Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The personalities and feelings of characters in Oryx and Crake were of little interest; these were figures in the service of a morality play. The Year of the Flood is less satirical in tone, less of an intellectual exercise, less scathing though more painful. It is seen very largely through the eyes of women, powerless women, whose individual characters and temperaments and emotions are vivid and memorable. We have less of Hogarth here and more of Goya.

  If there were any affectionate human relationships in the earlier novel, I don’t recall them. In this one, affection and loyalty are strongly felt, loving relationships between characters are memorable. Such loyalties are affirmed, of course, against all the odds, and like everything Toby, Ren, Amanda, and the Gardeners are and do, will soon end in the brute failure of all human intentions. Yet these loyalties spring up, like the shoots of March. In this tiny green featherweight in the scales of Doom we persist in seeing a vast, irrational hope. And somewhere here, somewhere in this irrational affirmation, I think, lies hidden the heart of the novel.

  That is why the hymns of the Gardeners, which are printed about every third chapter along with the sermon-meditations of Adam the Gardener, may be read as kindly spoofs of hippie mysticism, Green fervor, and religious naïveté, and at the same time can be taken quite seriously. Their hymnbook rhythms and Blakeian dodges are appropriate to their sentiments, which aren’t as simple as they might seem at first sight.

  But Man alone seeks Vengefulness,

  And writes his abstract Laws on stone;

  For this false Justice he has made,

  He tortures limb and crushes bone.

  Is this the image of a god?

  My tooth for yours, your eye for mine?

  Oh, if Revenge did move the stars

  Instead of Love, they would not shine.

  In an endnote, Atwood invites us to hear the Gardeners’ hymns sung on her websites and to use them “for amateur devotional or environmental purposes.” This seems to indicate that she means what they say.

  But any affirmation by this author will be hedged with all the barbed wire, flaming swords, and red-eyed Rottweilers she can summon. Much of the story is violent and cruel. None of the male characters is developed at all; they play their roles, no more. The women are real people, but heartbreaking ones. Ren’s chapters are a litany of a gentle soul enduring endless degradation with endless patience. Toby’s nature is tougher, but she is tried to the limit and beyond. Perhaps the book is not an affirmation at all, only a lament, a lament for what little was good about human beings—affection, loyalty, patience, courage—ground down into the dust by our overweening stupidity and monkey cleverness and crazy hatefulness.

  It is no comfort to find that some of the genetic experiments are humanoids designed to replace humanity. Who wants to be replaced by people who turn blue when they want sex, so that the men’s enormous genitals are blue all the time? (Who wants to believe that a story in which that happens isn’t science fiction?)

  I found the final sentences of the book unexpected, not the seemingly inevitable brutal end or dying fall, nor yet a deus-ex-machina salvation, but a surprise, a mystery. Who are the people coming with torches, singing? In the Year of the Dry Flood, only the Gardeners ever sang. Are not the Gardeners all dead? Perhaps I missed the clues again. You must read this extraordinary novel and decide for yourself.

  Margaret Atwood: Stone Mattress

  2014

  In the last century, a good many people were taught that serious poets wrote only poetry, never fiction. No Goethes for the purists. At the same time, modernist critics of fiction decreed that writing imaginative literature disqualified you as a serious novelist. No Mary Shelleys for the realists. Professors and prize-givers preferred purity, so maverick writers whose talent led them to wander cross-country kept running into barbed-wire fences.

  Young Margaret Atwood leapt them handily, winning the Governor General’s Award early on both for poetry and fiction as well as for literary criticism. But she took on a high fence with The Handmaid’s Tale, a brilliant example, like Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984, of the near-future social-satirical-cautionary mode of science fiction. Huxley and Orwell had no problem here, but by the mid-eighties the day after tomorrow had been exiled from the precincts of Literature. Any publisher with his eyes on the prizes was terrified of the label SF. A mistress of deft evasion, Atwood has avoided it, at some cost then and since, while her flexible, adaptable, fiercely intelligent, and highly willful talent kept roaming farther from conventional realism. These days, she can play freely with genre, and it’s as interesting as ever to see where she goes.

  In Stone Mattress, her eleventh volume of short stories, she’s having a high old time dancing over the dark swamps of Horror on the wings of satirical wit. She’s out for the shocked laugh, and gets it, but with elegance. Her scenes and caricatures, as accurate and vivid as those of Hogarth, are almost entirely of old age. The tales run to a general pattern: people who knew one another intimately in their twenties are brought back together in their seventies to live out the variously absurd, fantastic, or dreadful aftermaths of youthful sex, illusion, and crime.

  The first three tales are connected by the narrative device that allows participants in an event to recount it from widely differing, sometimes irreconcilable viewpoints. Henry James did it with characteristic subtlety in The Turn of the Screw; Kurosawa did it so well in film that it’s often called the Rashomon Effect. Fascinating in itself, it’s well suited to a modern take on the fantastic or supernatural, since all the evidence is word-of-mouth and the author never has to commit to a belief in any of it. That’s important to this author; but I think she enjoyed writing her ghost story, with its scathing caricatures, its well-deserved punishments, and its fairy-tale happy ending, as much as we enjoy reading it.

  Atwood has never indulged in gross cruelty to the extent many of her contemporaries do. She shuns predictability, and writes with a light hand and a dry wit. Still, these tales dwell at length not only on the feeble artifices old people may use to disguise physical decay and their fear of death, but also on their murderous fantasies. These dotards are dangerous. The common source of their bloody imaginings and actions is sexual anger, hardly a laughing matter, but Atwood maintains her light tone, and the violence won’t trouble readers inured to such self-indulgence in sexual rage as the Stieg Larsson mysteries.

  In the very entertaining title story, the protagonist has a sudden vulture‘s eye view of herself: “an old woman—because, face it, she is an old woman now—on the verge of murdering an even older man because of an anger fading into the distance of used-up time. It’s paltry. It’s vicious. It’s normal. It’s what happens in life.”

  Satire often walks a knife edge between controlled and uncontrolled anger, between selective and total attack, and the fiercer the indignation behind the satire, the higher the risk of its serving only to destroy. Like Swift, Atwood runs the risk of leaving nothing standing in the wake of her cleansing fire. To my mind the last tale, “Torching the Dusties,” fails as comedy or as cautionary satire, offering no alternative to mindless terror, violence, and despair. “Fun is not knowing how it will end,” a character in an earlier story thinks in a moment of insight, and I thought perhaps he was speaking for Atwood. But in this final story, the fun consists of telling us that this is how it will end, don’t kid yourself, cruel Nature’s out to off you, and she will. Courage and the friendship, generosity, and tenderness briefly praised in earlier passages are worthless. Mortality makes life meaningless.

  Atwood calls these fictions tales, a word, as she says, that removes a story “from the realm of mundane works and days, as it evokes the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale.” Fiction that reduces life to the paltry and the vicious is often humorless. But many folk tales laugh at both bloodshed and petty cruelties, and the grotesque, the dreadful, and the banal are always getting mixed together in comedy and satire.

  Look at these tales, then, as eight ic
ily refreshing arsenic popsicles followed by a Baked Alaska laced with anthrax, all served with impeccable style and aplomb. Enjoy!

  J. G. Ballard: Kingdom Come

  2006

  The voice that narrates Kingdom Come is that of Richard Pearson, an advertising man who has just lost both his job and his father. The father was the victim of an apparently random shooting at a huge shopping centre in Brooklands, between Weybridge and Woking. Pearson goes there to close down the flat and seek some postmortem understanding of the father he hardly knew. On the way he runs into various signs of racial unrest, and in Brooklands itself, described as “a pleasant terrain of comfortable houses, stylish office buildings and retail parks, every advertising man’s image of Britain in the 21st century,” he finds his father’s death to be involved in ambiguities, and the town a hotbed of racial prejudice and hooliganism, led by men wearing shirts with the St. George’s cross. All is not well in the pleasant terrain.

  Not surprisingly, given his profession, but perhaps unfortunately for the reader, Pearson’s narration is so thoroughly unreliable that his story is difficult to follow, and inconsistent sometimes to the point of self-destruction. It’s often hard to read his judgments and descriptions as anything but symptoms of hysteria or paranoia, though he often writes with a specious brilliance, as when he shows us a commentator on a giant screen, “his smile dying in the blur of arc lights, authentic in his insincerity.” Everyone he meets talks pretty much the way he does; here is a middle-aged solicitor describing life in Brooklands, where he grew up: “No one attends church. Why bother? They find spiritual fulfilment at the New Age centre, first left after the burger bar. We had a dozen societies and clubs—music, amateur dramatics, archaeology. They shut down long ago. Charities, political parties? No one turns up. At Christmas the Metro-Centre hires a fleet of motorized Santas. They cruise the streets, blaring out tapes of Disney carols. Checkout girls dressed up as Tinkerbell flashing their thighs. A Panzer army putting on its cutest show.” To which Pearson replies, “Rather like the rest of England. Does it matter?”

  This hateful, scornful exaggeration, coupled with the affectless response, is characteristic of the tone throughout. Pearson seems to side against effete London with the dwellers in the inter-urban sprawl, the consumers to whom his advertising was directed, “the real England,” yet his judgment of them is brutally snobbish: “they preferred lies and mood music,” the Heathrow suburbs are “a zoo for psychopaths.” This well represents an advertiser’s bimodal thinking, but the hysterical note keeps sounding, as he repeatedly presents his perception of Londoners and the people of the motorway towns as two equally degenerate species seething with mutual loathing and contempt.

  As he sees them, the people of Brooklands, the paradise of consumerism, have nothing to do but consume, and their consumerism is consummate, so they are bored: on the edge, longing for violence, even for madness, anything for a thrill. Hence the popularity of the bullyboys wearing the cross of St. George. These faceless multitudes whose life is shopping and spectator sport are ripe for fascism.

  Along in here I thought of José Saramago’s The Cave, which is also about a monstrous supermall, a consumerist apotheosis, but one even more sinister than the Metro-Centre, because at least some of the people it destroys are seen as human beings. They retain, as long as they can, a daily life of hard work and strong emotional bonds, and through it access to the spiritual. Saramago quotes Plato as his epigraph: “What a strange scene you describe, and what strange prisoners. They are just like us.”

  J. G. Ballard’s motive in writing Kingdom Come may have been much akin to Saramago’s in The Cave, but Ballard’s narrator is inadequate: he himself has no access to work worth doing or any bond but sex; he is totally alienated. He can see the people of Brooklands only as parodies of himself. Work and family mean nothing to him, or them; consumerism itself is, he tells us repeatedly, their religion. So the dome of the Metro-Centre becomes their temple, where they fall to worshiping giant teddy bears: a scene which strains both sympathy and credulity, yet is so portentous in tone as to subvert its comic potential.

  In a novel, particularly in a science-fiction novel, if you’re expecting an apocalypse you’re probably going to get one. Richard Pearson connives in a mini-revolution, a manufactured local outbreak of irrationality, violence, and warped spiritual fervor. The leaders of this movement barricade themselves with a few thousand hapless shopper-hostages in the great dome of the Metro-Centre, and withstand for two months the government’s somewhat perfunctory efforts to unseat or outwait them. All this last section of the book moves with energy through scenes of surreal vividness. As the siege goes on, as the food in the meat markets and greengrocers rots, and the air conditioning is shut off, and the water gives out, the gradual and literal decay of existence inside the huge dome is brilliantly drawn. The narrator comes alive as everything begins dying. No doubt it’s what he was waiting for all along.

  After the siege, as violence and racist attacks die down, and the television reverts to household hints and book-group discussions, Pearson tells us, “Once people began to talk earnestly about the novel any hope of freedom had died.” Yet a page later, the last sentence of the book is: “In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.” The meanings of the words freedom, sanity, and republic are here so compromised as to be meaningless. To this narrator, nothing actually means anything, nothing is what it is. But the trouble with letting a spin doctor tell your story is that you risk your reader asking him his own question: “Does it matter?”

  Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain

  2011

  Lying on my bed, reading Chris Andrews’s excellent new translation of the Roberto Bolaño novel Monsieur Pain, I experienced a sudden sense of unease, mixed with a vast pity for something or someone, I was not certain who or what. It may have had something to do with the continual but almost unnoticeable flickering of my reading lamp—or was it the daylight itself that oscillated strangely between the greyish sheen of a street scene in a very old film and the more ordinary light of a cloudy December Tuesday? Even more unsettling was the sense, for which I could find no specific cause, that I had read, not this book, yet something very like this book, several times before in several places, none of which I could remember. Had I perhaps seen it at the cinema? Was it in that theater on the Rue Royale, when the two Spaniards in broad hats had come in directly behind me, hurrying after me, pressing themselves so closely on me as I found my way down the dark aisle that when I at last saw a vacant seat and slipped into it my heart was beating hard and my vision was obscured? All through the film they sat behind me, smoking cigarettes that glowed like unreachable stars, while the hero of the film pursued an obscure quest through tortuous alleyways and corridors, which ended strangely enough in a hospital room whose antiseptic whiteness and perfectly delimited space seemed only waiting to give artistic emphasis to the dark silhouette which I now knew, with no desire to know why, would materialize in the doorway, or beside the bed where I lay reading . . .

  ——

  Surrealist narrative is a literary form at war with itself; disconnection is a primary tactic of surrealism, and story is a process of making connections, however unexpected. Readers open to the autodestructive element of modern art may find the surrealist devices in Monsieur Pain more deeply engaging than coherent narrative. I find them curiously old-fashioned, overly cinematic, and all too close to self-parody. But this early Bolaño novel has a keen moral and political urgency that obliges me to accept its noir banalities. Its tortuous method of approaching the unspeakable reveals the face of evil without glamorizing it as popular literature and film so often do. By indirection it avoids collusion.

  A synopsis that made sense would misrepresent the book, since all we know of “what happens” is what the narrator tells us, and he doesn’t distinguish actuality from hallucination. He is Monsieur Pain, a gentle F
renchman, lung-damaged in the First World War, who makes a small living as a mesmerist in mid-1930’s Paris. The woman he loves but is too shy to win brings him to the hospital where a friend of hers named Vallejo is dying of a mysterious illness, complicated by intractable hiccups. The white corridors of the Clinique Arago are labyrinthine, nightmare-like. Two Spaniards persistently shadow Pain, then bribe him not to treat Vallejo. He accepts the bribe. He returns to the clinic, but is driven from it into a (labyrinthine, nightmare-like) warehouse where his life is threatened. He follows one of the Spaniards into a theater where they watch a surrealist film containing a sequence in which he recognises a friend, a physicist, long dead; another man he knew back then joins the Spaniard, insists on renewing acquaintance with Pain, takes him out for a drink, and tells him, smiling, that he is “treating” Republican prisoners for the Spanish Fascists. Pain throws a drink in his face. He finds a way back into the dream-corridors of the clinic in a vain search for Vallejo; hiding in an empty room, he witnesses an apparently significant conversation but cannot hear it through the window. Some while later the woman he loves comes back to Paris with her new husband; she tells Pain that Vallejo is dead, and that he was a poet. The narrative is followed by a set of brief, allusive obituaries of some of the characters.