Category: writers (Page 18 of 21)

A look inside James Smythe’s The Machine

Maureen Kincaid Speller recently posted a fine review of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, a ‘zombies take Manhattan’ novel that was submitted for the Clarke last year and one of those books widely thought to be a ‘near miss’ for the eventual shortlist.

I enjoyed Maureen’s review very much, first (as always) for the elegant approachability of her style and scrupulous attention to detail, and secondly because it presented such a well argued view of a book that I personally found myself unable to get on with. I went into Zone One fully expecting to like it. The writing displays considerable flair and the assured craftsmanship of a novelist fully in command of his material is admirably apparent. The thing is, much though I wanted to, I could never get past the fact that it was a zombie novel, and for me the pairing of a familiar science fiction scenario (near-future catastrophe, city under siege, a band of survivors fighting to reassemble civilization) with what can only ever be a fantastical conceit was an uncomfortable mismatch. The living dead aren’t out there, they’re not coming to get you. There are many ways the world could end, but the zombie apocalypse has always been an unconvincing exhibit in the gallery of possibilities and much as I enjoy a good zombie movie I find the idea of zombies roughly about as scary as Stephenie Meyer’s wannabe vampires. Kincaid Speller herself puts it thus:

I have never found zombies especially interesting. Indeed, in terms of genre tropes, I’ve never been quite clear what they are actually for. Once you get past the idea of their being the ‘living dead’, with an unfortunate taste for live flesh, and especially ‘brainssss!’ there is not a lot to be done with them except to get rid of them.

Well, quite. Of course, as Kincaid Speller asserts and demonstrates in her review, Whitehead is going all out to try and give us more than just the traditional ‘gun and burn’ zombie novel, and in terms of his style and approach I can see why Kincaid Speller argues that he’s succeeded. But for me the question remains: is it in fact possible to write a ‘serious’ novel about zombies? Again, here’s Maureen:

We’ve been with Omega patrol for one novel, spread over three days and this sudden intimacy has brought us to care about these people, however artificial the circumstances. Yet, when the system fails, we run with Mark Spitz because what else can we do? It’s been three short days in the middle of something incomprehensible. We’re no closer to knowing why there are zombies, what the zombies want now that there are more of them.

And if Colson Whitehead, with all the considerable literary arsenal at his disposal, can’t make you believe in zombies, who can?

The truth is that if you want to inject new life into a dead trope the only way to do it is to approach it sideways. The one genuinely frightening thing about zombies is not the idea that the dead might rise (enough already), nor even the possibility that when they do they’re going to guzzle your brains. What’s frightening about zombies is that moment in which a zombie becomes a zombie – the moment when a known and loved human being changes into something alien, dangerous and utterly unknowable. These are the key moments in any halfway decent zombie narrative, and the ‘what ifs’ such moments give rise to form the only serious subtext of the whole zombie subgenre: what if our best friend/lover/mother was to be taken away and replaced by something monstrous? How would you even begin to confront that possibility?

Musing on Maureen’s review, I came to the conclusion that if more writers were willing to give up the zombie tropes, sacrifice a little of the over-familiar fantastical iconography for some more realistically applicable science fiction, they would quickly discover that this moment of change and the reasons surrounding it present far more serious and terrifying possibilities for fiction than the derivative aftermath. Just a day or two after revisiting Whitehead, I happened to begin reading James Smythe’s new novel The Machine, which with uncanny prescience seemed to present the perfect concrete illustration for my theoretical argument. Smythe’s novel is more understated than Whitehead’s, less determinedly showy in the manner of its telling. It isn’t even a zombie novel – though with its fascinatingly original variant on the trope it could be argued as such. And in its economical lines and claustrophobic spaces it achieves a realism that in the end and for all its high and earnest style Whitehead’s novel does not: it is so completely believable that it’s frightening.

The Machine is essentially a Frankenstein for the 21^st century. Our Victor is not a scientist but a soldier. Suffering from post-traumatic stress after a near-fatal incident in Iran, he undergoes an experimental course of treatment that promises to excise the trauma but that in practice wipes his memory banks and leaves him in a near-vegetative state the medics call ‘vacancy’. In a fitting homage to Mary Shelley herself, the ‘modern Prometheus’ here is not Vic – he’s the reanimated corpse – but his wife Elizabeth. Fearing that she is at least partly to blame for Vic’s vacancy, Beth determines to steal her husband’s ‘body’ from the care facility where it’s being kept and bring him back to life by re-codifying his purged memories. The apparatus she will use to perform this miracle is the same now-illegal apparatus that caused Vic’s meltdown in the first place, known simply and ominously as the Machine.

Like the original Frankenstein, The Machine is far less a horror novel than a novel of serious science fiction that deals in the serious subjects of faith and science, hubris and responsibility. Should a technology necessarily be used, just because we have access to it? What happens when our imaginative reach outstrips our practical control? Beth’s inevitable descent into hell is described in terse, economical prose with a lethal clarity, and the message the novel shares with Shelley’s Frankenstein – that man is only ever one step away from becoming a monster of his or her own making – is delivered with devastating finality in a conclusion that gives the inimitable original a very good run for its money.

The Machine is set just decades from now, in a near future where the effects of global warming have begun to dramatically alter climate and weather patterns. Central London is at permanent risk of flooding, and whole stretches of Britain’s rapidly eroding coastline are now underwater. The Isle of Wight, where the main action of the novel takes place, is a parched, deprived hinterland of transient supply workers, disaffected youths and scruffy housing estates. Skiving teenagers hang about on corners, looking bored and being vaguely threatening. Neighbours gossip, kids daub graffiti. The sweltering weather aside, this might almost be the backdrop to Shane Meadows’s This is England, or Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank. In other words, what happens to Beth could be happening right down the road from us. This is an environment so familiar, so parochially our own, and its alienating, arid spaces seem almost to mirror the obsessive, inescapably cyclical behaviours of their human inhabitants. Smythe’s confidently worked evocation of this particularly British landscape remains for me one of The Machine’s salient achievements.

I’ve read and enjoyed three of James Smythe’s novels this spring, and The Machine is the best yet. Immediately gripping and oppressively tense, it’s the most unputdownable book I’ve come across in a while. Smythe’s clean and supple English is a pleasure to read, and his facility with plot is something I can only gawp and point at admiringly. But perhaps the most exciting thing about Smythe is that here is a writer who clearly cherishes literary values who actively wants to write science fiction. Unlike the ‘mainstream dabblers’ he seems neither embarrassed by nor disdainful of being called a science fiction writer. He obviously loves the stuff and understands what he’s doing with it. You get the sense while reading him that he is himself excited – about the possibilities of SF in general and what he might be able to bring to it in particular.

With writers like James Smythe coming up, SF is far from exhausted, nor is it likely to become so any time soon.

Aleksandar Hemon’s ‘The Aquarium’ seems likely to be the most affecting piece of writing I’ll come across in a while. It’s a story, but a factual one, an excerpt from Hemon’s new memoir The Book of My Lives, the account of the illness and death from brain cancer of his nine-month-old younger daughter Isabel. It would be natural and probably necessary for Hemon to find words for what happened, because that is what writers do. It is still an act of extreme bravery. The narrative can be described only by reading it.

The quality of thinking behind Hemon’s writing powers through in passages like this, where Hemon talks about the necessity of story in human lives as a means of survival:

One day at breakfast, while [my older daughter] Ella ate her oatmeal and rambled on about her [imaginary] brother, I recognized in a humbling flash that she was doing exactly what I’d been doing as a writer all these years: the fictional characters in my books had allowed me to understand what was hard for me to understand (which, so far, has been nearly everything). Much like Ella, I’d found myself with an excess of words, the wealth of which far exceeded the pathetic limits of my own biography. I’d needed narrative space to extend myself into; I’d needed more lives. I, too, had needed another set of parents, and someone other than myself to throw my metaphysical tantrums. I’d cooked up those avatars in the soup of my ever-changing self, but they were not me—they did what I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do. Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories was deeply embedded in our minds and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination—and therefore fiction—was a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We processed the world by telling stories, produced human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

I first encountered Aleksandar Hemon through his unnervingly brilliant first novel The Lazarus Project, which uses interlinked timelines as a means to coming to terms with identity in exile. Hemon is obsessed by language at every level – as an expression of identity, as the cornerstone of self expression – and the language he uses is enviably eloquent, what I would choose to call idiosyncratically direct. I found reading ‘The Aquarium’ as close to unbearable as a reading experience can be – and yet as a writer as much as a reader it demanded my attention.

It also presented an odd coincidence, a glancing relationship to my own autobiography. When I was a little less than four years old, I was in a car on a motorway somewhere in the south of England, travelling with my family from our home in the Midlands to spend a weekend with friends. For a young child – and this was just a year or so prior to that time when forever afterwards long motorway journeys would be synonymous in my mind with hours-long, blissful opportunities for reading – such a journey might have seemed both endless and dull, but my dad was always an intrepid motorhead, and already such lengthy expeditions were a commonplace in my life. This one though turned out to be different: sinister, unnervingly truncated. Because of the age I was then – more or less exactly the same age as Hemon’s older daughter Ella when her sister died – I am left with the sense that I never quite grasped its seriousness, even today.

Seemingly out of nowhere, my brother fell ill. He was just a baby, not quite two years old. One minute everything was normal, the next my dad was pulling us over to the side of the road, my brother was being wrapped in a blanket and we were headed for the nearest hospital. Most likely because she was a trained nurse, my mother had spotted something definitively abnormal in my brother’s feverish, at first agitated and then increasingly unresponsive state, and it’s likely that her prompt assessment of the gravity of his situation contributed significantly towards his later recovery. Because my brother had contracted viral meningitis. This was in 1970, when laypeople weren’t as alert to this disease as they are today.

Reading Hemon’s descriptions in ‘The Aquarium’ of Ella’s attempts to understand what was going on – the instant disruption of her normal routines, the sudden and total incursion of anxiety into her world – gave me the oddest feeling of experiencing his account through the wrong end of a telescope. For I do remember the things, to some small extent similar, that happened to me: instead of the expected weekend with friends (I was even at that age an intense child, a jealous child, a child that disliked the meaningless small talk and enforced jollity that seemed to characterise such encounters and I had not been looking forward to it) I was left with those friends, hurriedly and with scant preparation, while my parents dashed back to spend first one night and then another at the hospital. I remember not making nearly as much fuss about this as I might usually have done – I did somehow grasp that my brother was seriously ill and that anything I might do or say that did not directly relate to this or help the situation would be embarrassingly inappropriate – but I was confused, and a bit scared, in a kind of emotional stasis. I remember standing in water up to my knees in a kind of public outdoor paddling pool – so was it summer then? – while my mother’s friend Margaret watched carefully over me. I remember wondering if my brother might die, whilst not really having a clue what that actually meant.

I must have had some notion of what was going on, because I handed over my favourite toy – a beagle glove puppet – with the firm instructions that it be given to my brother at the hospital. I was inseparable from that thing. The idea of giving it away under ordinary circumstances would have been unthinkable to me.

My brother made a full recovery. He was critically ill for perhaps a week. Not long after that he was boasting about the monster injections (lumbar punctures) he had been given. He was soon back to normal and we all went home. But when I read Hemon’s words in ‘The Aquarium’ about being with Isabel in hospital – ‘If I found myself envisioning holding her little hand as she was dying, I would erase the vision, often startling [my wife] Teri by saying aloud to myself, “No! No! No! No!” ‘ – I can’t help but think of my own mother, the image of her from that time that is still imprinted on my brain, like a single snapshot, her leaning over into the back seat of the car and reaching for my brother, abnormally still, wrapped in that yellow blanket, and how easily things might have taken a darker turn.

Read more about The Book of My Lives, and John Freeman’s wonderful interview with Aleksandar Hemon here.

Nick Royle novels make train journeys pass more swiftly – fact. I spent most of my seven-hour cross-country haul from Truro to Hastings today reading Nick’s First Novel, which is not his first novel at all, but his eighth. I found it strange and rather pleasurable to note that the last time I made that journey it just happened to be in the company of Regicide, which is listed as Royle’s seventh novel but is actually his first. Odd coincidences like that are part of what First Novel is all about.

The book begins with a man in a room. Paul Kinder, a creative writing tutor with one indifferently received novel to his credit, sits in his office painstakingly deconstructing the Kindle he’s just been given free as a perk of the job. He arranges the innards of the small machine in neat rows on his desk according to size, reflecting that either he’ll be able to put the Kindle back together again, or he won’t. In the event he does not try – he sweeps the whole thing into the waste bin and carries on with his day as if nothing has happened.

There’s something curious, and curiously disconcerting, about all this. Kinder’s dispassionate narrative – delivered in the cool, minutely observational tone of the French Nouveaux Romans Royle is known to admire – is simultaneously alienating and compelling. We follow Kinder willingly enough, because we can’t help wanting to know where he’s leading us – and yet at the same time we’re looking off to the side, wondering what, exactly, we’re supposed to be doing here and where we’ll end up.

First Novel‘s early chapters reminded me very much of the dangerously wayward novels – Blind Date, Cockpit, Steps – of Jerzy Kosinski. They had that same seeming-objectivity, that same eerie amoral intensity. But the book soon twisted itself into something rather different as a multiplicity of narrative threads began to emerge, bewilderingly diverse at first, ultimately thronging together like the strands in a rope, becoming whole, becoming one, yet resisting any simple explanation. Are these storylines – sinister, diverting, affecting – the testimony of a madman, the inspired fictions of talented debutants, the solution to a mystery? They are all of these, and something more, something bigger yet. First Novel takes the concept of the unreliable narrator to a whole new level.

Oh, and it’s so beautifully written. There’s poetry here as well as madness. It’s an amazing novel – a fluid, dark river of a book and I loved it. It marks a new high water mark of Royle’s already considerable achievement as a writer, and if it doesn’t make this year’s Booker shortlist then the literary world is even more insane than we thought.

While I was in Cornwall I finished reading Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl. It’s very different in tone from Royle’s work – the very opposite of dispassionate – and yet the two share a multitude of similarities: unreliable narrators, buried secrets, suicides and hauntings. I would consider The Drowning Girl to be the finest, most riveting and most actually disturbing evocation of a supernatural haunting I have ever read, and this novel is every bit as achieved, as shattering, as exquisitely rendered as is First Novel, one of those books that makes me anxious towards the end in case the close turns out not to be equal to the rest. In the case of The Drowning Girl, my anxiety proved entirely groundless. It’s a beauteous thing, as near to flawless as any novel could hope to be.

It is very rare indeed to read two such superlative fictions back to back.

Loads seems to have happened while I’ve been away. I had intermittent internet access only, but I did at least get to see the BSFA and Kitschies shortlists on their day of publication. Niall Harrison’s excellent summation is here.

The first Caitlin R. Kiernan story I ever read was ‘Valentia’, in the Jones/Sutton anthology Dark Terrors 5. That was all the way back in 2000, would you believe. I knew nothing about Kiernan prior to reading the story – this was at a time when I still knew relatively little about who was who in modern horror, and I took a great delight in simply grabbing a clutch of Year’s Bests and diving in. It was a period of great discovery for me, and I learned something from just about every story I read, but (and I think this would be true for every writer) there were a few stories that worked a different kind of magic, that spoke to me in a voice that said: this is the kind of thing you want to be writing.

The Joyce Carol Oates novella The Ruins of Contracoeur was one such story from this period – I am still in love with it – and the Kiernan story was most definitely another. What was it? The language, the oddness, the slow seepage of myth and dark magic into everyday life? All this and more. Put simply, I hadn’t known that horror could be like that, and I ached to write something that good. I read Caitlin Kiernan stories wherever I could find them, bought her first novel, Silk, when it finally turned up as an import in Forbidden Planet (it was so difficult to obtain US books back then – how annoying that was), continued to admire her.

I’m currently reading her most recent novel, The Drowning Girl, which is so skewed and so rich it’s like discovering her work all over again. When people bemoan the dearth of good contemporary horror fiction (as they frequently do), this is one place I would send them.  Flawlessly beautiful sentences, a twisted plot thorny as roses. Reading it today I kept thinking how much it reminds me of another great classic of modern horror, Peter Straub’s perennially magnificent Ghost Story. Like Kiernan’s, Straub’s prose and plots have that quality of entanglement that I’d not call abstruse, exactly, but certainly knotty. And knotted. There’s a drowning at the centre of each book of course. And (I realised with a chill) an Eva also.

Last week and before starting on the Kiernan I finished reading the third book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, The Waste Lands. I have to admit to a certain disappointment here. The careful interweaving of style and substance that was so much a feature of The Gunslinger is more or less absent from The Waste Lands. What we have instead is ‘just’ story, pure and simple. Because it’s King you’re never bored, which some might argue is achievement enough by itself, but I missed the mystery, sensing instead the inevitable problems a writer faces when trying to progress a series of this scope and length. We have action, but we lose intensity, which is just one of the reasons I’ve instinctively never been a fan of series fiction.

Well, I’m off down to Cornwall tomorrow, a trip that delivers pleasure even before I get there because of the long train journey – time enough to finish the Kiernan, and hopefully to get me started on Nicholas Royle’s much anticipated First Novel. I shall also be taking the book Chris bought for me at the weekend, Joyce Carol Oates’s new collection The Corn Maiden.

In anticipation of five days away I’ve been working hard this week on that third draft I mentioned earlier – more on that soon, I hope.