Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  ORYX AND CRAKE (2003)

  Coupland’s Girlfriend and Miéville’s Kraken, as we have seen and will see, engage not so much with the real-world possibility (or likelihood) of catastrophe as with the culture of catastrophe, and they set about freeing us from this by exaggerating it. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, in contrast, is a bitter diagnosis of playfulness, an angry condemnation of taking things lightly that imagines this flippancy as a disease of the imagination to which our own culture is horribly subject. In this context, ordinary decency is more powerless than paradoxically strong, and the narrative structure that was observed earlier, whereby the clash between ordinary decency and its antagonist is resolved by an anomalous third term, is muffled (as will be seen when we come to discuss the role of Oryx in the novel).

  Oryx and Crake gives us a dystopia brought to an end by an apocalypse; after the apocalypse the text takes the form of a Last Man story. The dystopian society is divided between luxurious gated communities of the techno-scientific elite and “pleeblands” inhabited by the socially discarded.10 The Last Man is the point-of-view character Snowman, scabby, his memory going, caretaker of a tribe of Edenic post-humans genetically devised by his friend Crake. Crake, like Snowman a lover of Oryx, released the virus that brutally killed everybody else, in effect replacing humans with amiable, simplified successors. Crake is a brilliant, affectless scientist, highly valued in a world that he eventually destroys without qualms; Snowman in contrast is a graduate of the humanities-centered Martha Graham Academy, where those of the elite who are fit for nothing better end up. He is well-meaning but ineffectual.

  We have here banal-cheery brand names, processes, gross transgenic organisms with silly names, nasty computer games also with silly or nasty names. The similarity with Coupland is clear, but the difference is that whereas Coupland, through his characters, admits to a complicity with the language of brand-name banality, Atwood remains fiercely alienated, and her diagnosis is much grimmer. This is a commodified world in which everything is a brand, and the brand names that Atwood invents both furnish it and convey her loathing of it. We have Happicuppa, BlyssPluss, an Internet game called Extinctathon, a live suicide site called niteenite.com, and so on and on. There are pigoons, wolvogs, snats, and the like: coarsely clever portmanteau names for hybrid transgenic inventions. The novel is a lot more interested in the brand names and coinages than in any technical or scientific details, because it is the mentality behind the names and coinages that shapes this society rather than the technical or scientific skill behind the various inventions and practices. In introducing new and sometimes marvelous inventions and practices, a science fiction has to devise names, often colloquial, that express how these inventions and practices have become normal in the novel’s novum. Here Atwood shears the name away from the thing (there is seldom any explanation of the imagined or extrapolated science behind it) and tilts the name violently toward the coarse and flippant.

  The diagnosis is clear. This is an adolescent, game-playing, immature culture that Atwood depicts and loathes, its thinking based on fridge magnets (209). The world is ruined in a fit of “boy genius” superficiality (158), “just kiddie fun” (225). There is no chance that this culture contains within itself the resources to recover, and indeed even in Coupland, where that chance does exist, it requires a series of miracles to be realized. The outcome will be different in Kraken, because that novel sets the scene at a greater, more fantastic distance from the confining culture of contemporary consumerism.

  Atwood’s style is angrily offhand. The decadence of the dystopia, the drugs, sex, and porn of the society that preceded and brought about catastrophe, is not enticing, and we would not expect it to be, but neither is the desolation of the Last Man story that is interwoven in Oryx and Crake at all redolent or evocative in the way that many passages of desolation and decay in literature are. These are pleasures and compensations refused. There are irregular gaps and speedings up in the narrative, a refusal of steady consecutiveness, as if this would be false to how things happen or are decided in this world. The tenor of the narrative is marked by “the usual,” “another,” “the usual strange accidents” (254), “same old stuff” (271); and, of the final annihilating virus, “it looked like the usual melting gumdrop with spines” (341). We are not being told anything new or anything we don’t know already. The novel’s fierce refusal of readerly pleasure and compensation, its persistence with a dialectic of the banal and the gross—Happicuppa and a genetically engineered headless chicken with twenty breasts and a mouth (“There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump the nutrients in there” [202])—are the expression of how we are implicated in what it is seeing. Befitting the novel’s inverted narrative structure and the anticlimactic “revelation” of the disaster’s heavily foreshadowed origins, Atwood is not inventing here so much as provocatively reminding.

  Snowman ends up doing the ads for BlyssPluss (a sort of enhanced Viagra, except that Crake has doctored it so that it leaves its users sterile). His feebleness as representative of the world of imagination points to something that is disturbing or maybe enraging this angry novel. It is a variant of what Fredric Jameson points to in his writings on the postmodern: the notion that art no longer has a separate sphere or role, the possibility that culture—the realm of play and critique, of imagination and the refreshed use of language—is now everywhere and so in effect nowhere. Culture is spread so thin as to be a mere veneer. In Oryx and Crake everyone is playing games, except that they are pornographic; play with language is widespread in the dozens of brand names that the novel devises, but always both deceptive and infantile. In this context, Crake, the affectless representative of the “socially spastic scientists” (205) at “Asperger’s U,” is a kind of distraction, a Villain with a capital V; the real problem is elsewhere. Snowman is a member of the class of symbolic analysts; he is working in the knowledge industry. It is the imagination that has decayed in the world of the Oryx and Crake, more even than the intellect.

  Snowman is a mere observer; Snowman and Crake do combine to bring about completing the deaths of Oryx and Crake (Crake stages the event, and Snowman finds himself completing the scene), but the novel is not structured around their complex collaboration as was The Lathe of Heaven with Haber and Orr. It’s named for Oryx and Crake, not Crake and Snowman. What of Oryx, then? Does she figure as a kind of third term, an anomaly that might resolve the binary blockage between Crake and Snowman, as the aliens do in The Lathe of Heaven? It sometimes seems so, but (for this reader) the effect is inconclusive. Oryx is an elusive figure, for all that a child sold from somewhere in Asia into the sex trade and subsequently shy of intimacies and disclosures might seem to fit the grim world of the novel. We can’t even be sure that the child and adolescent of her past and the woman who is Crake’s possession and whom Snowman pines after are the same person.11 The two men combine to kill her, but neither really knew her. She slips sideways into her role as the mother of the Crakers, the human who has contact with them and nurtures them, and then after her death becomes their deity. Her elusive course through the novel is in contrast to the gross materiality of the world in which it is set, and to its emphasis on pornography, exploitation, failed marriages (those of Snowman’s and Crake’s parents), adolescent fumblings and yearnings, and the un-neurotic but purely physical sexuality Crake has bred into the Crakers: a panoply of behaviors in which love has no part. Oryx won’t receive or give love. The effect is tantalizing, and enriches the novel’s economy as a whole, but baffling. Oryx slips elusively through the novel without participating in it. The story of Oryx, Crake, and Snowman is itself peripheral, after all, because the disaster they precipitate is as if it had already happened. The power of the novel is not in its narrative but in Atwood’s powerful and angry analysis of contemporary culture and its destructive banality of imagination.

  KRAKEN (2010): AN ANATOMY

  China Miéville’s Kraken is a comedy of apocalypse: a riff on the mood of apocalypse t
hat (while we read the novel) frees us of our fear of it by reconnecting the apocalyptic in the ordinary and everyday and by an anarchic splurge of images and possibilities: “Any moment called now is always full of possibles. At times of excess might-bes, London sensitives occasionally had to lie down in the dark.”12 As can be seen in this quotation, the narrating voice of the novel is freely inventive, not tied to the point of view of its usually bewildered characters, or infected by any pervasive banality in its imagined world. Like many of the novels under consideration, Kraken multiplies apocalypses—stories, sects, fakes, repetitions. The single overwhelming disaster on which the concept and frisson of apocalypse usually depends is fractured into competing fantasies and sects, and the narrative proliferates crises, all of which threaten to overset reality, only to give way to yet more crises. Further, Kraken reimagines the laws of transformation whereby a given state or phase might become something utterly different. These reimagined laws—to be discussed below—involve a literal relation of word and thing; they posit that there are no gaps in nature, not even between life and death; and they posit that the universe is persuadable and may respond to our arguments about its nature by conforming to what those arguments say.

  In Kraken’s London there is a surplus of accessible and available transformation; transformation is everyday and not usually obtained by great effort or risky evocation of dark powers. This is a novel about London and Londoners; transformation exaggerates ordinary urban conditions:

  “The tattoo was talking.” [Billy, early in the story.]

  “Do not start that. Miracles are getting more common, mate. [Dane]

  “It’s the ends of the world.”

  “End of the world?”

  “Ends.” (78)

  Marge’s problem, when she asked on her bulletin boards where she should go, “as a noob in all this” to learn what London really was, was not too few but too many suggestions. A chaos of them. (248)

  There will be a multitude of apocalypses: faked or seeming-ultimate events that threaten ultimate or startlingly fundamental transformations. Banal or very ordinary objects play a powerful role: a phaser (that is, a toy from the world of Star Trek), a key that has got mislaid and wedged in the tar of the footpath (247), a flickering lightbulb. Marge, one of the ordinary Londoners who has to stumble through to a solution, is for a while protected by a kind of magic iPod, which she programs with some of her favorite songs. As often in London Gothic,13 it’s scraps of wasteland, forgotten dead-end streets, overlooked courtyards, that are the scenes of the actions and the repositories of mystery or potential; “where the world might end was turpe-industrial”: “Scree of rejectamenta. Workshops writing car epitaphs in rust; warehouses staffed in the day by tired teenagers; superstores and self-storage depots of bright colours and cartoon fonts amid bleaching trash. London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. Here was an arena of scrubland, overlooked by suspended roads” (357). Magic is spun out of the ordinary—a kind of origami can fold an ordinary object (in one instance, a cash register) into a new shape, and maybe can fold a man so he can get past barriers; or it can be used to kill, horribly. One of Miéville’s best inventions among the cast of habitués of alternative London is Jason Smyle, “the proletarian chameleon”: “Jason still plied his knack as he came, and the people he passed were momentarily vaguely sure they knew him, that he worked in the same office a couple of desks along, or carried bricks in the building site, or ground coffee beans like them, though they couldn’t remember his name” (234). In similar fashion, much later in the story, Billy and Dane, “hunted by all the violent sects and gangs of alternative London, are ‘disguised by how unremarkable they are’” (321).

  Billy is an ordinary guy who works in the Natural History Museum, from which at the beginning of the novel the preserved corpse of a giant squid has been stolen. He had once jokingly, in a pub conversation, claimed to be a bottle baby, a product of in vitro fertilization. After repeatedly denying his status as some sort of prophet and thence the way he has been swept to the center of events, he realizes that the universe had taken his claim literally, by a mistaking or perhaps a pun. (The effect resembles what was observed in The Lathe of Heaven.) The solution to the mystery and the resolution of the crisis will come not from the giant squid in its huge container but from the glass container itself. Puns, wordplay, and coinages structure the action of the novel as well as its text. The ultimate threat comes from fire, as it happens a kind of time-fire, which, in burning, renders the thing burnt as if it had never been, ever: those swept up in the move to bring about this transformation are named Byrne and Cole.

  Literalism is important to the whole project of Kraken. The magic potential of the universe (that is, this alternative but grungily grounded universe) doesn’t come from the esoteric or from ethereal forces but from transformations of the actual, from takings and mistakings that have the same basis, the same power to change, as puns, wordplay, mishearings. Extraordinary events and transformations happen according to fantastic but definite rules and processes; the anomalous is grounded in nature in Kraken as it is not in Girlfriend or Oryx and Crake. In the fantastic but rule-bound world of Kraken, the universe is attending to what we say or enact, is sometimes persuaded by it—“the universe had heard Billy and he had been persuasive” (461)—and sometimes mishears or finds a double meaning. The way the plot will eventually come to rest on words and ink, writings, reflects this metafictionally. There is an emphasis on unexpected, rudimentary, improvised episodes of communication, and on communication as a variety of sympathetic magic. The text mirrors this power of words; each new group or condition will be given a name—not just Teuthists or Chaos Nazis or Londonmancers but also the endsick, the krakenbit.

  This literalism follows from Miéville’s love of thoroughgoing application, of taking a trope as far as it can be taken. So Wati, originally a model of one of those servants intended to serve the Egyptian upper class in their afterlife who rebelled against that servitude, has gone on in semi-immortality to organize all such beings into revolt or protest. As events unfold in Kraken he is leading a strike of the UMA, the Union of Magicked Assistants—a huge variety of those who drudge and are industrially exploited as familiars to magicians: mice, beetles, pigeons, and whatnot. The narrative of the strike—pickets, scabs, strikebreakers—is threaded through the text; meanwhile Wati also helps Billy and Dane in their flights and quests connected with the missing squid and the way in which the squid seems to be precipitating the apocalypse to end all apocalypses. To do this he manifests as a voice and a spirit—not, now, in the original clay model such as one sees in the Egyptian department of a museum, but in anything that is replica or statue-like, banal or dignified. He can go anywhere he can find these things, and Miéville entertains himself with varying them—the insignia on a car, a bronze statue, a crucifix on a necklace, a figure of Captain Kirk from Star Trek:

  “How’d you feel about a Bratz doll?” Dane said.

  “I’ve been in worse.” (177)

  The magical rubs up against and is sometimes derived from the everyday, and the everyday comprises not only perennial trash and grunge but also banal contemporary things like Captain Kirk dolls.

  Similarly the personage called “the Tattoo” is one of the two crime lords who are masters of the violence of the novel’s alternative London. He turns out to be a literal tattoo. He has been imprisoned in the form of a tattoo on the back of an innocent guy named Paul, and from there directs his minions, to Paul’s severe discomfort. Later, after a series of adventures, Paul will regain control of his self simply by having a tattooist sew up the mouth of the Tattoo. Earlier Paul and Marge had muffled the Tattoo with tape. The Tattoo, a man able magically to speak and command even though imprisoned as a tattoo on another man’s back, is nonetheless subject to ordinary conditions, such that if you plaster tape across his mouth he can’t speak. Who imprisoned him? The other crime lord, Grisamentum. Grisamentum is in violent quest of Billy and his allies
in order to get hold of the kraken (or more precisely the apparently stolen or disappeared giant squid from the Museum of Natural History). He believes he can restore his own life by combining with the ink of the squid, and can do this by sympathetic magic or magic of literal proximity, whereby if something is near or even concerns another thing, it is on the way to becoming that thing. Grisamentum plans to melt the ink off the writings about the kraken that he has had his minions steal, and blend with that ink too. It all stems from a kind of power in metonymy, or in contiguity.