True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  The nearest thing in either book to a visual description of an Engine is this, significantly enough given us indirectly, through a character’s journal entry:

  What did the Engine look like? I saw it on the Concourse, but only in shadow, and besides, the memory fades. I cannot quite express it in words. I might try to sketch its machinery, as I have sketched in these pages the neuron, the cerebellum, the pituitary gland – but to do so, I think, would miss its essence. I can say that it was long, very long; it was four, five men tall. It was jet-black and it smoked. It was plated with extrusions and grilles and thorns of iron that might have been armor, and might have been machinery, but which in any case made it rough, uneven, asymmetrical, and hideous. It reminded me somewhat of the ink-blot tests devised by Professor Kohler. It reminded me also somewhat of storm-clouds. From the complex cowling at the very front of the engine two lights shone through the gloom and the smoke of the Concourse. The light was the gray of moths’ wings or dirty old ice.34

  Liv Alverhuysen, doctor from the East, voice of civilised neurosis and of mercy in the books, has passed the Engine at a run a few pages before, ‘and perhaps that was fortunate, too’. Now, in an icy black compartment within the beast’s mile-long body, she struggles to remember it. The first-person filter is a favourite device of Gilman’s – he is going to use it continuously, on the grand scale, in The Rise of Ransom City, where the world of the book is passed to us exclusively through the unreliable voices of Harry Ransom and his editor – and there is certainly an element of pure gameplay to his preference. He likes the tricky and the partial for their own sake, just as (as in the passage above, and in all the oblique descriptions of the ‘half-made’ chaos of the West) he is interested for their own sake in things of uncertain shape. But we can see that his objection to reliable description isn’t a reservation about vividness, perhaps a sign of a non-visual sensibility at work. Far from it. Vividness, he likes: the dirty ice eye-beams here, the comparison soon after of the train racing across salt flats to a line of ink running across clean paper, are brilliant, if carefully minimal. He doesn’t mind allowing himself the occasional wild pulp ululation, either. ‘Their boiling black blood, their breath!’ the novel suddenly cries out, Lovecraftianishly, as the Engine’s smoke billows back at Liv.

  No; the objection is surely to definiteness. Take it away, Edmund Burke, theorising the sublime in 1757:

  But let it be considered that hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea. There is a passage in the Book of Job amazingly sublime, and this sublimity is principally due to the terrible uncertainty of the thing described:

  In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, fear came upon me and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face. The hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof; an image was before mine eyes; there was silence; and I heard a voice – Shall mortal man be more just than God?

  We are first prepared with the utmost solemnity for the vision; we are first terrified, before we are let even into the obscure cause of our emotion: but when this grand cause of terror makes its appearance, what is it? Is it not wrapt up in the shades of its own incomprehensible darkness, more awful, more striking, more terrible, than the liveliest description, than the clearest painting, could possibly represent it?

  ‘Terror’ for Burke was a pleasure to be found here and there in literature as the Book of Job, or Milton, pushed particular pyschological buttons for particular momentary effect. But it was about to start being produced deliberately, generically, in bulk, in the emerging Gothic; and the whole cluster of twentieth-century popular literatures of the fantastic, fantasy/SF/horror, are among other things deliberate factories of grandly indefinite Burkean terror; to an extent therefore routinising the sublime, making it over itself into a predictable clause of the writer–reader contract of expectations. And there are certainly aspects of Gilman’s use of sublimity which might seem to come under this kind of good-management heading, to be routine and (as it were) tactical. For a start, Gilman has a strong negative motive for not letting us know too much or see too much about the Engines. As Burke goes on to point out, both literal pictures and writing that is too pictorial tip over easily into ‘the ludicrous’ if they try for terror. The danger of bathos yawns very nearby in The Half-Made World. Gilman is writing villains (as he’s said himself) who are ‘Giant Evil Trains’: he really, really needs to avoid specifying himself down into writing a kind of satanic Reverend W. Awdry adventure, featuring Belial the Bad Engine.

  But I would argue that he belongs in the much rarer category of fantasists for whom the Burkean sublime still retains its original expectation-confuting power, and with it its power to shock and confuse. He is interested in it for the sake of its disruptive potential, not for its efficiencies as a recipe. If there is, so to speak, a ‘normal’ sublime lodged in fantasy now, it comes with a promise that what is withheld in one way will be restored in another. If writers have learned from Lovecraft how to milk the terror of the not-quite-seen, of monstrosity asserted to be unimaginable yet equipped with a few delicately phobia-inducing qualities of texture, then the implication is that a compensating resolution will be supplied in plot terms. We won’t ever quite see Cthulhu, but we’ll be led through a narrative catastrophe which is very clear, very definite, very distinct. Resolution will not be withheld.

  In Gilman’s case, though, the pulp energy and violence are there (the body count of the two books is enormous) but the delicate non-resolution of the sublime descriptions – the way in which stormcloud, Rorschach blot, hint of a crown of mechanical thorns, all become visually active without settling into visual coherence – is, instead, matched on the scale of narrative by a particular kind of non-resolution there, too. The monsters you can’t quite see are, if anything, metonyms for plots you can’t quite declare finished.

  Gilman rules one plot closure out in The Half-Made World before he even begins. The war of Line with Gun is a fantasticated version of the Matter of America, yes; but the consoling, canonical reconciliation of America’s violences and America’s masses within America’s civil religion has been pre-sabotaged. The Red River Republic has already risen, failed, and vanished from the scene. The remnant of it in the wilderness that Liv and Creedmoor stumble on is a repellent, simple-minded little Sparta. Then, in The Rise of Ransom City, Gilman brings the Republic back, but casually, almost dismissively, without ever letting it occupy the focus of the book. I don’t know which is more successfully shocking: the original abolition, or the Republic’s return on terms which make it clear that Gilman cares far more about not providing a conventional sequel, in which we might have seen the double possession of the land by Line and Gun exorcised within our view. He’s willing to reverse the political withholding of the first book, but only because it has been trumped by another opportunity for withholding resolution that he cares about more.

  For, meanwhile, he has lured us with the MacGuffin of a secret weapon possessed by the land’s indigenes, and led us out into the wilderness while Liv and Creedmoor develop a relationship of considerable conflicted intensity, but no conventional romantic form; and then stopped, at the moment when we’re told the search for the weapon against the demons is just beginning; only to resume again in the second book through the eyes of a minor character who seems to be coming along on the search, but then doesn’t, and follows a destiny of his own irresolvably suspended between innocence and con-artistry, with the consequence that we never find out what the MacGuffin was, or how Creedmoor and Liv ended, or how, with the maximum ironic tidiness, the world of the books seems finally to be converging with, secularising and dwindling into, one much more like our own. Boxes th
at won’t close are his specialty; beautiful discords; inventions that, having taken the licence of fantasy to curve away from our world, then refuse to curve reassuringly back again.

  One possible analogy that strikes me is with David Foster Wallace’s explicit promise, in Infinite Jest, that the parallel lines of his two plots would eventually meet, only for the novel to end with them still as separate as ever. But that, I take it, was a high-modernist point being made about the real, and about its unrepresentability except by means that included the mimetic sensations of not-fitting, not-solving, not-ending. Whereas this is –

  [I had a beautiful formulation of what this is, but alas there is not room for it in this margin]

  (2013)

  BATS OF SOME KIND

  Books that make you laugh out loud; books about the Russian novel. In the grand Venn diagram of literature, these are usually thought of as non-intersecting phenomena. Wholly separate soap-bubbles of literary content, in fact, bobbing about autonomously with a continent’s-worth of space in between, probably filled with wolves and pine trees. Yet Elif Batuman’s The Possessed 35 is set firmly in the impossible overlap of the two. It really is, seriously and perceptively, about Russian fiction, and it really is funny. Not surprisingly, the ease with which Elif Batuman has conjured this domain for herself has had critics in the US predicting great things for her. Hardly anyone can pull a life-sized Dostoevsky out of an opera hat. Frankly, hardly anyone would have thought of stuffing him in there in the first place.

  The trick is that The Possessed is a book about reading much more than it is one about writing. It is about the way that a passionate reader’s encounter (or reader’s passionate encounter) with Anna Karenina or Chekhov’s ‘Lady with the Little Dog’ or Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry always happens in a particular time and place in a life, and therefore joins the mood you find on the page with the mood of that moment. If your life happens not to be in the groove of intense moral seriousness, or tragic delicacy, or revolutionary metamorphosis just then, then the more seriously and intelligently you read, the worse the disparity gets. Or the better, for the purposes of comedy. Batuman reads Red Cavalry while trying to cook a Black Forest gateau. ‘As Babel immortalised for posterity the military embarrassment of the botched 1920 Russo-Polish campaign, so he immortalised for me the culinary embarrassment of this cake, which . . . produced the final pansensory impression of an old hat soaked in cough syrup.’

  But it isn’t (just) a recipe for being silly about Russian lit. She is interested in finding words for a whole array of disparities, for the different emotional mixtures that coalesce when her teenage self reads Tolstoy in her grandmother’s house in Turkey, when she’s studying in Samarkand one hot summer where she has to pick ants out of the jam, when she’s experiencing a collective infatuation at grad ­school that mirrors her understanding of Dostoevsky’s Demons. Funny is a constant but it isn’t the goal. It’s her means, her method, her chosen form of conversational naturalness, and her palette of intentions is much wider. From the Samarkand sections, spread out through the course of the book, you remember the disastrous Uzbek medieval poem she reads:

  Was it my heart – a bird – that was caught in your locks

  that unfortunate night,

  Or was it bats of some kind?

  Indeed, I think I’m never going to forget it; but you also retain an elegantly, lightly expressive portrait of a post-Soviet city, where she had hoped to find a meeting ground between her ancestral Turkish and her chosen Russian, between the who and the what of her identity, and instead discovered that places and languages don’t work like that.

  The disparities between reading and its circumstances stand in for, provide the local embodiment of, the difference between novel-shaped experiences and life-shaped ones. This is her serious theme; and her comic one too, both at once. ‘Unknown parties had strongly impressed upon the camp organisers that I, as an American, ate nothing but corn and watermelon.’ ‘Starting around that time, I was plagued by a recurring nightmare about penguins.’ Deadpan details like these have no point to make, and that’s their point. When she’s pursuing her formidable gift for the charmingly inconsequential – to the point where it sometimes feels as if she’s got a slightly bored-looking guy with a bass drum and hi-hat permanently stationed behind her, ready to go ba-boom-tish! every few sentences – she’s also making an argument.

  As she puts it in the opening chapter, ‘Events and places succeed one another like items on a shopping list. There may be interesting and moving experiences, but one thing is guaranteed: they won’t naturally assume the shape of a wonderful book.’ Among other things, The Possessed is a record of her decision to become a reading kind of writer rather than a novelist herself. She could have closed the life–art gap the traditional way, by shaping life in art’s image. (The book includes a spectacularly unappealing comic summary of the contemporary American short story.) Instead, she says, she chooses to live out the art, ‘by study instead of imitation, and metonymy instead of metaphor’. She’ll go to the places and see the things and be true to what that feels like. It’s a kind of manifesto, comical-scholarly-documentary. ‘What if you wrote a book and it was all true?’

  Well, there’s true and there’s true. It’s a rare piece of even conventional non-fiction that doesn’t steal from the coherence of fiction to glue its narrative secretly together, and this is no exception. The emotional strand we’re following out here is the by-no-means-unheard-of autobiographical one in which a smart aleck with charm – in this case maybe a smart alexei – gets some wisdom. Moreover, though it seems churlish to point this out of something so beautifully made, paragraph by paragraph: where The Possessed doesn’t work, it tends to be because, very conventionally, it isn’t structured enough, it hasn’t borrowed enough on the sly from the coherence of the novel. Beneath its eloquent skin, The Possessed is palpably a fix-up, rather than something devised from the start as a whole book-shaped book. It’s a brilliant piece of opportunism, retrospectively sutured together from (I’d say) three existing Russia-related magazine pieces, with the Samarkand material serving as a spine, and the genuine commitment to the comedy of desultoriness serving as a warrant for incorporating desultory stuff she happened to have by her. Friends who serve one function in one context of reading turn up later in another one and are re­introduced as if for the first time. So it isn’t, quite, the promised book in which everything is true. But the faint disappointment here attaches to ‘book’, not to ‘true’, where her irony is in astonishingly perfect working order; and you should read The Possessed, preferably while having unruly adventures of your own, in order to take your reader’s share in the first outing of a major voice.

  (2010)

  IN MEMORIAM, IAIN M. BANKS

  Iain Banks wrote literary novels and science fiction turn by turn for nearly thirty years. He banged out a piece of well-reviewed lit fic – this is not a derogatory way of putting it, just a reference to the smoking speed with which he always seemed to work – and then hoisted the M in the middle of his name to signal to the world that ‘Iain M. Banks’, the world’s most penetrable pseudonym, was next about to embark on some SF. His readerships and his reputations overlapped a bit; nevertheless, he really did have two careers. Just before he died of liver cancer, he took to his blog to quash the idea someone had mooted, that he’d been writing SF all this time to cross-subsidise the proper literachewer. It was the other way round, he pointed out. His straight novels outsold the SF fourfold or fivefold. It was the science fiction that was the subsidised labour of love, the impractical art pursued as a vocation.

  Reading this as someone who’s principally a fan of Banks-with-an-M made immediate sense to me. (And made me even sadder at the cruelty with which his time had been cut short by the cancer.) Because, while he was a good novelist, he was a great SF writer: an iconoclast, a changer of the landscape of imagination, a once-in-a-generation talent. Let me try and explain why, for those of you who happen not to have rea
d him, who maybe haven’t seen reason to dip much into SF at all. In particular, let me try to explain why this part of his work ought to be cherished by British atheists, in whose company he was proud to number himself. (Unlike me, but let’s not talk about that today.) Some of this will be a bit of a reach. Thanks to the specific choices he made, it is possible for a new reader to bounce back, baffled. Nick Hornby, for instance, famously threw his hands up in comic despair when he tried Excession, one of the very best of the books. But it is worth persisting.

  Back in the mid-1980s, when Banks had made his (literary) name with The Wasp Factory, and was contemplating his perverse swallow-dive into genre, there were, roughly speaking, two available ways of doing SF. (I exaggerate and simplify.) With immense difficulty, over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the better writers within the field had dragged it away from its pulp roots; they had brought in good prose and ambitious characterisation; they had opened it to politics, to feminism, to formal experimentation; they had redirected it away from the traditional subject-matter of adventure in space and Things With Tentacles, and pointed it instead at plausibly rendered near-futures, at psychological exploration of the alien within. ‘Cyberpunk’ was the movement of the moment, with William Gibson’s glittering neo-noir Sprawl trilogy as its defining success. Serious SF was expected to be in this tempered literary mould: if not Gibsonian explorations of the Reaganised or Thatcherised street, and the uses it found for digital technology, then anthropological seriousness à la Ursula Le Guin, or dystopic seriousness to befit the threat of nuclear war. Because the only other way of doing it was the tacky, vestigial tradition of writing about rayguns and starships and galactic empires: still going, thanks to Star Wars, but tending to be practised only by the naive, the nostalgic, the conservative, or the featherbrained. ‘Space opera’, so-called, was an embarrassing low-status leftover.