‘Tim!’ I called.
Almost immediately there was a loud crash. The house lurched, a powerful draught parted the tarpaulins. That was enough for me. As I went down the ladder I heard him tottering about up there, coughing in the dust. He seemed to be trying to drag some item of equipment across the floor. ‘Tim! For God’s sake!’ I called up from the landing. His face appeared briefly, framed by the trap.
‘The whole lot’s coming down,’ he said. ‘Tell her to get the kids out. See if you can persuade her to care about someone else for once.’
Lizzie, halfway up the stairs, heard this.
‘You sod,’ she said. ‘I’d do anything for those children.’
Everything seemed to lurch again. I got her by the arm and pulled her down the stairs and into the street. The boys, sensing the future like dogs before an earthquake, had already saved themselves. They couldn’t believe their luck. Their house was falling down. The hall was full of plaster. Cracks had opened up in the exterior walls. From above came the shrieking sounds of joists giving way under huge loads. It was so cool. They stood in the quiet street in the hot night air, staring up at the line of the roof where it had sagged into the void of the loft. Their father came running out, then stopped and turned as if he had forgotten something.
His house was done for. Window frames popped. The facade deformed and began to slip. Just before the roof fell in and it became obvious that the whole thing would come down on us if we didn’t move, I saw the tunnel he had been digging out of the loft. It hung in the air, transparent but luminous, perhaps three feet in diameter. Travelling north towards the river, it rose steeply until, at perhaps a thousand feet, it linked up with a complex of similar tunnels all across London. Hundreds of them, thousands, more than you could ever count, they rose up from the houses. A 787 Dreamliner was making its way down between them towards Heathrow, engines grinding, landing lights ablaze. When it had gone, the tunnels hung there for a moment like a great shining computer-generated diagram in the night sky, then began to fade.
‘See?’ Tim said. ‘What would you have done?’
‘We’ll come back,’ I promised him. ‘We’ll come back and find another way in –’
Lizzie didn’t seem to hear this. ‘Twenty thousand pounds on a kitchen,’ she said. She laughed.
Later, she sat on the kerb a little way down the street, with the boys on either side of her and the baby in her lap, thoughtfully watching the fire engines and drinking tea. Someone had given her a man’s woollen shirt to wear, wrapped a foil blanket loosely round her shoulders. The street was full of hoses and cables, generators, powerful lights. Firemen were picking over the rubble, and a television crew had arrived.
Imaginary Reviews
(1) THE HERO’S ANXIETY
In this curiously involuted thriller of the near future, the father is not dead but absent, if only temporarily. The son must act for him, whether he wishes to or not. They exist in the most ideal loop of anxiety, the father a ghost in the son’s brain, the son a sub-routine of the father’s competence. They are a single entity, the hero only completed by his father’s wealth and prior achievement; the father present in the world only through his son’s ability to act in it. Whose anxiety is the greatest? It is hardly possible to venture a guess. They describe between them not so much a main character as a desirable state, a circle whose perfection is forbidden to the son, no longer obtainable by the father.
(2) INERTIA, ANIMALISM & PARANOIA
The humanity of the world is maintained only through constant effort. If you learn to grow flowers as a child – if you understand how quickly they die without water – you become a better adult. People think of love as a given. Love is made. Maybe it does come out of nowhere but it can’t support itself here, and it would soon go back there if we let it. To occur at all, festivals, celebrations, civilizations must be constructed; sustained by contribution. The nightmare of this novel is that among its characters nothing is being constructed. The only alternative to inertia, animalism and paranoia is magical thinking. Nothing practical is being done. The curve of humanity bottoms out. From here the only way is up. Where its author sites herself in relation to this understanding is uncertain.
(3) 1973
1973: The whole of a small desert town is inhabited by aliens who have taken on human form. They escaped the disaster that wiped out their planet, but denial and post traumatic stress have erased this from their memories. The TV series, based quite closely on the original film, constructs itself as a phased revelation of their state. Imperfect recollections of life and death on the alien world are seen to be symptoms of what look like new psychological disorders. Dr Bax Fermor, drawn to the desert by convoluted Lacanian flexures in his own personality, understands their situation by an intuitive leap, and becomes town psychiatrist. He must spend the rest of his life taking care of them – some he helps to remember, others he gently encourages to forget.
(4) RIPPED, CUT & LOADED
The contemporary investigator is loaded. He drives a Porsche and wears Versace overcoats. He is as big as he is charming, as cultured as he’s ripped and cut. He got his self-defense training from an ex-KGB agent. He has a connection to the CIA; or to a mysterious agency which has only twelve clients worldwide, and which can get him information about anything or anyone, any time he needs it. His family runs every part of the infrastructure of this major American city. The contemporary investigator is PC, and even when he isn’t, even when he falls from grace a little the way every man can, well, his girlfriend is rich too, and equally well-connected, and she won’t take any nonsense from him. His assistant’s a Goth, tattoos all over. She won’t have truck with that male manipulative charm either. Even when he’s arrested in what he calls ‘Buttfuck, Iowa’, the contemporary investigator’s connections are there for him. Despite that, he can get in trouble! Just in case that happens, he carries with him ‘four inches of money’ (ten thousand dollars) along with unimpeachable false identities for himself and his assistant. Because even when the he’s not in charge, the contemporary investigator is in control. Even when contingency rages, it isn’t entirely contingent, not for him.
(5) BUTTERFLY
This novelist’s characters are like himself. They speak in clever and rounded sentences. They have caught life in a linguistic net, and found some odd fish there, and now they are going to tell you about it: not really at length, but in the end at more length than you suspected in the beginning. The impression of wisdom radiates from the feeblest of their jokes. You look covertly at your watch even as you think, ‘How delightful!’ It isn’t possible at this distance – the distance between writer and reader – to tell how much of the novel is ‘autobiographical’. If some of it is, there’s nothing we can do about it; if none of it is, well that’s a joke some decades old by now, and perhaps a little less joyful than it seemed in 1980. What is possible to say is that the acknowledgements page, written in the same tone as the book itself, is a very self-indulgent piece of work. A butterfly landed on page 52 while I was reading it in my garden. From that single event I learned nothing about the book, or reading, or writing, or anything at all.
(6) SCIENCE & THE ARTS
A clear and useful bridge between science and the public is constructed by this empathic literary novel of a boy and how he comes to terms with his world. Explanations of everything from black holes to epigenesis demonstrate the author’s engagement with the scientific worldview, acting as the pivots of metaphors for a full range of human emotions and concerns. The total effect is one of numbing boredom and of a mind which has carefully removed everything of excitement from its encounters with physics, cosmology and molecular biology. A Hay Festival version of the Popular Mechanics-style science fiction of the 1920s, this novel has a similar mission to educate its demographic – primarily 40/50-year-old reading-group members with humanities degrees. As a result, the very last thing its author has managed is to be, as his dustjacket claims, ‘boldly imaginative’. The most interesting thing ab
out the book is its title, the literary referentiality and linguistic quirkiness of which promise more than they can ever deliver.
(7) READER, I WROTE HER
‘What’s your book about, Carlos?’
‘It’s about the romance & holiness & mystery & paradoxical matter-of-factness of all books. & it’s about my struggles with this book, my book, the one you hold in your hand. & it’s about women, the romance & holiness & mystery & paradoxical matter-of-factness of women, & about my struggle with this woman, the woman you –’
‘Next.’
(8) AN UNIMPRESSIVE WAR
The interception of incoming rockets – silvery elliptical explosions seen through the clouds – reminds the viewer, at best, of the closing sequences of This Island Earth: special effects put together long ago by a team not of the first rank. Missiles that get through make a hole no bigger than a V-weapon made in the East End of London in WW2; far fewer of them have fallen. Meanwhile the corporate-class civilians video themselves in state of the art gas masks in their sealed sub-basement, footage they will later edit and label: ‘How we spent the war. The little boy was so frightened.’ Of what? The awful events they had explained to him? Their panic at the things that might almost be happening? He could have had very little direct evidence. It’s all a bit histrionic, a bit unstoic, after such an inaccurate bombardment, so few deaths. On the other side, meanwhile, we see the civilians walking about almost cockily while the smart weapons, each one guided by a small part of the cloned neural tissue of a pigeon, moan and fizz down the line of the main street above them, en route to their very exact targets.
(9) DINNER IN THE BROWNOUT
In this novel of alternate history, Thatcherism inadvertently drove the Left into the tertiary education system, where it became a permanent nuisance. In a world separated only by the thickness of a cigarette paper from our own, the ruling Right Wing coalition’s economic measures are aimed at driving it out again, a program which will fail to the precise extent that it succeeds: indeed at the outset of the novel, the Left, outraged, disoriented and under pressure, is already regaining its lost enthusiasm for actual Leftism; while the associated mayhem is as good as a rebrand. Even as student action weakens the walls of the ideological kettle from one side (reminding the Left that it can still act despite long term bans on unregistered strikes and street demonstrations), the collapse of the aspirational model for the majority of the population erodes it from the other. The middle aged (portrayed with amusing accuracy as the 35 to 50 year old default constituency of the UK Centre – established yet for psychological reasons still insecure, embittered in a curiously comfortable way by the life-defeats they’re required to call ‘realism’) begin to lose control of the people who most frighten and enrage them: the young who will replace them and the old who know more than they do. A purge of the universities, one of the central characters remarks at a candle-lit dinner in the brownout, is one of the first and most satisfying revenges the business-culture imagines for itself; but when you succumb to that temptation, you deal yourself a whole new hand of nightmares.
(9) SCIENCE FICTION
In American Ruminant, self-replicating machines arrive from the stars. Implacability is their signature characteristic. Their mission: to cannibalise our planet for parts! Life as we know it – the life of well-fed science wonks and policy advisors and their resilient, generally likeable, dependent families – seems doomed. But though the planet dies, home and hearth live on. The author recommends a spirited response to life but demonstrates only repression, invokes the concept of total loss but in the end preserves everything. You could slice big pieces off the ideological carcass of American Ruminant and, like a fortyish academic from a prairie state, it would still walk around, feeding, digesting and congratulating itself on its own gravitas and of the worth of the herbivore life in general. It might stumble occasionally or feel tired; but it would have an explanation for that.
(10) DISSIPATIVE SYSTEMS
In this novel of worldbuilding, future psychoanalyst Diana Sontag-Cohn recklessly intertwines her own imagination with that of an unnamed patient known only by the letter X. X has failed to construct himself and invites the psychiatrist to extend her own self-constructive efforts on his behalf. The two of them are immediately looped into the construction of a third thing – their relationship – then a fourth and fifth – each one’s perception of this relationship under the shifting terms of the old pre-analysis selves – and so on. Out of the patient’s perception of emptiness and the psychiatrist’s gesture of filling, they build not one but several ‘worlds’. In the end, has the psychiatrist helped X to identify, find, or make himself? No: but between them they have made an incalculable number of new psychological spaces, their exploration of which has made an incalculable number more. This labyrinthine dissipative system fails both of them and everything they have consigned to it re-emerges sooner or later in acts of insane violence. When I received this book from the Times Literary Supplement for review, it was under such heavy embargo that minor reviewers like myself weren’t even allowed to know who had written it. The name of the author would be backfilled into our copy on delivery. I would be required to show evidence that I had destroyed my Advance Reading Copy by an accepted secure method. At first I thought I must be reading a lost Richard Powers, written in the mid-80s and for some reason remaining unpublished. But at 120 pages the volume seemed too slim; and the text didn’t, in the end, seem recursive enough. Then I began to count the author’s many uses of the acronym DSC, the initials of worldbuilding psychiatrist Diana Sontag-Cohn, whose name comprises the first three words of the novel. With the exception of X, all the central characters share these initials; and in one entire – thankfully short – chapter, every character’s name is made from an anagram of Sontag-Cohn’s. This led to the inevitable recognition that I was holding in my hands an early product of the legendary Dynamical Systems Collective – perhaps their first and only foray into the literary arts! You can imagine my excitement. A tragedy that, in the end, it was withdrawn a week before publication – although the occasional ARC, untitled, unattributed and unread, can still be found in the Oxfams of Clapham, Highgate and Cambridge.
(11) KICKASS CULTURAL PROPERTIES
The behaviouristic universe, controlled from outside the text. The meaningless anxiety generated by a plot trope carefully isolated from any actual plot. The meaningless preparation for action. The preparation for meaningless action. The Proppian magic object, its discovery being the next item on a to-do list checked from outside the text. The freedom motif and its meaninglessly glib reversal. All of it makes a Skinner box look like To the Lighthouse. The actant has nice muscles but you feel only compassion. Not because she’s haggard from the effort of keeping in shape; not because she’s trapped in a scenario one millimetre deep; not because she’s encumbered by those risible poses of faux-aggression and off-the-shelf feistiness; not because her humanity has been reduced to an algorithm, a schematic whose tragedy is to make Lara Croft seem complex: but because she exists only as cultural property at the beck and call of the rights holder & the male player. She can escape the prison but not the game.
(12) LIQUID ARRANGEMENTS
In this novel without urgency, there’s a carrot but no stick. Chapter by chapter, a Team of Friends, driven by what they’ll gain when they solve a problem rather than by what they’ll lose if they don’t, solve problems. Once a problem is solved, the next problem is presented and the drive to solve it lies simply in the fact that no solution has yet been found. At the same time this isn’t a puzzle novel. Neither does it seem to be an attempt to write an exciting story without resort to violence, sensationalism, othering, etc. Once all the problems have been solved the novel ends. The same applies to each scene, each sub-plot, each arc of character-relation among the Team of Friends: the momentary problem and its solution drive development at every level. People live alone, but come together easily in cafeterias, offices and public spaces. Their arrangements ar
e liquid. Spirits are usually high, but even where there is physical danger – or loss or heartbreak, or at least the possibility of those things – work on the current problem places it somehow at one or two removes: so that while the Team of Friends may be threatened, threat converts fluidly into an issue of morale which in itself slides away in the corner of the reader’s eye as a new problem captures the attention. Violence is deferred or confronted by proxy. In moments of great doubt there is always an authority to be applied to. It’s a structure which appears to be written out of – and directed back into – a culture or subculture in which, although society is often depicted as collapsing, work and its aspirations remain the only conceivable drives. Whatever its motive or audience, this assumption about the world comes over as a soapiness in the feel of the narration, as if no one is really there and nothing is really being told.
(13) THE LAST FISH
This short novel’s central character stares out over a deserted coastal town, entangling himself with mysterious couples, psychiatrists and airmen as the world around him falls slowly but irrevocably into a beach-fatigued 50s science fiction version of itself. ‘Every so often, as he waited for nightfall – signalled by the long repetitive sweep of the old Ferrari’s headlights against the greenish afterglow above the esplanade – Carson would force himself up and down Hermione Miro’s small swimming pool at a slow crawl, these few enervated daily laps a way of convincing himself that he still existed.’ We read this as a metaphor: but in Carson’s world, as in ours, everyone without sufficient ego is vanishing. As the novel progresses, we see that Carson is vanishing too.
You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts Page 4
