly given some of the feats it will later perform, such as travelling through underground tunnels. While Lakin-Smith does describe its various features it remains difficult to get a sense of it as an entity. Whether or not this is intentional, I don’t know. One would like to believe that the circus perhaps has some kind of strange interdimensionality to account for this elusiveness, but given what takes place in the rest of the novel, I doubt this is so. Similarly, it would be pointless to query the physics of the Cyber Circus’s ability to fly. Fictional physics is very accommodating, so the Cyber Circus does what the novel requires of it.

Indeed, the technology of this alternative 1930s dustbowl America is generally a little difficult to grasp. Genetic engineering seems to exist in some sort of haphazard fashion, likewise cybernetic engineering that doesn’t rely on steam power. Various characters have been altered and enhanced, but rather crudely, and it is clear there is a thriving street trade in body parts, blood and so forth. Quite where all this comes from is unclear; again, it exists to drive along the plot and it is pretty much pointless to query this strange mish-mash of background details.

The Cyber Circus itself seems to own its inspiration in part to Jonathan Dark’s carnival in Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and in part to Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr Lao. The literary circus and carnival traditionally signify disruption to the conventional social order, to the extent that they are almost institutionally transgressive. They appear out of nowhere, providing glamour, strange wonders, a break from the normal routine, but also offering the possibilities of temptation or moral redemption. The circus, we are led to understand, is a force for change. Nothing can ever be quite the same after such a visit.

In Cyber Circus, we travel with its performers, and it is outsiders who represent a threat. In this instance, D’Angelus, a brothel-keeper, is anxious to reclaim his property, Nim, an enhanced woman who travels with the circus. Quite how she left D’Angelus is not clear but what is clear is that D’Angelus anticipates a fight to get her back, not least because he has also decided to steal Rust the Wolf-Girl. Hellequin, the Hawkeye, an enhanced soldier, and Pig Heart, a man who is now part pig, having received a pig’s heart, are equally determined to stop them, Hellequin because he is somehow in love with Nim, while Pig Heart loves Rust. That it is Pig Heart who has betrayed the circus to D’Angelus so that he can retrieve Nim is beside the point.

When D’Angelus and his men are turned off the circus vessel without their prizes, they determine to take their revenge and follow the Cyber Circus in a digging machine, from which they stage a series of attacks on the circus folk, trying again to kidnap Nim and Rust. And this is where the novel’s problems really begin because that, pretty much, is the plot, although for variety various other members of the circus crew are held captive and then rescued. As I noted with God’s War last night, it is as though the plot can only be moved forward by an act of violence, which means that the narrative is mostly a repetitive series of acts of violence, with occasional interpolations, such as a sudden recollection by Hellequin of his early life. The final showdown in the underground cavern ever-so-slightly rings the changes, because at last something different is happening – here, the Scuttlers, a group of genetically altered insect-like children, assist in the watering of the circus vessel by dragging a hose to the lake and discover a ghostly man, the one-time fiancé of the mysterious Zen monk who has previously boarded the circus and been revealed as a woman, and the two are finally reunited, while the Scuttlers themselves find a sanctuary that until that moment I hadn’t realised they wanted.

The circus meanwhile sails off across the horizon, but the magic has dissipated, and not I think as part of an intentional act on the writer’s part. It is more as though it has dwindled away because there is nothing left to do with it. There is no sense of cathartic release or of redemption; the circus just keeps on going, not even providing a metaphor for the relentlessness or hopelessness of life.

The problem is not so much that the plot is disorganised, although it does seem to flail at times, more that knowledge and events are brought into play only at the moment they’re needed rather than the groundwork being laid earlier in the novel ready for their emergence at the appropriate moment. And so much is focused on the chase that there seems to be little left to spare for more firmly defining the characters on the page. Yes, we learn things about them but rarely as a natural development of the plot. In fact, the characters are quite fascinating but much more needs to be done with them. At present they stand against a backdrop of ‘atmospheric’ writing’ that doesn’t always make sense and do comparatively little.

The biggest pity of this is that Lakin-Smith is quite clearly capable of producing something so much better. Cyber Circus is accompanied by a short story, ‘Black Sunday’, set in the same alternate universe, and prior to Cyber Circus. It is everything the novel is not: tightly written, good characterisation, strong plotting, and a much greater sense that Lakin-Smith understands her world, physics and all. If she could only have brought this into Cyber Circus it would have been so much better. As it, the novel reads like a short story stretched too thinly, while the short story is much more satisfying to read.

God's War – Kameron Hurley

Three things counted against Kameron Hurley’s God’s War before I started reading it. I mention this now so that my prejudices, such as they are, lie cleanly in the open. First, I had read Hurley’s short story, ‘Afterbirth’, and had not been impressed with it. It seemed to be messy, disorganised, and tapping into a style of feminist sf that I personally considered to be old-fashioned. If, as I gathered, it was set in the same universe as God’s War, it didn’t inspire confidence. Secondly, Paul Kincaid had read the novel and had not been impressed by it. We don’t agree about everything but we have tastes sufficiently in common that I usually pay attention to his views. Thirdly, I had become sick and tired of people behaving as though God’s War was a herald of the Second Coming. I have a strong distaste for hype, and the more people go on about something the less inclined I am to read it immediately.

The corollary of ignoring things that people make too much fuss about is that when I do come to them, at my own leisure, it is often to find that while the novel in question is not that bad, neither is it as wonderful as everyone claims. Here I might point to Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow which is a perfectly blameless sf novel so far as it goes, but it does not go as far as everyone claimed at the time. It was, though, clearly a zeitgeist novel, and I have come to the conclusion that the same may be so for God’s War. In fact, let me start by saying that God’s War was rather more enjoyable to read than I had been anticipating after ‘Afterbirth’. On the other hand, I am still slightly at a loss to understand the level of fuss it has generated. It has flashes of brilliance but in many respects it is not particularly exceptional, and in one or two places it is downright flawed.

At the centre of the story is Nyx, formerly a bel dame or, if you like, government-sponsored assassin, who now works as a bounty hunter, along with a hand-picked team, mostly people she has poached from other bounty hunters. The setting is Umamya, described by another character as a post-Haj world, which points towards there having been some sort of interstellar Islamic migration, though the nature of this is left unclear. Nasheen and Chenja, we are led to understand, have been at war for at least a century, so much so that the war has effectively become an institution; it appears to be being fought over religious matters but it is extremely difficult to tell what the issues are.. All the young men of Nasheen, Nyx’s home country, are obliged to serve until they are forty; participation in public life is contingent on this. However, they are only one part of the story. There are also what are termed ‘magicians’, who seem to be scientists with a particular expertise in genetic engineering, and mercenaries. This is not only a men’s war. Nasheen is a matriarchal society, for reasons that are also not entirely clear. Women can serve at the front, and Nyx is among those who did so. Other women participate in the breeding programmes to ensure a regular supply of new fighters.

Nyx’s life has been shaped by her experiences at the front. She has a casual, approach to life, death, sex, drink, religion, violence and so on. Effectively, all she knows how to do is to kill, which she does well. About the rest she is entirely fatalistic. Yet one can sense too her dissatisfaction with this even as she knows that there is currently no way out of such a life. She has been brutalised by her experiences but there is no undoing of them.

Paul Kincaid has elsewhere raised objections to the way in which Hurley presents this war. Economically, logistically, it makes no sense at all and seems to be effectively unsustainable. But as with the effects of Maternal Death Syndrome in Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb, which is in some respects a crisis of fictional convenience, so is this a war of fictional convenience, always in the background, coming forward as and when needed to make a particular dramatic point but mostly kept at a scenic distance. There is no point in interrogating its wherewithal; it is almost a war of the mind, something intended to maintain a strong sense of nationhood, and the reader might almost suspect it isn’t really happening except that there is just enough evidence to suggest that it is.

Nyx, as I noted earlier, was once a bel dame, part of a government network of assassins, but was thrown out after a previous incident. Thus, she is surprised to be summoned to the palace to be given a task, to hunt down a missing alien visitor, who has access to genetic technology which, so the Queen believes, can put an end to the war. It is, though, a question of who gets to her first. The Queen has summoned a number of other bounty hunters, all of whom have so far failed to locate the woman. The mystery is why she has not used the bel dames. It quickly becomes clear that the bel dames themselves have become factionalised, some working for the queen, some against, and that they are also unofficially hunting for the missing alien, but also planning to put Nyx and her team out of the picture altogether.

One cannot help likening the bel dames to Frank Herbert’s Bene Gesserit, although their methods are perhaps less sophisticated and their aims less long-term. Nonetheless, there is the sense of their need to meddle in politics and shape the country’s destiny. One suspects this will come to the fore again in the sequel. The politics generally are very murky, again broadly sketched, with much hand-waving. Much is left unexplained, not leas the presence of off-worlders. Among the nations of Umamya, only Nasheen seems to have pursued a matriarchal route. While in Chenja men seem to be the dominant gender, and in the other countries one has the sense that the situation is similar to a greater or lesser degree, it is in Nasheen that men dare not walk the streets for fear of violence, doubly so if, as in the case of Rhys, Nyx’s magician, they come from Chenja. The role reversal is, to be honest, rather crude for most of the time, and something I associate with an earlier wave of feminist sf writing, which settled for simply switching the roles of men and women. One wonders what kind of point is being made by having women veterans simply swaggering around in bars, taking on roles occupied by men in other countries. One might hope for something more subtle, but I can’t determine whether Hurley is trying to suggest that the whole of Umamya is so brutalised by the war nothing else can be expected, or whether this is something unique to Nasheen’s culture, and that everything is expressed through fighting.

It might point towards a deeper tension in the novel between the broadly sketched  background and the close-up focus on Nyx and her team. Stripped of the war, the gender politics and so on,  the bounty hunters nonetheless remain as a powerful force on the page. Apart from Nyx, there is Rhys, a mysterious refugee from Chenja and an at best adequate magician; Kosh and Anneke, who are ‘shifters’ or shape changers, and Taite, the comms man. Misfits one and all, with back stories they mostly prefer not to talk about, as the novel unwinds the reader comes to understand more of what drives them. Kosh, for example, moves boy children to safety in other countries using a network of brothels.

Rhys is similarly interesting, in part for his desire to become a magician, able to control insects, in part for the oddly tender relationship that he and Nyx form, based in part on a mutual antipathy, in part on an inexplicable need for one another’s company, and perhaps summed up in Nyx’s constant request to him to read to her from the Kitab, the holy book. There is a sense, perhaps, that Rhys represents that finer part of herself that she can no longer find.

The mysterious ‘bug tech’ that pervades the novel is one of the most fascinating things about the whole novel. One assumes that the earlier magicians (why magicians, one asks; what went wrong with ‘scientist’ other than that someone somewhere took Clarke’s Third Law very much to heart[1]) worked with whatever they had to hand, in this case insects before moving on to other forms of genetic engineering. The technology is all-pervasive but there is little indication of how it works, other than that magicians seem to have a greater propensity than ordinary people to somehow communicate with insects, and that the insects have acquired various extra functions.

But is such novelty enough to rescue the narrative from other awkwardness? As it stands, I am doubtful whether it is. I am bothered by this portrayal of a world that we are obviously intended to read as Islamic, with its mixture of cultures, all of which revolve around a holy book, the Kitab (Arabic for book, and apparently also a synonym for the Quran), and most of which place women in a subordinate position, with only Nasheen as a fairly crude sort of counter. The religious and gender politics would bear a much more detailed unpicking than I have time for here. I wondered frequently as I read the novel whether I wasn’t reading some sort of broad-brush Anglo-American perception of an Islamic-style world but without knowing more about Hurley, what can I say?

I am bothered too by the awkward construction of this novel. It feels as though in places it has been patched together. Part One, the first five chapters, has an entirely different feel to the rest of the novel. The narrative seems to start only fifty pages into the novel. This might also go some way to explaining the oddity of ‘Afterbirth’, a story that seemed neither to begin or end properly. Paul Kincaid has also noted that the plot is always moved on by an act of violence, and he is correct in this. The number of times members of the group are kidnapped, imprisoned and rescued is remarkable, not to mention statistically implausible; clearly, there have to be other ways to move the plot forward, if only to suggest that the team are the competent bounty hunters they are supposed to be (though they are undoubtedly skilled at escape).

And yet, although I think that this novel is a political and structural mess, the central group of Nyx, Rhys and the rest of their team, damaged as they are, is oddly attractive and I found in the end that I genuinely cared about what happened to them, which is not a thing I say very often.

I still don’t believe this novel heralds the Second Coming. Its strengths, such as they are, lie in unexpected areas, in the way the relationships between team members are sketched, in their interactions. The background, the plot and so forth are at times almost incidental; the interactions could happen almost anywhere. Yet I find myself now wanting to read on, and indeed to reread, to go more deeply into this world that is struggling to come to birth.

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[1] Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb – Jane Rogers

There are several ways to read Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb. One is to consider it as a not-overly-thought-through near-future science fiction novel. It is based on a rather vague premise about a virus which produces an effect similar to CJD, but only in women, and only if they become pregnant: Maternal Death Syndrome. The child may survive but the mother will die. The virus seems to have been released at airports, thus ensuring maximum distribution across the world, and women die in massive numbers. There is no escape. Who caused it, no one seems to know, nor why in particular at this time. And these are questions which are not answered. Most of this happens off the page; the only real indication of its full extent comes in the mention at the beginning of the novel of a mass funeral at York Minster and the huge traffic jams this causes, and later in talk of memorials. There are other hints: a scene in a charity shop when Jessie disposes of some of her possessions is especially telling – the shop is already full of containers of women’s clothes that no one wants to keep or to buy.

However, what Rogers does not do, except in the broadest, vaguest way, is to give any indication of how this affects daily life at the most practical levels. For example, what happens to the economy when a large part of the workforce isn’t there any more, and another significant chunk of the workforce has to suddenly consider childcare? Somehow the world seems to continue much as normal, yet the last pre-2012 fuel crisis showed how close to the edge this country habitually teeters. As one or two commentators have noted, this novel seems to fit into an older model of science fiction –John Wyndham would be an excellent example – which relies less on hyper-accurate, heavily researched detail about what would happen if, and more on creating a certain kind of mood.

For example, close to the beginning of the novel, Jessie and her friend Sal are talking about the impact of MDS for the population, coming to a realisation that the world they are familiar with is probably going to end soon.

We thought about our houses slowly falling to bits, the doors blowing open, the roofs caving in, birds and animals nesting there. ‘Some other species will dominate,’ said Sal, and we began to argue about what it might be. All the animals in zoos etc would have to be let out before the last people died. Which would probably kill off a few more of us even sooner. And those animals that could adapt to life in their new territory might take over. There might be wolves again in England, and bears. Tigers might live off untended herds of cows. Tree branches would spread out over roads, and hedges would grow huge and wild, and weeds burst through the tarmac. After a hundred years the world would be one great nature reserve, with all the threatened species breeding again, and great shoals of cod in the sea, eagles nesting in old church spires. It made me think of the garden of Eden, how it was supposed to be beautiful before Adam and Even messed things up. (9)

Wyndham, to the best of my recollection, never actively considered the zoos but this excerpt reminds me sharply of the latter parts of The Day of the Triffids, when Masen returns to London for provisions, which in turn seems to draw heavily on Richard Jeffries’ After London. This similarity to Triffids and its ilk is not coincidental, I think. Wyndham and Rogers are less concerned with the ‘how did this happen?’ and far more preoccupied with ‘how do we manage now it has happened?’ And by ‘manage’ I mean on an emotional level rather than the nuts and bolts of day-to-day survival.

Rogers’ refusal to engage with ‘how did this happen’ is helped by her choice of protagonist, Jessie Lamb, sixteen years old, and as self-absorbed as any sixteen-year-old trying to figure out how the world works. To begin with, MDS doesn’t really figure in Jessie’s life except as a traffic jam. Only later does it begin to acquire a name and a face: a girl at school, a friend’s aunt, and then personal significance when Jessie, along with all the other girls, receives a compulsory contraceptive implant at school. Events elsewhere are filtered through Jessie’s consciousness, what she sees on tv, hears from other people; the picture is fragmentary because it doesn’t impinge on Jessie herself.

But as the crisis continues, Jessie becomes more and more aware of how MDS will change her life. On the one hand, what is the point of continuing with things like GCSE exams? On the other, she and her friends experience a growing sense of impatience. Why isn’t anyone doing anything? They blame the adults and decide they must take action themselves, but in what way? At the behest of her friend Baz, Jessie attends a meeting where young people are trying to decide what it is they want to do, and incidentally, who to blame. There are any number of scapegoats available, from climate change deniers to research scientists, and any number of strategies. One girl wants to set up centres for motherless children, run by the children themselves, without interference from adults. Others want to promote a greener lifestyle, by force if necessary. Still others want to take the campaign to the scientists, Animal Liberation Front-style. For her own part, Jessie is convinced of the need to punish ‘old people’ for what they’ve done, but her perception of who is to blame is no clearer than that.

Jessie’s journey through this confused post-MDS landscape might be an allegory for the teenage experience generally, of being half-child, half-adult, expected to make decisions then criticised for doing so. It could also be related to the journey that Bill Masen makes across England, moving from community to community, searching for Josella, but also testing and discarding any number of models for living in the world shaped by Triffids.

Jessie’s understanding of what she needs to do comes gradually, influenced by a number of things. First, there is the experience of her mercurial aunt, Mandy, recently dumped by her partner, is desperate for a child of her own, about to undergo fertility treatment until it is cancelled by the MDS crisis. Later, Mandy becomes involved with the Noahs, a new religious group who, as their name implies, are trying to preserve something of the present to take into the future, but they reject her as a potential mother because she is too old. Jessie’s friend, Sal, is raped by a group of her boyfriend’s friends, and Jessie herself is spat at, threatened and robbed by a group of boys. Young women are suddenly expendable in the eyes of young men, and treated accordingly.

At the same time, young women are intensely valuable as a commodity, it having been discovered that so long as they are kept sedated and on life-support, babies can be brought to term. These are the Sleeping Beauties. People are very excited by this possibility of continuing the human race, not least as it buys time to do the research to counter MDS, but already different groups are in contention, for research, against it, pro-Sleeping Beauties, against them. A woman’s body is once again a battleground, and for Jessie this is to become all too personal when she makes the decision to volunteer to become a Sleeping Beauty herself, prompted by her aunt’s experiences in part but also, it seems, by her sense of what is likely to happen to her in the world as it changes. To become a Sleeping Beauty – and this is quite explicit if one actually thinks back to the fairy tale[1] – is to be protected, not by a hedge of thorns but by the laboratory. One might counter that with thoughts of Brave New World but from Jessie’s point of view, the decision is not as bizarre as it might at first appear. More disturbing undoubtedly is the response of Jessie’s parents, who imprison their daughter – another version of the Sleeping Beauty story, if you like – in the hope they can persuade her to change her mind. Most of Jessie’s testament is written while she is imprisoned; most of the rest of it while she is awaiting the implantation of the fertilised egg.

We are meant to understand Jessie’s decision as being one that is taken freely, an adult decision made with the full understanding of what it involves, and it would be wrong to try in any way to undermine Jessie’s own perception of what she is doing. Nonetheless, Rogers does an excellent job of showing the vested interests that mass around her, from the creepy Iain, from the youth movement she was involved with, using her to promote the cause, which is itself in part a front for his own predatory activities. Her parents’ refusal to accept her decision represents a denial of their daughter’s having reached adulthood, no matter how much it is couched with scientific explanations from her father, who works in a research lab. Rosa, another girl about to become a Sleeping Beauty, is obsessed with the notion that in this way she will find love and celebrity at last, although she will not be there to experience it. Lurking behind that is the less well articulated but all the more disturbing assumption that the human race must persist, come what may, and that any means is acceptable in order to ensure its survival. Inevitably, this will be the burden that women bear (and one can already imagine a scenario in which it is discovered that men can safely carry babies to term and themselves survive; what then for women?).

Yet, I remain in two minds about this novel. It is, as I’ve noted, representative of a certain kind of science fiction, and done rather well, though I don’t think it is especially innovative. But there is something slightly odd about it that I cannot quite pin down from just one reading. I’ve been watching Dominic Sandbrook’s tv series about the 1970s, the decade in which I turned from a teenager into an adult, matching my fragmentary perceptions of it against Sandbrook’s admittedly sketchy account. I am reminded on the one hand that Rogers catches that sense of uncertainty very well, evoking the internal and the external anxieties of being a teenager. But at the same time, assuming we take the 1970s to stretch into the early 1980s, far enough to embrace the beginnings of the Greenham Common Peace Camp and a new iteration of the women’s movement, as well as the sudden awareness of AIDS. I can’t help feeling that Rogers is reaching back to this in order to underpin her creation of a near-future society rather than drawing on the contemporary world as one might expect. Perhaps it’s just me but the novel and the series seem to resonate in a way that the novel doesn’t with contemporary experience, no matter how many references to climate change denial and CJD she includes. Which leaves me with an odd sense of dissatisfaction that at present I can’t quite dispel. It may be that a second reading is required as this novel is rather more subtly layered than it might appear to be at first sight.

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[1] And there is at least one version of the story in which Sleeping Beauty awakes to discover that the Prince has been and gone, and she has become pregnant in the meantime.

Wake Up And Dream – Ian R. McLeod

Every time I read something by Ian R McLeod I am reminded how much I enjoyed the last thing of his that I read. Yet somehow he is not a writer whose work I remember to actively seek out. I am not sure why this is except that he is what I would term a ‘quiet’ writer. His novels and short stories are well-crafted but they seem to be published without fanfare and are all too easily overlooked. On the up side, there is at least the pleasure of rediscovery.

Wake Up and Dream is McLeod’s sixth novel, his first since Song of Time, which won the 2009 Arthur C Clarke Award. It is set in Los Angeles in the 1930s, and features the ubiquitous down-at-heel private eye. This one is called Clark Gable; inevitably,the name alerts the reader to the fact that something is going on. My first thought was to sigh at the use of such a tired old gimmick but it says a lot for McLeod’s ingenuity and inventiveness that one quickly forgets about this; instead, the idea of Clark Gable, failed film star and washed-up PI seems entirely plausible. Indeed, one almost forgets that there is a world in which Clark Gable was a successful film actor. How does McLeod accomplish this feat? First, he has a very strong story, no matter the novelty of the PI’s name. Secondly, McLeod is particularly skilful in the way he constructs the novel’s alternative historical background. Thirdly, in terms of pacing, this is one of the most tightly controlled novels I’ve read in a while.

To start with the story: it is 1940, and Gable is contacted by one April Lamotte, who wants him to carry out a particularly unusual job. She wants him to impersonate her husband, a screenwriter, in order to facilitate the signing of a contract. Daniel Lamotte is, according to April Lamotte, currently suffering from a mental collapse and is sequestered in an highly exclusive nursing home. She needs Gable, who looks not unlike her husband, to impersonate him for a few hours, just to save the truth from coming out. Daniel Lamotte hasn’t had a really big break since his successful ‘feelie’, The Virgin Queen, and there is a lot riding on this contract. Lamotte has written the screenplay for a biopic about Lars Bechmeier, the inventor of the technology behind the feelies, and everyone seems to be very excited about it.

Bizarre as the job seems to be, Gable agrees to take it on. The deception is successfully carried out and in fairly short order April Lamotte attempts to kill Gable b drugging him and leaving him in a car filled with carbon monoxide fumes. However, something odd happens. Gable survives the attempt on his life and forms the odd impression that something or someone unidentified saved him. But who or what? His mind full of questions Gable returns to the city, retreating to the room that Daniel Lamotte kept there so that he could get on with writing in private.

Before Gable can confront April Lamotte she is found dead in circumstances similar to those Gable would have been found in, and Gable is himself mistaken for Daniel Lamotte, forced to identify his ‘wife’ at the morgue and then maintain the pretence. Gable turns this to his advantage in order to investigate April Lamotte’s death and Daniel Lamotte’s disappearance. He works with a young woman, Barbara Edsel, the real Daniel’s neighbour at the rooming house, who has quickly realised that Gable is not who he claims to be. Gradually, they come to realise that the Lamottes are part of a deeper conspiracy centred on something called ‘Thrasis’. However, the question is, what is Thrasis? And there is a second question: why have so many people associated with a film called Broken Looking Glass, the first feelie, either vanished or else died in mysterious circumstances? These include Betty Bechmeir, wife of Lars Bechmeir, the inventer of the technology behind the feelies, found hanging from a bridge. These are promising beginnings for a story and McLeod develops them from something personal, something small-scale, into a complex story with national, even international, ramifications, before resolving the story in a satisfyingly bitter-sweet way.

One of the most admirable things about the novel is the way in which, as I said, McLeod constructs the novel’s setting. As noted earlier, the novel is set in 1940. Europe is at war, and feeling is running high against FDR. There is a great deal of anxiety about whether Roosevelt will take the USA into the war and this anxiety has fuelled interest in the League of Liberty, an organisation fronted by Herbet Kisberg, an openly anti-Semitic potential presidential candidate. The League has, needless to say, a paramilitary wing, although Kisberg keeps himself at some distance from it in public. Many people, though, have simply joined the League as a means of expressing their disquiet.

But McLeod doesn’t just employ a simple historical point of divergence. He reinforces this with a technological point of divergence, the invention of the Bechmeir field, a way of recording emotional responses and then broadcasting them to manipulate people’s emotions. The obvious move was to  incorporate them into movie production, hence the advent of the feelies. Effectively, it’s like talking pictures all over again. Many familiar movie stars fell by the wayside because, for various reasons, they could not make the transition to the feelies. Gable was particularly sensitive to the recording machines, reacting as badly to them as they did to him, a fact that stands him in good stead as the story unfolds. We see the Bechmeir Field at work in a number of situations, such as in the mental hospital where Howard Hughes now occupies himself running the asylum’s heating plant, and the broader implications of the technology are clear, given the interest shown in it by the likes of Kisberg.

Too often, alternate histories seem to foreground the points of divergence at the expense of the story. Indeed, too often they’re not about the story at all except insofar as it exists to show off their world-building chops. McLeod’s presentation of the alternative technology is very understated; it is discussed as and when the plot demands, rather than being drawn attention to as part of some sort of Cook’s Tour of Alternate 1940. It is a necessary part of what is going on but always subordinate to the story rather than being brought into the spotlight to do a star turn. It prompts questions but not so obtrusively as to distract the reader from the investigation. It’s a very low-key approach and works very well to build the novel’s atmosphere. McLeod is good too on period atmosphere, including just the right amount of detail as necessary, and not dishing it out inappropriately just to show he’s done the research.

As also noted earlier, I very much admired the pacing of this novel, the way McLeod builds it up from the small beginning of Gable’s odd assignment, through the death of April Lamotte to the realisation of Daniel Lamotte’s being missing, connections being made painstakingly (no internet to rely on for research, which means lots of scutwork in libraries – it really does seem to make a difference to the way a story’s told), moving on to the realisation of just how many people are implicated in what’s been happening. McLeod never seems to drop the ball. He also seems to be able to use a first-person viewpoint narrator with much more skill than many writers. There is no sense of contrivance in making sure Gable is there to see what he needs to see. At the same time, he doesn’t see everything or immediately make the connections and is reassuringly fallible as a result.

In short, I was rather impressed with this novel. It does a lot to refresh the idea of the alternative history and the trope of the luckless PI. It’s just a little bit knowing, enough to be fun without being gimmicky. It wears its research lightly and its atmosphere is not overwhelming. And it tells a good solid, very intriguing story. And the way things are going there is a lot to be said for that. 

Mr Fox – Helen Oyeyemi

‘I’ll tell a tale of Mr Fox, how he came courting me

He was the finest fellow you could ever hope to see’

Mr Fox – Mr Fox

I did not particularly enjoy Helen Oyeyemi’s previous novel, White is For Witching. It felt a little too studied for my taste, a little too ‘creative writing class’. I don’t particularly like self-consciously beautiful writing and this seemed to fit squarely in that category. Having read Mr Fox, I shall have to go back and reread White is For Witching, as I fear I may have misjudged it very badly. Because Mr Fox is one of the best novels I have read in a long time, and that is not a thing I say lightly.

The story of Mr Fox, Reynardine, Bluebeard, Fitcher, call him who you will, is best summarised as “the usual – wooing, seduction, then – the discovery of a chopped-up predecessor” but rather than opt for a conventional “retelling” of the well-known folktale Oyeyemi deconstructs the story, visiting it again and again from various angles, telling it and retelling it, turning it inside out as she goes. The effect is dizzying; the reader is left uncertain what is ‘real’ and what is not.

To begin with, we have St John Fox, celebrated novelist living in New York with his wife, Daphne. The time is 1938. In walks Mary Foxe, whom St John apparently knows, and she accuses him of being a villain. Fox protests his innocence but Mary continues: “You kill women. You’re a serial killer. Can you grasp that?” Fox, it turns out, specialises in the kind of thriller fiction where women die in a myriad terrible ways. He dismisses Mary’s accusations: “It’s ridiculous to be so sensitive about the content of fiction. It’s not real. I mean, come on. It’s all just a lot of games” (5).

Mary begs to differ and mysteriously transports Fox into what might be one of his own stories, where he becomes the protagonist, a doctor, who beheads his wife to ensure she doesn’t speak, only to find that he misses her presence around the house. When he replaces her head (for it is that kind of story) he finds that she can only repeat the same question over and over. Fox’s response is bafflement, although we know that he has already, so to speak, silenced his own wife:

*She doesn’t complain about anything I do; she is physically unable to. That’s because I fixed her early. I told her in heartfelt tones that one of the reasons I love her is because she never complains. So now of course she doesn’t dare complain. (1)

We might have the impression that St John Fox, famous novelist, is a bit of a shit, and nothing that happens in the next section of the novel is likely to disabuse us of this idea. One can choose to read the story of Mary Foxe, governess-companion to the clever but wayward Katherine, as a version of the story of how she and St John Fox met: an exchange of letters redolent of 84 Charing Cross Road, an agreement that Fox will read Mary’s short stories, followed by several aborted meetings and finally, an incident in which Fox’s secretary burns the stories in front of Mary, supposedly at Fox’s behest.

But gradually uncertainty creeps in: Mary next suggests that she burned Fox’s stories, to punish him for ‘beheading’ his wife. Is it possible Mary Foxe is misremembering the experience? Or that there is more than one Mary Foxe? It even seems that Mary Foxe may be some kind of literary stalker, gaining access to Fox’s study when he is not around, working over his manuscripts. Or does she exist at all? Is she, as Fox himself claims, a figment of his imagination, in which case she seems to be a very powerful imaginary friend who has stepped out of his mind and into material form., so much so that she can even be befriended by Daphne, Fox’s wife.

One can ask what is going on here, and speculate about whether Fox is going mad or whether he has entered a fugue state of some sort. We are in particular invited to consider this option though not by Fox himself. Rather, another avatar of Mary Foxe meets a man called St John Fox who happens to research precisely this thing, and yet that seems all too easy an explanation, not least because one suspects that the St John Fox she visits is not different but playing an unlikely game of deception, luring her to his country house, as of course Mr Fox should.

Perhaps St John Fox’s conscience is troubling him about what he does, but he has no way of articulating his unease except by externalising it. There is one small, telling detail in an exchange with Mary Foxe, in which he becomes convinced that he was once married to her, that she left him, and that when he tracked her down he beat her and murdered her. This in itself is appalling but there is a small detail in the story, a description of how, to persuade a friend of his to tell St John where his wife had gone, St John broke down in tears.

The friend expressed the hope that St John would get his manhood back, i.e. would stop using tears as a weapon, as well as regaining his wife. It hints at an idea of masculinity which until this point in the story remains unexamined, although Oyeyemi takes it up in the very next section, “the training at madam de silentio’s” which in part parodies conventional finishing schools and their preparing women for marriage, but also parodies a masculine fantasy of the woman trained as courtesan, posing the question, how would this seem to a man if he had to go through it himself rather than merely approving of it in women. Why is it, Mary wants St John to ask himself, does he think like this.

The narrative circles round and round this use of male violence against women, examining it in various ways. There are stories which make abstract points about the matter juxtaposed with accounts from the main participants in the ‘actual’ drama. Of all the interpolated stories, there is one – ‘My Daughter is a Racist’ – which doesn’t seem to quite fit. It is an excellent story in its own right but seems to be so tangential to the rest of what is being discussed it is at first difficult to see quite what the connection might be; except, I realised subsequently, it is intended to be the foundational counter-argument to the ongoing insistence that women are entitled to freedom as much as men, and yet even there, the argument is also undermined by the narrator, although she is surrounded by men and women determined to maintain the status quo

Towards the end of the narrative we have Daphne Fox’s account of her first meeting with St John and the reasons why she fell in love with him although he was so very different from what she’d been brought up to hope for, but then also her first meeting with Mary Foxe, who suddenly materialises before her. Through their conversation we see another St John Fox, damaged by his war experiences. Mary Foxe is the dream woman he invented in order to find some way through the carnage he witnessed. But gradually we also see another Daphne, desperate to find some way to express herself – painting, pottery and flower arranging, the traditional hobbies of the idle rich woman, have proved no solace for the silence and disregard of her husband. It is undoubtedly no coincidence that Mary invokes the memory of Hedda Gabler at this point, but I find myself thinking too of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and the ways in which Fitzgerald exploited his wife and mocked her creativity. St John Fox has brutalised his wife mentally in the same way that he has physically brutalised women through his fiction.

We see finally, through the intervention of Mary Foxe, that neither of them has got what they expected from the relationship, perhaps because both of them had such unreasonable expectations – fairytale expectations, perhaps – of what a relationship might involve. Such a conclusion might be perhaps rather trite but it is saved from sentimentality by the horror of the journey all the characters have undergone, along with the reader. The true nature of Mary Foxe herself is left unexplained. The reader can only wonder. The novel, though, is a remarkably inventive exploration of a difficult subject, a novel that demands to be reread in order to fully get to grips with its elusive and allusive nature.