How to end such a story, especially one that is this angry, like a big black fist? The voice is off-putting. All the important action happens offscreen; we don’t even see the shooting or the actual bodies or the video. Like that one guy in fiction workshop said, meta is so eighties. The mise en abyme is cool but overdone. This is a story of fragments, sketches. Dear author: thank you for sharing this, but we regret.
And what a brilliant story it is, this first, titular entry in the table of contents of this flawlessly executed, arresting debut collection. Of course, the very features listed by Thompson-Spires as flaws – her irony deliberately self-conscious – are its key attractions. That ‘Heads of the Colored People’ is a story of sketches, fragments leaves us as readers all the more intensely involved with it, reaching for truth even as we look away, sickened by the horror of truth’s implications.
Not all the stories in this collection are so deliberately oblique. Each and every one makes for compelling reading. My favourites are the linked stories – ‘Belles Lettres’, ‘The Body’s Defenses Against Itself’, the superb ‘Fatima, the Biloquist’. The brilliant little duology that is ‘This Todd’ and ‘A Conversation About Bread’. But then there’s the shocking needle-sharpness of ‘Suicide, Watch’ and ‘Wash Clean the Bones’ – I admire them all.
This is the kind of collection you might feel driven to read in a single sitting, just to see where it’s going, just to make sure that at least some of its characters emerge from their narratives unscathed. And to enjoy the writing, of course, the author’s seamlessly dexterous control of voice and form. Thompson-Spires has talked about her reasons for training her gaze on the American black middle classes in particular – because the issues they face are often hidden and not openly discussed – and this is a book that will make you question tired assumptions just as often as it makes you laugh.
I think it’s brilliant. I am so eager to see what Thomspon-Spires writes next, because the second book is, more even than the debut, the proof of an author’s intent and future direction.
I am not sure whether I personally would have considered Heads of the Colored People as a typical Gordon Burn Prize contender, if there is such a thing and maybe there isn’t and maybe that’s the point, but for me these stories have a smoothed perfection about them – an MFA quality – that removes them from the jagged edge of immediacy I have come to associate with the prize. Maybe I’m talking tosh and it wouldn’t be the first time. In either case, I hope Thompson-Spires garners many more award nominations, because the significance of her achievement is not in doubt.
This novel opens with one of its twelve principal characters walking over Hungerford Bridge on her way to the National Theatre, and in one of those weird moments of synchronicity that happen more often than cold logic would give life credit for, that is exactly what I found myself doing the day I finished reading Girl, Woman, Other. How could I not think of Amma as I reached the bridge’s mid-point, stopping, as I so often do when making that particular transition, to gaze out at the lights of London, to meditate on where the city is headed, where I see myself now in relation to it?
This is a great symphony of a novel, one in which a number of story threads and character arcs are gradually woven together – or unravelled, if you prefer to see it that way – in a dense and skilfully designed tapestry of narrative. No character is random, no incident irrelevant. And though many of the book’s central characters live in London and the novel has a great deal to say about that city in particular this is far from being exclusively a London novel.
Reading Girl, Woman, Other is an experience not unlike wandering through the departure lounge of an international airport: you watch individuals, couples, families, hear snatches of their conversations, pick up intimations of their worries and dreams, experience fleeting visions of a hundred lives. All are different, yet all are connected. All, for those moments in which you encounter them, seem somehow intimately and uncannily connected with your own.
The way the book is written, the form it takes – an unstoppable river of words alternately close-packed and free-wheeling, skittish – is for me at least its greatest joy. In its disregard for conventional arrangements of paragraphs and cut-and-dried syntax, the novel offers an irresistible invitation to dive right in: to be with its people, to question your own choices, motivations and assumptions, to recognise the role you play in shaping the lives of others and of our body politic. The use of different Englishes and registers of English forms an inalienable part of the work”s innate musicality.
In its interest in the absolute now as the uppermost layer of the peculiar arrangement of time we know as history, Girl, Woman, Other is absolutely a Gordon Burn book. As an intense and vivid evocation of the lives of black British women, how they have always been here and have always mattered, this work is essential. I don’t mind admitting that I fell in love with it, and more than a little.
Behind me, mirrored, the head of the snake, puffs, opens its black hood, my brain is going to fucking, spunk, bears fangs in its opened mouth, hoods its tongue, is spit on a mirror, and mirrored is miracle: because I know now why there are no snakes in Ireland. I know now. Saint Patrick told them to beat it because snakes move through time differently from us. Their tails are in the past but their heads are in the future. That’s why Saint Patrick told them to beat it. He had to get rid of them. Because if you can read the future then the game is up. And where would Ireland be without the game?
In Anna Burns’s Milkman, a young woman takes refuge in literature as a way of escaping the random brutality of life in the dystopia that is Belfast during the Troubles. In For the Good Times, we are on the other side of the fence, with the milkman who wasn’t really a milkman or at least others like him, pissing about and getting pissed and doing revenge jobs for the Ra while we’re about it.
This is a world where the laughter is loud and the singing is wild and the blood flows painfully and often. This is not a comfortable place to be. This discomfiting impasse, this rupture between a world in which life is lived and comic books are enjoyed and smart clothes admired and the hell in which lives are taken tit for tat and artists burn alive behind barricaded doors is conveyed to us through the words of Sammy, a provo in his youth, now in prison. Sammy is visited by visions – of his beloved best friend Tommy and the horrors they committed together, of the snake that stands for treachery and every single mistake made by every man, ever.
This extraordinary division in register, shifting the novel back and forth between Sammy’s hard-nosed, almost flippant account of irreconcilable social division and its violent consequences, and the hallucinogenic, occult imaginings of a pawn in the game who intuits realities and poetries beyond, realities that are almost more terrifying and more brutal than the blood and grime that is become his daily grind.
For the Good Times reaches beyond social realism into visionary experimentalism to offer us a novel that is in full control of its combustible material, deploying it in a manner that must rank as one of the harshest critiques of paramilitary violence you will ever read, at the same time utilizing it brilliantly as just that: material for the construction of a complex and subversive, bravura work of art.
As an unflinching portrait of these ‘good times’ this book is painful, hard-hitting, difficult to deal with. As the work of a writer who surely counts as one of the most exciting and complete artists at work in Britain today, For the Good Times is a must-read. To add that Keenan’s writing channels the spirit of Gordon Burn to an uncanny degree would seem superfluous to requirements.
“I wanted to make the point in a way that the modernist tradition in Ireland really stems from the Irish vernacular, the love of telling jokes, and the idea that storytelling is performative, and that there are different ways in which to perform a story. I wanted some passages to have the cadences of songs, I wanted to have stories told like interviews back and forth, and some that were pure fantasy like comic strips—this all comes from the Irish folk tradition, but also from the Irish street tradition, which I think definitely informs Irish modernism: that tremendous faith in the power of language.”
(From a fabulous interview with David Keenan at The London Magazine here.)
Literally minutes after finishing reading This Brutal House and while in the process of checking a reference I discovered Ryan Murphy’s HBO series Pose (currently available on BBC iPlayer and amazingly good). In the space of a week I have gone from knowing nothing about the background to Govinden’s novel to knowing at least something about it. I kind of wish I’d discovered Pose before reading This Brutal House but at the same time I’m glad I didn’t, firstly because I can now enter the world of the book again retrospectively and with added sumptuous visuals, and secondly because reading the book ‘blind’ delivers the kind of literary electric shock that reminds us of why we are readers and (especially) why we are writers.
I found this book difficult (a compliment), not in its subject matter so much as the way in which its content is delivered. I’m not a fan of the omniscient voice narrator – I tend to slide away from fabulism – and so I found the use of the first person plural for the Mothers’ narrative somewhat distancing even as it is perfectly appropriate for its context. The narrative is largely expository, the text so dense in places it feels as if you’re having to fight your way inside it. I found it most effective to read this novel in hour-long chunks, so as to immerse myself fully and not to lose the thread.
All these criticisms, in the end, act as plus points: This Brutal House is the kind of novel that stays with you forever, that, once having read it, you can pick up whenever you want and recapture its sense of itself in just a few splendid paragraphs.
I would have liked the book to deliver more of the atmosphere of the vogue balls themselves, the artistry, the coding, the furious competition. Unsurprisingly I enjoyed the formal invention of the vogue caller chapters and could have done with more of them. Stand-out sequences for me were Teddy’s experience in the Chanel store (everything about that chapter is genius) and his later dialogue with the refuse collectors.
At the heart of the book lies Teddy’s story with Sherry and the fleeting glimpses we are offered throughout the course of the novel prove effective as a uniting thread. To ask for more of Sherry and Teddy would seem too greedy.
I know already that This Brutal House will not be my favourite book from the Gordon Burn longlist – in a sense, it is not a novel that was written ‘for’ me and that is well and good – but I know also that it must be one of the contenders most worthy of winning. In entering new territory, both in terms of form and subject matter, in its willingness to take risks, in its superb level of literary achievement, in its opening of the reader’s eyes to social division and hidden oppression, in its reflection on a historical moment This Brutal House loudly embodies the spirit of the Gordon Burn Prize and I will long treasure what it has brought to me, not just as a reader but as a writer too.
It’s interesting how greatly our reaction to books is defined not always by the book as it stands, but by the book we are looking to find.
Of all the novels on this year’s Gordon Burn longlist, Lanny is probably the most beloved by readers and I can see why. Max Porter has a poet’s ear for language. In spite of the bleakness of certain sections, the book as a whole is big-hearted and ultimately positive in its outlook. The action takes place within an enclosed rural community we feel we come to know – as readers, we are drawn into this community, we feel ourselves become a part of it, for better or worse.
All of the above could equally be said of another novel, Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. Perhaps because of the similarity of their conceit, I found myself constantly comparing the two and for me at least, Lanny loses out – definitively – at every juncture.
The wonder of Reservoir 13 lies in the depth it accrues – the multi-layered, undramatic reconstruction of lived reality, the genuine ambiguousness of many of the characters – characters we come to know only gradually, characters who might easily be us. Lanny is too brief an exercise – too studied – for its ecosystem to properly evolve. Even as the language of their thoughts is beautifully evoked, its characters shade towards stereotype. I hate to say it, but Lanny the golden child feels as if he belongs in another novel – Harry Potter, for example. The book might have worked better – and again, this probably says more about me as a writer than it does about the novel – if Lanny had been some more typical little toerag, ruining his neighbours’ vegetable patches playing Bravo Two Zero or spraying obscene graffiti on the village hall.
As it was, I didn’t believe in him. God preserve me from whimsy.
Part 3 of the novel, that too-tidy resolution, feels altogether too swiftly arrived at, and entirely unearned. Part 2 was much more satisfying. If anything, the novel needed to be longer. It needed to dig in more. It needed to have the courage of its original convictions. Max Porter has spoken eloquently of how Lanny began life as a long poem and I think the bones of that original conception – more abstract, more lyrical (and yes, the Lanny of the poem – when it’s just him and Pete – is entirely conceivable as a character and as a poetic being) – show through too starkly, without ever showing through enough to deliver the rigour this project demanded.
Has ambition, lacks depth, too woolly. It’s not him, it’s me.
When I graduate from the partial hospitalization program, I’ll receive a medallion. The people in group will adorn me with compliments and kind wishes. Then I will get on a plane and perform the persona of a successful author—a feature, interviews, a book tour. The medallion will be inside of my jacket pocket, between my fingertips. My hands will smell like a coin, and my nervous laughter will be amplified by a microphone, and women will line up to adorn me with kind wishes, and they’ll tell me they’ve been hurt too, and I’m scared I’ll reach out to hold them and the coin will fall out of my pocket like the secrets I don’t tell. The coin will fall out and I’ll have to admit that I’m a dumb Indian—and maybe that’s what they need to hear. You can’t obscure the truth with the mundane. You can’t illustrate pain for tourists.
Maybe I’ll wear the coin like a talisman, or be in the hospital again.
One writer’s journey, and so much more. It would be interesting to place this book in dialogue with Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table, Anna Kavan’s Asylum Dance, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I find myself remembering especially Meena Kandasamy’s When You Hit Me, which similarly makes the quality of its own sentences the theme of the work as well as the means through which that theme is explored, the proof of its own pudding.
In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure their dichotomies apply to me.
Of central importance also is Mailhot’s identity as a Native woman. The passages examining the difficulties she experienced as an MFA student – the internal opposition she felt to particular assumptions and demands – are marvellous and striking. The book’s genesis – as a series of individual essays – does not in the least affect its overall cohesion and resonance. A short work, but so resolute, with a quality of expression that frequently approaches poetry.
As if its words were hewn from rock. Heart Berries is the kind of book that makes you want to write, immediately, to capture moments and memories and arguments as they thrash and burn.
People didn’t know what to make of each other any more. People didn’t know what to make of themselves. And you couldn’t explain that away. You couldn’t say that this was a bad area. You couldn’t blame unemployment. You couldn’t blame the EDL with their march and their rootless anger and their banners. You couldn’t blame the small houses and the narrow streets. Eva was right. People see what they want to.
How best to sum up this book? There is an ex-police officer in this novel as well as a serving one, yet to call Black Car Burning a crime novel would be to stretch the envelope some distance beyond what even that most accommodating of genres could reasonably stand. It is a novel about landscape that is inalienably about a city. It is a novel haunted by violence in which the dominant role is played by compassion. It is a prose work written by a poet. It is poetry in the form of prose.
In Black Car Burning we meet Alexa, a serving police officer who keeps having nightmares about Hillsborough, a crime that was committed while she was still a small child. Alexa’s father is Pete, who resigned from the police force in the immediate aftermath of Hillsborough and resigns from being Alexa’s dad when he finds he cannot accept her polyamorous relationship with Caron and Leyton. Pete now works in a shop selling climbing gear with Leigh, who thinks she is falling in love with Caron. Caron is in love with Black Car Burning, a notoriously difficult climbing route that tests the nerve as well as the physical stamina of most climbers.
Above and behind them all, the gritstone of Stanage. At their feet, the city of Sheffield, scarred by Hillsborough, its rapidly evolving communities stretched almost to their limit by increasing austerity.
I was writing to a friend about this book the other day and the word they used to describe it was humane. Black Car Burning is one of the most deeply humane explorations of community, class, history, landscape and the absolute now that I have read. I have not felt so deeply, so personally invested in a novel since Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border. Black Car Burning is more difficult, more austere than The Wold Border but it is equally the kind of writing that might save us.
It is no coincidence that Helen Mort has chosen as the epigraph for Black Car Burning a quotation – a radiantly humane one – from M. John Harrison’s 1989 novel Climbers. It must be a coincidence that Black Car Burning happens to be published exactly thirty years after Climbers – writers don’t plan these things – but what could be more fitting, more beautifully apposite? The huge changes that have taken place in those decades – in the climbing community, in the makeup of both our urban and rural environment, in the political climate, in who might be writing about climbing, and landscape, and the feel of granite dust under the fingernails – are searingly observed and catalogued in these two novels, framing the late Thatcher period with Late May like bookends, revealing also and as importantly the ways in which little has changed, the ways in which, though lost, we can still fight, we can still come together, we can still show that we see what is happening, and do not consent.
How significant and how hopeful it is that Black Car Burning was written by a woman. I took to the book so immediately and so naturally it never occurred to me, through at least half the reading of it, to frame it to myself in those terms. But it is important, and it is worth saying.
Please love this book with all your hearts. It is a keeper.
My
relationship with the work of Ian McEwan has been going on for almost the whole
of my adult reading life. I first encountered him in The Cement Garden, which my mother brought home from the library in
the early eighties. She read it and pronounced it ‘weird’. I read it and found
it weird, too, unlike anything I’d read before (I was fourteen) and compelling
in its breaking of taboos, its willingness – one might say its eagerness – to
shock. More than that, The Cement Garden
seemed somehow to chime with the world that was unfolding around me: my parents
were splitting up, I was discovering unpalatable truths about people and
relationships and the wider world of politics and social division. I can’t
swear to this – it’s too long ago – but The
Cement Garden might have been the first adult novel I read by a young,
contemporary writer that dealt explicitly with the fractured and aberrant
nature of modern Britain. McEwan seemed risky to me, and important. I formed an
attachment to his work on the spot, even as it unsettled me and probably
because of that.
I read The Comfort of Strangers a year or two later, First Love, Last Rites at some point between the two. I found both
of these – Strangers especially –
equally risky, equally compelling. The
Child in Time was the first of McEwan’s novels I remember buying at the
time it was published. I was by then an undergraduate and exactly the right age
for reading him. I was gripped by The
Innocent, even more so by Black Dogs,
which in my memory contains some of McEwan’s best writing. Enduring Love is the book I still believe to be his masterpiece:
intense, engaged, dense and ambiguous. Out of step with many, I also enjoyed his
mordant and clever Booker winner, Amsterdam.
Then came Atonement, the novel that made McEwan a household name but that
marked, at least for me, the beginning of an inexorable downward slide into
bland respectability. Compared with the idiosyncratic, vaguely disreputable books
that comprise the first half of his oeuvre, these more recent novels seem smug
and self-satisfied. They are novels that attempt to grapple with universal
themes, whilst appearing to lack the personal engagement and imagination to
convey much of anything beyond the superficial.
I have found this development sad, and shocking. Probably the seeds of doom were there all along – they usually are – and if I were to go back and read the early works now I would find them scattered all over the place. I don’t feel like doing it – I don’t have time to waste on a cause that now seems beyond redemption. Still, from the moment Machines Like Me was announced I knew my curiosity was bound to overcome my reticence. Ian McEwan, trying his hand at science fiction? Not that anyone, least of all McEwan, was going to call it that. In an interview for the Guardian, he is clearly at pains to emphasise that he has something more serious in mind:
“There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future, not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you. If a machine seems like a human or you can’t tell the difference, then you’d jolly well better start thinking about whether it has responsibilities and rights and all the rest.”
I’m sure I’m not alone in finding it ironic that a writer who purportedly has no interest in science fiction is able to come up with such a neat and tidy description of what science fiction is and sets out to do. But if it’s dull and annoying to hear these misconceptions about SF trotted out yet again, it is equally tedious to witness another windy bout of performative outrage from the science fiction community, most especially when it is obvious that few, if any of those doing the yelling have actually read the text they’re so pissed off about.
Of course it is possible to respond to an interview in and of itself, which is what the critic Sarah Ditum did, again in the Guardian, a couple of days later. ‘SF is not a respectable genre’, Ditum states. ‘Its origins are brash and cheap, its richness often married to its slightly disreputable status.’ She goes on to give a neat and informative summary of science fiction’s hotly contested origin story, whilst at the same time opening up to scrutiny the misinformation about science fiction that continues to be disseminated throughout the wider literary world. Quoting the 1976 essay by Ursula Le Guin ‘Science Fiction and Mrs Brown’, Ditum reveals how science fiction is in fact not so much a category of literature as a mode of expression: “a crazy, protean, left-handed monkey wrench, which can be put to any use the craftsman has in mind”.
Ditum’s essay is refreshing and insightful. What it hints at also is the fact that the literary/SF divide is and always has been a war of two armies. For all those writers such as McEwan who refuse to touch the monkey wrench for fear it might be contaminated with genre radioactivity, there are an equal number of writers behind the SF barricades who continue to insist that science fiction is their monkey wrench, that no one else should be allowed to use it unless they want to be exposed to ridicule for using it wrong, and that they should especially not be allowed to use it unless they can tell you where the metal it is made from was mined, write a three-page essay on the smelting process and cite bibliographical sources attesting the canonical uses of monkey wrenches from Golden Age times.
To avoid torturing this analogy any further, we could just call this pointless posturing what it is: the science-fictional equivalent of a comic-book farmer, bellowing at the clueless townies to get off his land.
At this point I would like to posit my own counterfactual, a world in which Ian McEwan, when asked that inevitable question about science fiction, had the nous and the background knowledge to answer simply: ‘Yes, you could definitely say that Machines Like Me is a science fiction novel. At the very least, it makes use of science fictional materials. But then, this is nothing new for me. One of my early stories was published in a science fiction magazine. Several of my other novels make use of speculative conceits. If you look at my TV play, Solid Geometry, or read the story ‘Dead as They Come’ from In Between the Sheets, you will see I have been interested in these kinds of Ballardian themes for a long time. Science fiction is simply one of the many useful tools at a writer’s disposal’.
Such a response would not only have been more truthful, it would have been more interesting for everyone involved. Rather than simply reiterating familiar arguments, we could now be discussing how science fiction has impacted and influenced the contemporary novel. Faced with McEwan’s theoretical Damascene revelation, the science fiction commentariat (such that it is, these days) might have felt obliged to stop snarking from the sidelines and actually read his novel before damning it to hell.
*
The
protagonist and narrator of Machines Like
Me is Charlie Friend, a thirty-three-year-old one-time tax fraudster whose
brush with the law has left him determined to eschew conventional employment in
favour of earning a precarious living from playing the stock market. When a
family inheritance leaves him temporarily solvent, he indulges his inner nerd
and blows the lot on Adam, one of twenty-five new-generation AIs, designed to
look, behave and learn like a human being. As well as fulfilling his lifelong
curiosity about future developments in robotics, Charlie hopes that his
acquisition of Adam will serve to foster his relationship with his upstairs
neighbour Miranda, a postgraduate student whom, after months of supposedly
platonic friendship, Charlie has suddenly decided he is in love with.
So far, so near-future. As it turns out, we are not in the future, but in the past: an alternate nineteen-eighties where Margaret Thatcher’s disastrous Falklands campaign leads directly to a leftwing Labour government under Tony Benn, where JFK and John Lennon are both still alive, and most crucially where wartime codebreaker and mathematical genius Alan Turing was not persecuted to death by the government for his homosexuality. Instead, Turing lives on to complete his life’s work, accelerating the development of computers and information technology. Laptops and mobiles are as much a reality in this nineteen-eighties as the miners’ strike. ‘The near future of the real world becomes the present of the novel,’ states Sarah Ditum in her Guardian article, ‘giving McEwan the space to explore prescient what-ifs: what if a robot could think like a human, or human intelligence could not tell the difference between itself and AI?’
Machines
Like Me, in both its outline and its intention, is a
digital Frankenstein, a story that takes place – just in case we
were in any doubt about its SF credentials – in an alternate universe. It feels
deeply contrarian for an author to invest their energies in a premise like this
and still insist it is somehow ‘not’ science fiction, and it would be equally
foolish to waste time and space here arguing the point. It seems more
interesting and relevant to ask ourselves if the novel makes effective use of
those speculative materials.
One of the most common accusations
levelled at so-called SF tourists is that they insist on reinventing the wheel.
I don’t care about that, particularly, because it’s another boring argument,
and mostly specious – all writers and especially science fiction writers make
copious use of second-hand material. What matters, across all genres, is how inventive
the writer has been in their interpretation of familiar scenarios, how
rigorously they have engaged with the ideas they have chosen to explore. I find
it particularly ironic that Machines Like
Me, a novel that McEwan himself would appear to suggest is somehow better
than SF, relies so heavily on unmitigated exposition, more popularly known in
SF parlance as ‘as you know, Bob’ and held up by mainstream critics as one of
science fiction’s most egregious sins:
Speech-recognition software, a fifties miracle, had long turned to drudge, with entire populations sacrificing hours each day to lonely soliloquising. Brain-machine interfacing, wild fruit of sixties optimism, could barely arouse the interest of a child. What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cogntion-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set.
And that’s just a tiny portion of what’s
on offer. In examining the mechanics of Charlie’s narrative, we should ask
ourselves why he feels the need to explain all this at such length. More
importantly, who is he explaining it to? A science fiction narrative should not
depend on exposition, any more than a novel set in contemporary London should
depend on its narrator explaining the rise of the smartphone, the obsolescence
of VHS.
McEwan’s seeming lack of confidence in handling
speculative materials reveals itself even more glaringly when it comes to the
political background of his counterfactual. In drawing potentially insightful
comparison between the political turmoil of the 1980s and the chaos of now, McEwan
takes the fatal shortcut of simply telling
us: page after page of historical summary that reads like background notes for
a novel rather than the finished article. At one point, Charlie himself seems
to notice this, stepping forward with the following disclaimer:
I repeat this well known history for the benefit of younger readers, who won’t be aware of its emotional impact.
Even AE Van Vogt would have found it
hard to get away with that one. It is difficult to believe such ineptitude
exists in the work of a writer who professes himself too sophisticated for
pulpy old SF.
So much for the background, but how
successful is McEwan in exploring the potential and future implications of
sentient AI, and what are we to make his artificial human, Adam himself? Somewhat
incongruously, the book that kept coming to mind as I thought about this was
the peak pulp also-ran from last year’s Clarke Award shortlist, C. Robert
Cargill’s Sea of Rust. Set in a far
future where a war between humans and machines has left humans extinct and
machines in a decadent state of existential dread, the central problem – among
many – of that novel resides in the fact that for all the ‘machine
consciousness’ displayed by Cargill’s robots, they might as well be human, and I
am afraid much the same could be said of Adam. That he is by far the most
interesting character in the book should not be taken as a win. Whilst some
might argue that in the newly-awakened Adam of the first third of the novel
McEwan makes a credible stab at portraying the essentially alien processes of a
machine mind, the further we progress through the story, the more McEwan
appears to forget about his original intentions, retreating instead to a more
straightforward polemic concerning moral relativism that is not in the least
new or alien, but familiar from many centuries of novels and plays as well as
real-life situations. Indeed, McEwan himself has rehearsed similar arguments on
numerous occasions, most recently in his somewhat cursory 2014 novel The Children Act.
Questions pertaining to AI sentience, self
determination and social autonomy, though they are touched upon here and there,
remain largely unexamined. Similarly the implications for human workers of
increasing automation at all levels of employment – an issue that should lie at
the heart of current social concerns and that has already been the subject of
several recent works of science fiction – is quickly brushed aside so that
McEwan can concentrate his intellectual energies on the question that truly
interests him: whether Miranda should be considered legally and morally
culpable for the act of premeditated revenge that has marked her past and that
has the potential to shatter her future. Such an argument has much in common
with the staged philosophies that form the bedrock of many an Iris Murdoch
novel, and personally I would argue that Machines
Like Me would function better with an all-human cast, and without McEwan’s
clumsy deployment of speculative tropes, especially since Adam’s farewell haiku
reads like knocked-off Blade Runner.
Our leaves are falling.
Come spring we will renew,
But you, alas, fall once.
*
During the course of a forty-minute interview for Radio 4’s Start the Week programme, the presenter Andrew Marr asks Ian McEwan if he believes the territories traditionally occupied by literary fiction and genre fiction are beginning to coalesce. McEwan stands firmly convinced that they are not:
‘I think the distinction still holds, actually… I think there is still about the literary novel a kind of seriousness. No one writes them to get rich, and many people are devoting themselves to the study of them and the writing of them. So I think it’s still worth keeping that distinction, to come back to that notion of the small print of human interaction, of trying to see where we are now, what is the condition of this kind of modernity, the representation of subjectivity, flow of consciousness, all of that, and how that interacts with the social world seems to me a great pursuit, and I don’t find it in pulp fiction.’
Leaving aside his brute assumption that such subjectivities would have no place in a novel of science fiction, we are bound to ask how well Machines Like Me holds up, in McEwan’s own words, as a novel that represents the small print of human interaction. For me at least, Machines Like Me performs even more weakly as a literary novel than it does as science fiction. The novel’s portrayal of Charlie and of Miranda especially is stymied by the fact that McEwan clearly no longer feels comfortable writing about the lives and concerns of people who are younger than he now is himself. Charlie is meant to be thirty-two, yet with his confused politics (protesting the war one minute, feeling a lump in his throat at the sight of the departing taskforce the next), tendency towards nostalgia and bland ignorance of how ordinary people actually live their lives, he comes across as a kind of left-leaning Jacob Rees Mogg. His attitude towards Miranda is depressingly retrograde, the kind of unconscious, ‘benevolent’ sexism – ‘new shirts for me, exotic underwear for her’ – still routinely apparent in the speech and behaviour of too many men, even those who believe themselves enlightened.
Miranda herself is barely characterised
at all. She is an objectified cipher, the female bone of contention between two
sparring males. She is supposed to be twenty-two years old, yet McEwan would
have us believe she doesn’t know how to use a computer mouse. Almost every line
of writing about Miranda mentions her appearance. Adam, for all his superior
logic and absolute morality, is unable to give Charlie a reason for his ‘love’
for Miranda other than her ‘loveliness’. In this respect at least he is just
another predictable middle-aged man with bolted-on maths skills.
In the Marr interview for Radio 4, McEwan states that he has made the moral dilemma at the heart of the novel ‘as difficult as possible’, yet in practice it is depressingly facile, with a glibness that is made more problematic by the fact that it is founded on tropes that are rapidly becoming obsolete, even from SF. [SPOILERS AHEAD] When she was in her final year at school, Miranda’s best friend Mariam was violently raped by a fellow schoolmate, Peter Gorringe. Mariam is so traumatised, so convinced that her family, should they ever learn about what has been done to her, would retreat to antiquated notions of honour and shame and be bound to shun her, that she later commits suicide. Distraught and furious, Miranda decides to enact revenge on Gorringe by falsely accusing him of date-rape. Gorringe is eventually convicted, and spends four years in prison, his life and career prospects effectively ruined.
Adam believes that Miranda should go to
prison for the offence she has committed, that this kind of vigilante action
cannot be justified in a lawful society. The issue is further complicated by
the fact that Miranda and Charlie are trying to foster a child, Mark. Charlie
argues that Miranda’s transgression is a necessary subterfuge: even if Gorringe
did not rape Miranda, he is still a violent rapist. If Miranda ends up with a
criminal record, they will almost certainly lose the chance to adopt Mark, who
would then lose the chance to be part of a loving family.
Let us note first that Miranda’s friend Mariam
has no agency. Her sole function within the narrative is to provide a catalyst
for the main action, her rape serving only as a means of placing Miranda and by
extension Charlie and Adam in a moral dilemma. A trope that has been much
discussed and criticised within the science fiction community in recent years
has been the woman who has to be raped in order for the male protagonist to
grow or change. That Mariam is raped in order for a female character to grow
and change is not exactly an advance on the creative bankruptcy of the trope in
general. That Mariam is Pakistani simply adds to the mistake McEwan has made in
resorting to it. If this is an attempt by McEwan to make his cast of characters
more diverse, it is an ill-judged one. Mariam’s family is presented as perfect in
every way: warm, integrated, welcoming, cultured. Are we to take it that McEwan
believes such a family would have to be
Muslim in order for Mariam to fear they would reject her? I am sure this is
not the case, yet this is how it reads. It is uncomfortable to see McEwan make
such questionable narrative choices, seemingly unaware of how they might be
perceived by a wider readership.
The supposedly climactic confrontation with Peter Gorringe scales heights of ludicrousness not seen in McEwan since the endgame of Saturday. After that, any discussion of Miranda’s suitability as a foster-parent – she is a twenty-two-year-old student with no previous experience of fostering or connection to the child – would seem superfluous to requirements.
*
In
the Guardian interview, McEwan denies his novel’s likeness to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, insisting that ‘[In Frankenstein] the monster is a metaphor
for science out of control, but it is ourselves out of control that I am
interested in.’ In the Marr interview he develops this argument further,
stating that while Shelley’s monster becomes a murderer, his own Adam is
supposed to encapsulate the best in us.
Such an analysis depends upon a
fundamental misreading of Frankenstein:
the monster becomes a murderer not because of ‘science out of control’ but
because, being different, he is rejected and brutalised not only by society but
by his own ‘father’. In Machines Like Me,
Charlie enacts a similar betrayal: he rejects Adam not just for being
different, but because he belatedly comes to realise how that difference will
eventually impact upon his whole way of life. Unable to consider anything
beyond his own primacy, Charlie himself becomes the murderer.
In criticising any novel, we should
never assume that views and emotions expressed by the narrator are shared by
the author, which is why we must consider the possibility that McEwan has set
up Charlie to be unreliable. Yet to read Machines
Like Me as satire would necessitate the inclusion of a contrary view, at
least a hint that at some level, McEwan wishes us to see Charlie for what he
is: an entitled sexist driven almost entirely by self-interest.
That dissenting voice does exist, of
course – it is Adam’s:
“There are principles that are more important than your or anyone else’s particular needs at a given time… Of course, truth is everything… What sort of world do you want? Revenge, or the rule of law. The choice is simple.”
Yet in the Marr interview, McEwan positions himself firmly on Charlie’s side, confirming his desire to exculpate Miranda as ‘the warm-blooded thing to do… the little white lie that defeats the algorithm’ and suggesting that only a machine would insist on balancing the cold equations. He even goes so far as to wonder whether those humans who do take Adam’s side would mostly be men, those who remain in sympathy with Miranda mostly women.
I find this particularly crass. Setting
aside the fact that Miranda’s actions are damaging and reprehensible, not least
because they would have the potential to undermine the cases of actual rape
victims, Adam’s viewpoint is not chilling or machine-like at all. Rather it is
a reasoned legalistic response to a problem of law – in fact it is played out
as such in the closing stages of the novel, and with no machines involved. Are
we then to assume that lawyers are cold-blooded and that the legal system we
are so proud of has been concocted by AI, or that women are inherently unsuitable
to be lawyers?
Of course, McEwan never intended us to
think any of these things. But once again, what he has proven in a roundabout
way is that Machines Like Me is not
about the implications and possibilities of machine sentience at all, that as a
novel it has fallen short of the task it set out to perform.
*
What
does all this mean and why should it matter? Machines Like Me is just a novel; it is an issue of subjective
preference, nothing more, whether one admires it or not. McEwan can write, of
course – he has acquired the level of technical facility that is the rightful
earnings of a lifetime dedicated to a particular pursuit:
Perhaps biology gave me no special status at all, and it meant little to say that the figure before me wasn’t fully alive. In my fatigue, I felt unmoored, drifting into the oceanic blue and black, moving in two directions at once – towards the uncontrollable future we were making for ourselves, where we might finally dissolve our biological identities; at the same time into the ancient past of an infant universe, where the common inheritance, in diminishing order, was rocks, gases, compounds, elements, forces, energy fields – for both of us, the seeding ground of consciousness in whatever form it took.
This could be the finest passage in the book, and I was happy to read it. What disturbs me is the disproportionate level of attention afforded by the literary establishment to this one author. Whilst I think McEwan is a good writer at the sentence level, he is not the literary colossus – the spokesman for our time, the ‘national novelist’ – we are being sold. He simply does not have the depth, the breadth, the originality, the idiosyncratic brilliance such a designation would require.
If he is anything, he is what I would call a heritage writer, representative of the national conscience and consciousness in the same way that National Trust stately homes are emblematic of British history: he is something, but he is not everything, and there will be many for whom he is irrelevant and even offensive. So why are we spending so much time talking about him? In attempting to speak for our times, McEwan not only sounds out of touch, he sounds out of date. There is age, but little gravitas. As a writer, McEwan seems so overtly concerned with embracing ‘big themes’, he appears to have lost contact with what truly matters, personally, to him.
McEwan does not need me to wish him well – he’s doing just fine – and I certainly do not wish him ill. He is just a writer, after all, trying to do his best. What I would like to see is more rigorous criticism, not just of McEwan’s work but of the arbitrary hierarchy he represents. Why is he so admired, and by whom? Why did he begin to attain his greatest success precisely when he turned away from riskier subject matter and towards these clonking stereotypes of what makes us British?
Could it be because he is not threatening, because he fails to adequately challenge our own received opinion of ourselves? His novels are easy to consume, and have every appearance of being serious, granting seriousness, by extension, to the reader. Yet he is essentially comfort reading, and I find the unquestioning, near-universal admiration granted to him concerning because of that.
I came to the end of Machines Like Me in the sad but certain knowledge that I won’t be reading his next book, or the one after that. There are so many more interesting writers I want to spend time with, and I no longer have hope that Ian McEwan retains the capacity to surprise me.
First, because I couldn’t put my foot on the ground. And then because I needed her words, her memories, to nourish the beginning of a novel she knew nothing about.
But I wasn’t afraid of this state of dependence.
It was justified by a higher project, which would develop without her knowing.
(Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan, translated by George Miller)
As her epigraphs for Based on a True Story, Delphine de Vigan chooses quotes from the Stephen King novels Misery and The Dark Half. Both are about writers who experience entrapment, Paul Sheldon at the hands of his infamous ‘number one fan’ Annie Wilkes, Thad Beaumont in the person of George Stark, a literary alter ego who takes on corporeal reality. There is a third King novel haunting the pages of de Vigan’s novel, and that is Bag of Bones, in which thriller writer Mike Noonan, thrown into turmoil by the death of his wife, experiences crippling panic attacks every time he tries to write. He can use the computer for other things – Sudoku puzzles, personal emails – but even opening a Word document is enough to make him vomit. Delphine, the narrator of Based on a True Story, experiences a similarly adverse reaction in the wake of publishing a highly successful novel based upon aspects of her own life story.
The only person Delphine can confide in is L, a ghost writer she happens to meet at a party hosted by a friend. L. seems to embody everything Delphine feels she lacks: a polished beauty and ease of manner, a way of existing among others that does not get in the way of her thirst for freedom, a writing career that, although wrapping her in a mantle of invisibility, nonetheless leaves her firmly in control.
L. is eager to know what Delphine is working on, what kind of novel she will write to build on the triumphant success of her prizewinning bestseller. Delphine is adamant that she will not write another autobiographical novel. Her success has also brought her anxiety, the sense of being owned by her audience, poison pen letters. L. is equally adamant that Delphine should not let what she insists are minor inconveniences get in the way of her true calling as a writer of autofiction. What is more, L. is here to help, to smooth the passage of the ‘phantom novel’ she is certain Delphine has it in her to write. Delphine should not worry – L. will see to it that she has space and time to work, that she will not be bothered by interruptions from friends and colleagues. Yet the more L. becomes indispensable, the fiercer the panic attacks. As the months pass, Delphine finds herself at crisis point, transfixed by the dawning awareness that she may have surrendered more of her own identity than she ever intended.
At the heart of Based on a True Story is an extended literary argument about the value of fiction. L. insists that only writing rooted in reality and known by the reader to be rooted in reality can be truly compelling. The rest is so much flim-flam, entertainment:
“Your readers don’t expect you to tell them stories that send them peacefully to sleep or reassure them. They don’t care about interchangeable characters that could be swapped from one book to another. They don’t care about more or less plausible situations deftly stitched together, which they’ve already read dozens of times. They couldn’t give a fuck. You’ve already proved to them that you know how to do something different, that you can take hold of reality, have it out with it. They’ve understood that you were looking for a different reality and were no longer afraid.”
Delphine insists there is no such thing as ‘reality’ in fiction, that the very act of putting pen to paper is a prelude to invention. Moreover, the writer has the right to toy with facts or not to draw upon reality at all – the reader instinctively understands that is part of the bargain they enter into when they open a novel. How much or how little a story is based upon events experienced by the writer is of lesser importance than the story’s internal verisimilitude:
Didn’t a character have the right to come from nowhere, have no anchorage, and be a pure invention? Did a character have to provide an explanation? I didn’t think so. Because the reader knew what to expect. The reader was always up for yielding to illusion and treating fiction like reality… The reader was capable of weeping over the death or downfall of a character who didn’t exist. It was the opposite of deception.
These arguments and counter-arguments seem especially powerful at the present moment, when autofiction – novels and stories that have their origins in lived reality – is experiencing a resurgence and writers such as David Shields and Rachel Cusk are using their fiction as a kind of reality manifesto. Caught in the middle, I find both arguments equally compelling and equally true. With its use of doubles, imaginary companions and invisible enemies, Based on a True Story is a literary thriller in the most complete sense, a novel-length philosophical argument about what fiction is for.
“I’m almost certain that you, all of us readers, all as much as we are, can be totally taken in by a book that presents itself as the truth and is pure invention, disguise and imagination. I think that any halfway capable author can do that: ramp up the reality effects to make you think that what he’s writing actually happened. And I challenge all of us – you, me, anyone – to disentangle true from false. And in any case it could be a literary project, to write a whole book that presents itself as a true story, a book inspired by so-called real events, but in which everything, or nearly everything, is invented.”
And in fact this looks to be exactly what we are reading. We know that Delphine – the real Delphine de Vigan – wrote a bestselling novel based around her experiences of coping with mental illness within her own family. We can only guess at the sense of personal exposure de Vigan experienced in writing and publishing such a novel, just as we can only guess at how much the lives of Delphine the author and Delphine the protagonist might or might not converge. What we can surely agree upon is that for the purposes of the novel we are reading it does not matter – we are invested regardless.
It would seem almost impossible that such a complex and determinedly intellectual book might work equally well as a thriller, but such is the piece of trickery de Vigan has pulled off. This is an unnerving, page-turning book that keeps you guessing and wondering, inventing alternative scenarios, worrying about the characters. Even when in the final act de Vigan ramps up the action – a broken foot (hello again Paul Sheldon), a cobwebby cellar, rat poison, a dark and stormy night – the book remains stalwart and skillful in its use of reality effects. We as readers never stop believing, even when the reality we have been inhabiting is revealed as a lie.
Towards the end of the book I read the following passage
After her mother’s death, L. stayed shut up inside the apartment. I haven’t managed to find out how long. Some time. I don’t think she went to school.
Need to dig further. I think L’s father forbade her to cross the threshold except in an emergency. I think she was so afraid of him she went for several weeks, or even months, without going out. Alone in the apartment.
This triggers a memory of something I read, some time ago, about a woman in France who was kept a virtual prisoner by her father. Hadn’t he been religious, or something? Was there a cult involved? I couldn’t remember in detail but the connection between this passage in the novel and the half-remembered memoir keeps bugging me. After a couple of minutes’ online searching I find what I am looking for, an interview with a woman named Maude Julien who became the subject of an experiment conducted by her sociopathic, alcoholic father designed to make his daughter ‘superhuman’. Reading the interview again now, I notice how her story also bears similarities with the events portrayed in Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 film Dogtooth. The article was published in February 2018, to coincide with the release of the English-language edition of Julien’s memoir The Only Girl in the World . Based on a True Story came out in 2017.
Quickly i check the respective publication dates of the French originals: D’apres une histoire vraie by Delphine de Vigan, August 2015, Derriere la grille by Maude Julien, September 2014. Going by the dates alone I know it’s not possible for Julien’s story to have influenced de Vigan’s – by the time Julien’s was freely available to read, de Vigan’s would already have entered the production process. But what if de Vigan knew of Julien’s story already – it’s a small world, publishing. Or perhaps she knew Julien personally, had interviewed her even?
So what? It’s a tiny passage, a nod, a reference, not remotely important. But still, in less than five minutes I have constructed an imaginary narrative in which Delphine de Vigan is actually the ghost writer for Maude Julien and Based On a True Story is the book she wrote afterwards, a heavily disguised account of the peculiar experience of inhabiting someone else’s story and then being erased from it. I am sure this is a fantasy but I let myself believe in it, at least a little. Why not? It’s a great little narrative. It would make a good story.
What Delphine de Vigan most playfully demonstrates in Based on a True Story is how genre – in this case the thriller – can be subverted even as it is greedily enjoyed for what it is. This is a captivating, clever book that leaves its neatest trick till last, as we remember that L. sounds just like elle, the French for ‘she’.
I recently read this fine review of Jonathan Gibbs’s new novel The Large Door (which I have not yet read, though I admire his first novel, Randall, a great deal) and this passage in particular set me thinking:
“There are readers for whom this sort of thing is pretentious, an invitation to toss a novel aside. There are readers for whom it’s a snooze — been there, done that, so much pastiche of Pirandello’s Six Characters (1921) — and there are those for whom it’s not quite a deal-breaker so much as an irritant, a blot on an otherwise worthwhile book. In the case of The Large Door, however, I think it’s something else, very much worth dwelling on. It’s not just a feature of the novel’s design, I think, but also an integral component of its moral and political purposes. “
The passage seemed important to me not so much as a comment on The Large Door itself – as I say, I haven’t read it yet – but as an insight into ambition: who are we writing for and who do we hope to reach? In a word, what type of book are we intending?
Of course the answers to these questions will be different for every writer. Nor is it a simple question of subject matter. I believe one could take the outline subject of any book – even down to its key sequences and significant plot points – and recast it in any guise one might wish. I often use the example of how I might prefer A Game of Thrones as rewritten by Hilary Mantel, but it can work the other way, too – imagine Nick Hornby having a go at Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. Not an experiment I would personally be in favour of, but even as I write I am having fun imagining how many readers might prefer the Hornby version to the original.
What I am talking about here is not subject, but intention. Why do we write, and for whom? When Jonathan Gibbs was writing The Large Door, I am guessing he knew from the outset – all hopes and matters of idealism aside – that the manner of its execution would, to paraphrase the reviewer, be an irritant, maybe even a goad to some readers. Whilst this knowledge might be a sadness for Gibbs or an annoyance, we know already from the fact of The Large Door’s existence that it is not a deterrent. The act of writing the book – the necessity of writing the book – is justification enough. If readers will come, let them come – let them come in droves. But readers are not the novel’s only raison d’etre.
Many writers insist that when they are writing they write for themselves, they don’t think about the reader. A noble sentiment, even a necessary one, but is it true? Even Emily Dickinson wanted to be read. Do we not all, when we are writing, have in mind if not our ideal reader then our ideal writer, the writer who drives us forward, the writer whose audience we would like to share, the writer – if we dare admit it – we would most like to impress?
It is useful to acknowledge the truth of this, because it opens a window on to the summit of our ambition. Ambition is often seen as a dirty word, but for me it is a powerful word as well as an honest one, an abstraction that is physically revealed in the very act of writing.
How far do we want to climb? I’m not talking about a universal standard, a clearly measurable distance. It is a matter of the kind of terrain we wish to traverse.
My mentors have always been other writers . Not necessarily writers I have ever met or spoken to in person, but whose words on the page provide not a template but an ideal and – most importantly of all – a challenge.
Name our mentors – those personal to us – and we learn a substantial amount about who we are as writers and where we want to go. There’s an experiment I am in favour of. The results are invariably fascinating and – best of all – never quite what we expected when we started out.
