 |
And I suspect my brain may not have the neuroplasticity to keep up with this sort of thing anymore.
We’re on book two of the Empty Space / Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, a generation after Chinese Ed and Seria Mau Genlicher of Light, and the tract has fallen – part of it anyway – onto one of the ‘beach’ worlds which form the inhabitable border to this inscrutable singularity. The Site now lies across the city of Saudade on this unnamed beach world, and represents a dangerous and incomprehensible tourist attraction. Local entrepreneurs, calling themselves entradistas and travel agents, take cash from ignorant tourists, to get up close for a look-see (and sometimes sneak in), and from local gangsters, to sneak out artifacts. But what goes in often never comes out – it was the ruin of countless civilizations before – and what comes out... well, it’s got a lot of people worried.
It’s hard to describe this book. In part because of cognitive decline, yes, but also because I think the novel is suffused in the untranslatable concept of saudade, which I always thought was spelled sodade after the stunningly powerful Cesária Évora song (which is Cape Verdean, not Portuguese). Everyone in Saudade is yearning after something lost - someone, some thing, themselves, pieces of lives which no longer exist, places they were then but can never be again, and in the case of tourist Elizabeth, memory of anything more recent than the start of this book. The organic artifacts are seeking to understand the world they stumble into; the travel agents yearn to solve the riddle of the Site. Not a single soul in the book shows any happiness or excitement, and the only one that does, Paulie DeRaad, gets turned into glowing white slop by daughter code.
Don’t ask me what that is – I have suspended my disbelief and accept that it is unknowable but conceptually congruent.
To be fair, there are some instances of success – the Mona (GM prostitute) Irene and former pilot and minor felon Fat Antoyene, forge an optimistic jump-off to a future together with the aid of former dipship pilot Liv Hula, but one suspects Antoyene knows it’s doomed from the off. Edith, “daughter” of former travel agent Emil (a big name in Site entradistas in his day) buys Liv’s bar from her and sets it up as a destination venue for musical entertainment, capturing a little of her old magic from her performing days (on the accordion?!); but even the success of Le Chat Du Tango is predicated on the contemporary fad for old music – the new Nuevo Tango, an already old new-ish interpretation of golden oldies, accordions, jazz standards of another age – and it can’t last. However, Edith enjoys it while she can.
And, to start a sentence with a coordinating conjunction, perhaps this sense of nostalgia, of loss – lostalgia?* - makes the writing that less solid and deal-with-able, making it mournful, yearning, nebulous, shifting the narrative sand under one’s feet, much like the sense of perspective for those within the Site where the tectonics of the environment in there are always slipping unseen beneath you. In addition, Harrison seems to think (and write) in spurts, and ideas echo through sections, never to reappear – the detective Lens Ascheman dreams of dogs barking, and then for the next 20 or so pages, dogs are mentioned several times and then never again (or before); he uses the word actinic to describe how the detective’s tailored assistant moves, and repeats it later describing points of light, and then the word is gone again.
It’s hard to say I always understand what’s going on, and that’s fine. It’s magical and confusing, and there are so many cats. It’s a deeply regretful book, but also, I hope I got across, profoundly playful. Yes, very much like a cat toys with a shrew, Harrison is toying with his reader, pulling emotions this way and that, and always with a little grin. This is what science fiction can be**, and it does a disservice to those whose genre snobbery is the barrier to their own potential shift of perspective.
*Borrowed without regret or permission from the Elis and John Show, some episode numbering in the 540s somewhere
**And I am ridiculously excited to understand there is a new novel due out in June 2026!
(Paid link)
Comments
Post a Comment