 |
| What was a human being without death? |
You may recall that I’m a fan of Jeff VanderMeer. You may recall also that I mentioned the dreaded epithet “genre fiction”.
I did.
Well, I can’t lie, it may be. If you have to put it somewhere I guess that’s the place. I’ve read quite a number of Amazon ‘reviews’ of his work in my time and a few names keep coming up in the context of front-runners for the top “new weird” writer, most notably China Miéville. I would argue VanderMeer’s work more than bears the comparison (if you’ll pardon the pun, Mord fans), but yes, he does tend to inhabit this odd space at the edge of science fiction between post-apocalyptic fiction and the, some might say, insignificant sub-sub-genre of ecological fiction. But to push him in there and lock the door would be to do both him and yourself a disservice.
The world of Borne is a post-apocalyptic, post-ecological-melt-down landscape, where humans are few and far between, where your neighbours are more likely to be feral, bio-engineered children or a bear the size of a tower block than other homo-sapiens. Related from the viewpoint of a scavenger named Rachel, it enfolds a city of crumbling concrete, deadly booby-traps, warring factions and a mutant terror in the shape of Mord, a former biotech experiment from the company responsible for much of the destruction, named simply the Company, now ruling the city in his massive ursine fury.
But it is also a thoughtful and stimulating investigation into what it is to learn as a human and how limited our understanding of non-human life can be.
The titular amorphous blob, Borne, is harvested from the flanks of a sleeping Mord by scavenger Rachel, whose nominally human partner, Wick, fancies a crack at extracting new biotech from it to sell, but whose entrepreneurial ambitions are frustrated by Rachel’s instincts that it may be more than it seems. Incidentally, but importantly, Wick grows his own biotech in a swimming pool in the deserted hotel/flats in which they live, cloaked from view by other technology only briefly mentioned, and as it transpires, is a refugee himself from the Company laboratories. In this, VanderMeer runs with ideas that Paul McAuley was tossing around in Fairyland. Borne starts to behave like it is alive, demonstrably learning and developing. It absorbs information (and other things…), stumbling through its early education like a toddler finding its way in the world, until Borne’s skills grow exponentially, and tangentially, to a disconcerting level. Rachel and Wick come to realise the threat it presents and banish Borne from their lives, misguidedly as it turns out. With Mord proxies, smaller, more vicious versions of the larger bear, actively hunting things to destroy, growing in number and ingenuity, and Wick’s nemesis The Magician waging a full frontal assault on Mord himself, Rachel and Wick find themselves out of house and home, out of time and out of luck. In a grand finale of Godzilla-like proportions, Borne does battle with Mord and Rachel learns secrets from both her and Wick’s past lives.
All fun and games then.
But as alluded to previously, and this is a little bit of a spoiler, so apologies once more, it seems Borne is not a murderously ravenous consumer of intellectual and biological material. Not only, I mean. It transpires that, in ‘sampling’ the local flora and fauna, Borne does not merely eat them, for no waste products issue forth as a result. This is the only way Rachel can comprehend this consumption, as a conspicuously non-human process. In fact, and one more apology for both a nerdy DC Comics reference and a nod to a Lego movie version thereof coming up, Borne bears (sorry…) more than a passing resemblance to the Brainiac of the Superman / Justice League comic books in that he samples, analyses and stores the genetic information, somehow coding their consciousness’s into his being, so that their living essence is present in him for ever. Indeed, once sampled, Borne appears to be able to mimic their form. Borne’s friends therefore never truly die, and we come to suspect that, on the purely quotidian, human level, neither will Borne.
I know there’s another book set in the Borne world which I will be purchasing once the fiduciary horror of Christmas is past, but I truly hope to see another fuller length novel from VanderMeer soon. His imagination is truly cranked up to a level beyond that to which I can aspire and it’s a proper, if weird, joy to read everything he writes.
Comments
Post a Comment