Wood Pulp & Ink

In Nick Harkaway’s eponymous prologue to Irregularity, an anthology of fourteen original stories edited by Jared Shurin, we are presented with an excerpt from the lost Victorian-era diary of Augusta Noel, a young woman who inherits a mysterious house upon the death of her mother. Despite her mother’s complete lack of intellectual curiosity during her lifetime, young Ms. Noel discovers to her surprise that the house contains a library packed to the rafters with books, “a broad-ranging catalogue covering the latest work on the natural sciences and extensive political discourses and the arts.” (p. 8)

From this conceit Harkaway constructs a clever and appropriately mind-bending framing device for the stories that follow. But this mysterious library filled with eclectic knowledge also does double duty by setting up the anthology’s core philosophical dilemma. As Augusta Noel wanders the library she ponders the following question:

Was I standing in the shadow of a person hired to create a perfect Heaven for an inquiring mind, or some diabolical Hell where every track of understanding eventually petered out in disappointment and frustration? Could someone, working with these materials, reasonably expect to stifle or to drown the urge that was in me to learn and to understand? (p. 9)

This is a variant of the classic question, first explored in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, of whether scientific knowledge is ultimately worth the cost. The stories collected in Irregularity examine the costs of scientific advancement, and the results are as fascinating as they are disturbing.

Before diving into the stories themselves, however, it is worth noting the ostensible genesis of this anthology. Irregularity is billed as a companion piece to an exhibit that opened at London’s National Maritime Museum this past July. The exhibit commemorates the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act in the United Kingdom, the 1714 act of Parliament that offered a generous cash prize to anyone who invented a technology that could measure longitude. And although it was not the only prize of its kind, and although it was half a century before the prize was finally awarded, the Longitude Act is widely credited with accelerating the technological development in solving one of the most significant problems of the age.

In this vein, the stories in  Irregularity riff on various aspects of the burgeoning scientific Weltanschauung that came into being during the so-called Age of Enlightenment in Europe. Collectively, they provide glimpses into a period of European history when the widespread application of scientific methods to the physical world forced a break with the continent’s prior mythical and magical notions of how the world worked. Each story has a unique take on what humanity loses when the rational and scientific thinking takes precedence over esotericism and mysticism.

The starkest depiction of the break between the mythic, pre-scientific understanding of the world and the more quantitative one is Rose Biggin’s story, A Game Proposition. Set at the close of the 17th century, it tells the story of four prostitutes in English-controlled Jamaica and the peculiar game of chance they play with each other once every month. It is no ordinary game: the outcome determines which ships will sink at sea at certain points in the future. One does not have to squint too hard to see these four women as personifications of the mythical Anemoi—the ancient Greek wind deities that represented the four cardinal points on the compass—incarnated into the age of the European commercial revolution.

It all changes, however, when one day their monthly game is joined by William Dampier, the first man to collect data on the trade winds, oceanic currents and tides. The Dampier in Biggin’s story does not fare well in the game, but what he observes in the playing teaches him enough about how the winds and tides work to allow him to effectively map them, allowing navigators to exert more control over the ocean. As a result, according to Biggin’s tale, the actions of the Anemoi and their explanatory value are rendered obsolete.

Although Biggin’s story is told from the viewpoint of a rueful Anemoi, it is clearly a story of the triumph of science over esotericism. A different sentiment emerges from E. J. Swit’s The Spiders of Stockholm, an elegant and melancholy story in which the sudden appearance of spiders in a young girl’s room gives her psychic dreams. The young protagonist’s curiosity about these spiders drives her to find out more about them.

But as in certain folk tales, where revealing the name of a thing will sometimes void its magic, the knowledge the narrator acquires ends poorly for both the spiders and the protagonist’s psychic abilities . Here the victory of science over magic is shown in less a laudatory, more tragic light.

A more straightforward, visceral demonstration of the self-destructive capacity of scientific inquiry unfolds in James Smythe’s The Last Escapement. Smythe’s narrator is a clock-maker engaged in fierce competition for the Longitude Prize. But in his vain quest for technological achievement, he pays the price for progress in the form of his sanity and physical well-being. Not even gruesome self-mortification is too steep a price for Smythe’s hapless inventor in his quest for technological achievement.

Robert Luckhurst’s Circulation likewise doesn’t shrink from depicting the grotesque byproduct of scientific knowledge in the hands of the brilliantly insane.  Set in 1790, it is a recasting of Heart of Darkness in the French colony of San Domingue. An accountant for a London trading firm, which serves wealthy French merchants in exile from the French Revolution, has been ordered to travel to the West Indies to investigate a mysterious bookkeeping anomaly in a major sugar cane plantation. Playing the role of Kurtz here is a man named Sangatte, referred to both as a man of science, a wizard, and “one of the godless ones” (p. 227) As with the source story, the most interesting passages are from the journey itself, replete with observations of marine life and ship culture, rather than the revolting body horror that awaits the narrator at Sangatte’s plantation.

A lighter, more sanguine take on advanced technology is found in Claire North’s The Voyage of the Basset. It is a secret history of sorts, wherein Charles Darwin, fresh back in London after the voyage of the Beagle, receives a royal commission that sends him back across the ocean. Despite the fleeting threat of a pirate pursuit early on this is rather a low stakes story whose dramatic tension is tied to the revelation of the true purpose of Darwin’s mysterious commission, a reveal which ultimately proves anti-climactic. Still, there is a forward-looking techno-optimism underpinning in North’s tale, and its exuberance contrasts well with the bleak streak that runs through many of its companions in this anthology.

Similarly light in tone, if not in content, is The Darkness, by M. Suddain. It presents selected excerpts from the diary of Samuel Pepys, inhabitant of a steampunk London during the great fire. Only this fire is, as the title implies, a black void, an “unfathomable nothingness” (p. 247) that disappears anything it touches. Although Suddain’s London is basically a stock Victorian steampunk stage set straight from central casting, his Pepys is faithful to the terse, fast-paced deadpan of the real-life Samuel Pepys, who gave us one of the best accounts of the actual Great Fire of London.

Instead of being the result of a mishap at a bakery as the Great Fire was, Suddain’s “fire” is the result of experiments with weaponized magic that went terribly wrong. And, true to the theme of the anthology, Pepys has some choice thoughts about the costs of scientific progress:

Perhaps this nothingness is God’s answer to the sins and disorders of our City. Once the Great Flood had covered the entire Earth; and the Earth sat suspended at the very centre of the nothingness, which God had created out of nothingness. And so perhaps one day the universe will return to nothing. (p. 247)

Simon Guerrier’s An Experiment in the Formulae of Thought also gives us a tale of technology run amok in a steampunk London, but instead of Samuel Pepys and unfathomable nothingness we get Ada Lovelace and robotic dinosaurs. Guerrier beautifully and humorously captures the Victorian scientific zeitgeist, and the charming sincerity of his narrator, a starry-eyed journalist, helps gloss over the “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” nature of the twist on which the story’s moral hinges.

While many of the stories in Irregularity explore the darker consequences of scientific exploration, most avoid straight-up sneering at science. An exception is Archie Black’s Footprint, in which an achievement that has historically been attributed to scientific virtuosity is revealed to have a mystical origin. It is an evocative and layered tale, featuring the great architect Christopher Wren and one of his most famous works, the reconstructed Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

In rebuilding Saint Paul’s, Wren realigned the building so that it would face the Easter sunrise. One of Black’s narrators, however, scoffs at that explanation, deriding the “process-minded men of reason” who attempt to “exert dominion over the mysteries of nature.” (p. 128) The story, of course, presents an alternative, chthonic explanation. And while it contains a well-executed and chilling subterranean horror scene, it is hard to shake the feeling that Black is deliberately elevating esotericism and anti-scientific thought over rationalism and scientific virtuosity.

Not that the both sides are completely incompatible. The protagonist of Animalia Paradoxa, by Henrietta Rose-Innis, is a big game hunter helping his wealthy Parisian patron fill out her collection. A devotee of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish zoologist who features in several of these stories, he travels the Africa savannah with his copy of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, the foundational treatise of zoological nomenclature. But despite this scientific sop, he is hunting for a mysterious dragon-like super beast, a creature that is “animal and mineral and angel” (p. 120).

The monster in Richard de Nooy’s The Heart of Aris Kindt, however, is very much human. Narrated in part by the young Ferdinand Bol, the Dutch artist and apprentice to Rembrandt (who not explicitly named in the story), de Nooy’s tale reveals the occult back story to the famous Rembrandt painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. The narrative toggles between epistolary first person and distant third person, which resulted in some choppy transitions. But the story that emerges is captivating if only for the colorful glimpse of daily life in a 17th century surgeon’s ward.

Irregularity is regrettably light on significant historical female figures, in part because the era is similarly light. Tipping the scale ever so slightly is Kim Curran’s A Woman Out of Time, which is a homage of sorts to Émilie du Châtelet, the French polymath who produced the first translation of Newton’s Principia into French. Narrated in the first person plural, it tells the story of the Fates—or Norns or Moirai—the mythical beings that steer the destiny of human kind. Curran’s fates are following deliberately gradual path when it comes to introducing scientific advancements to humanity.

It is a subtle game. A push too far and their feeble minds will retreat. Not enough and they will stagnate, their minds becoming dull and indolent. (p. 254)

Their steady, stepwise path suddenly finds itself under threat, however, when they encounter an “irregularity” in the form of Madame du Châtelet, whose brilliance threatens to derail their carefully-calibrated plans by introducing a certain scientific concept ahead of its preordained time.

This conceit, however, results in a Screwtape-style hagiography of an admittedly hagiographically worthy figure. But apart from the occasionally overblown sentiments Curran makes the case for du Châtelet as a historically anomalous genius who, were she born a man, or were she born into a world more enlightened on matters of gender, could have scooped Einstein by two centuries.

Adam Roberts goes one step further with a cautionary tale of sorts about scientific knowledge acquired ahead of its time. In The Assassination of Isaac Newton by the Coward Robert Boyle we meet a character who, having learned the true size of the cosmos, yearns badly enough for the smaller, simpler Ptolemaic universe that he is driven to murder to make it happen.

As can be gathered from the title, the murderer is Robert Boyle, who has travelled into the future and learned the “New Astronomy” of Einstein, and is driven insane.  The resulting mental break is akin to what happens to a Lovecraft character upon encountering forbidden knowledge (save that Lovecraft, at least in this reviewer’s knowledge, never worked a running gag on Brian May into any of his stories).

Boyle’s intended victim is Isaac Newton, whose premature death would ensure that “the ideas sufficient to bring Copernicus’s into full non-Heisenberg will never be.” (p. 91). In other words, no Newton, no Einstein, and, as far as Roberts’s Boyle is concerned, such ignorance is vastly preferable to the existential terror that arises from familiarity with 20th century astrophysics.

Carl Linnaeus returns in the final story, as the protagonist of Fairchild’s Folly, by Tiffani Angus. The celebrated English gardener, Thomas Fairchild, had a brief correspondence with Linnaeus, which Angus’s wistful story uses as a springboard to explore the compatibility of love and science. Unlike some of the other stories here, which look to pre-Enlightenment concepts for their scientific antipodes, Fairchild’s Folly anticipates the shift in values from pure rationalism to the romantic worldview that was to come into dominance at the end of the Age of Enlightenment. Angus’s Linnaeus eloquently expresses this worldview when, in the letter to Fairchild that ends the story, he writes “… let us leave some Mystery. Let us understand what is possible to understand, but not fight to know all of it." (p. 280).

In the twelve years since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man hit theaters, superhero movies have become far and away the dominant genre in Hollywood. After more than a decade of back-to-back centimillion dollar blockbusters, the superhero meta-narrative that pits ordinary people with extraordinary abilities against a cast of shady, unambiguous bad guys has grown deep roots in our collective unconscious. Those roots have spread, nurturing flowerings of superhero stories in media outside the walled gardens of the comic books that birthed them and the Hollywood studios that supersized them. Television is now awash in such stories, and a number of prominent names in genre fiction have released superhero-inspired work. It was only a matter of time before literary fiction had a go at it.

Tigerman, Nick Harkaway’s third novel, is an unabashed attempt at a superhero novel for the literary fiction set. Our hero is Lester Ferris, an unassuming British sergeant posted to the island of Mancreu, a former British colonial holding in the Arabian Sea, who seemingly wants little more in life than to be a father and a family man. This vague desire finds a foothold in his friendship with a local boy, whose name we never learn, and who seemingly lacks a family of his own. For Ferris, the representative of a former colonial overlord and man of intense social inhibition, this would be a complicated enough situation under ordinary circumstances. But the state of affairs on Mancreu is anything but ordinary. 

Decades prior, a chemical company emptied mysterious waste into caverns deep beneath the island. A subsequent earthquake brought magma bubbling up into the caves, creating a kind of crucible for the toxic effluent stowed there, as a result of which new, ungodly chemical substances came into being. When a critical mass gathers below ground, it explodes to the surface in a massive discharge cloud.

As of the time of this story, there have been three discharge clouds, each with different, progressively more fantastical consequences. The first one deforested and scorched large parts of the island, and the second one killed all rodents (but only rodents). The effects of the third discharge cloud were very strange indeed: 

It caused the fish to change sex and provoked a wave of lust and license across Mancreu. It was remembered for months as a very good party, but the children born of passionate couplings in the Cloud could not speak. A German specialist, flown in to study the matter, pronounced that the entire section of the brain dealing with language--Broca’s Area, he said--was missing. (p. 26)

No one knows what a fourth discharge cloud will do, but no one is sticking around to find out: the British have ceded sovereignty to a amalgam of foreign governments with the menacing moniker of “NatProMan,” which stands for NATO and Allied Protection Force on Mancreu. NatProMan is charged with evacuating and “sterilising” Mancreu, which basically means burning the whole island in an attempt to cauterize the gurgling chasms beneath.

And as bad as that is, it gets worse: in the hands of the international community, Mancreu’s harbor, called the “Cupped Hands” for the way the island’s land masses intersect, has become a veritable rat warren for mobile black sites: ships flying flags of convenience puppet-mastered by the intelligence agencies of the largest governments and their multi-national corporate clients. The Fleet, as this collection of secret ships is called, specialize in an exhaustive suite of dark activities that includes “prisons for deniable detainees and hospitals for unethical procedures; data havens, grey banks, untaxed subsidiaries; floating harems and forced labor factories, auction houses for contraband goods; torture facilities for hire.” (p. 42)

While residents of the western world have the luxury of being able to ignore the covert brutality committed in the name of their security and economic well-being, residents of Mancreu have a constant reminder of it staring in at them from their own front yard. Except that, in a feat of defensive doublethink, they are taught to not see it:

The Fleet could have painted itself pink or burned to the waterline, and no one would have remarked upon it. People saw the harbor and the horizon and nothing in between. Even the fishermen who went out and zipped in between the big vessels, selling fresh fish and crab, and the traders on junkboats who bought and sold DVDs and Coca-Cola and fresh meat and anything else they could lay hands on---even they had a strange amnesia about which ships they visited. it wasn’t feigned. It was a habit so totally ingrained as to have become part of reality. The enormous ships were a fact of life, and it was a fact that you couldn’t see them. (p. 41)

Between mysterious chemical plumes, a restive, soon-to-be dislocated populace, and the occulted malfeasance of the Fleet, Mancreu is ripe for chaos.

And chaos descends early in the novel. A mass shooting prompts Lester to utilize his hard-earned military training to save the life of his friend, a local boy referred to throughout the novel only as "the boy." The boy, a hardcore comics junkie, prompts Ferris to combat Mancreu's burgeoning lawlessness dressed as a tiger. In a moment of prospective paternal indulgence, Ferris does.

Ferris is the embodiment of the reluctant hero. And despite having a distinct talent for violence, he emphasizes the symbolic nature of the superhero.

The first thing he understood in that hour was that it was never about hitting people. It was always about proving a point. Hitting people was just a background, the way a uniform was. The message varied like the soldier. For Superman, that point was about justice and ideals. He really was a perfect American dream. For Batman, it was something else altogether. It was a statement that no matter who you were, how tough you were or how wicked, there were some things you simply could not do. He was not primarily about punishment or even prevention. He was a living cipher, a message that the set of actions which were available to human beings did not include certain crimes, and that line was absolute, made absolute not by him but by what he represented, the human capacity to say “no.”  (p. 134)

Ferris's heroism also contains a distinct antidestructive strain, one that feels pretty right coming from a veteran of the Bush/Blair Afghan invasion and subsequent fiasco. At one point, when a rocket attack has destroyed a prison, Ferris's seethes at the perpetrator, but his moralizing is 

Fuck him for being so rude, so stupid, so powerful and yet so utterly powerless. He could blow up a building. Big deal. Could he put it back together again? No, and that was exactly how the whole thing worked. The chemical men had broken the island and now the United Nations would burn it. No one in the wider world seemed to do anything constructive, no one built or mended. It was lawyers, guns and tax avoidance out there. Real work, reconstruction, was down to ordinary people, and no one ever spent as much money and time on that as they did on ripping things down in the first place, because it was hard. (p. 255)

Harkaway's enlightened take on the superhero character, however, doesn't prevent the novel from veering towards some of the more racist conventions of the superhero narrative. The architecture of the story, wherein the representative of a former colonial overlord of a small tropical island fights the native criminals his nation's government had a hand in fostering, all but preordains a diminutive portrayal of native agency. Among other things, this dynamic makes the way the native Mancreuans eventually embrace Tigerman come across as unintentionally  disturbing. For instance, when Tigerman successfully stops a riot, he is embraced by the people thus:

  And then, here, at last, he let it go, because for all that he had done in his quest, this moment in the square was more important, not to him but to them. Tigerman. Tigerman. Tigerman. He was not Fleet. He was not Britain or America or France or anywhere except Mancreu, Mancreu looking out for its own. Tigerman, Tigerman, Tigerman, and the noise was louder than anything he had ever heard. Tigerman, for Mancreu, because they needed him so very very much. (p. 275)

 There is a distinct element of volunteerism here.

The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look.

In a section near the middle of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, the narrator of that section—the flamboyant but increasingly irrelevant novelist, Crispin Hershey—quotes a negative review of his latest book featuring the above sentence. In most of the reviews of The Bone Clocks that I’ve read, Hershey has been assumed to be a satire of Martin Amis. To some extent this feels true, but it’s hard not to see Mitchell poking fun at himself with Hershey, a caricature of literary self-importance whose most famous book is a non-linear cult classic. In fact, it’s hard not to imagine that Mitchell anticipated in the above quote the novel’s fundamental flaw.

Like Mitchell's magnum opus, Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks is divided into six self-contained sections, each in the first person and each set further into the future. The first two thirds of the novel contain four sections, which are worth describing in some detail: 

A Hot Spell, which takes place in 1984 and follows a teenage Holly Sykes as an argument with her mother over a boy leads her to run away from home. In the background of this journey are trade union rumblings, the the red scare, the Talking Heads and the Smiths. Scattered throughout are brief surreal, fantastical episodes, some of which are horrifyingly violent. But all memory of these events magically vanish from Holly's mind and the story's focuses returns to Holly's flight. A crisis occurs near the end that brings Holly home, and the section closes on a cliff hanger and with many open questions.

Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume, which takes place at the end of the year 1991 and follows the alternately harrowing and hilarious exploits of Hugo Lamb, a young sociopathic near-genius on winter break from Cambridge. During a ski vacation in Switzerland, he meets Holly Sykes, now in her late 20's and working as a bartender. A mysterious turning point in Hugo's life occurs at the end of the section, with hints of further supernatural goings on--but only hints.

The Wedding Bash, which follows Ed Brubeck, who we first met in 1984 when he helped Holly Sykes in her flight from home. It is now 2004, and Ed and Holly have a child, Aioffe, out of wedlock. Ed is a war journalist, home from Iraq for the wedding of Holly's sister. Brief, awkward domestic episodes are jammed between extended reflections on Iraq, and descriptions of the terrible things Ed has seen there. A crisis occurs towards the end which is resolved by supernatural means. 

Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet, which follows the exploits of the aforementioned aging literary bad boy in the year 2015. Following a bad review, excerpted above, he perpetrates a revenge against the reviewer--a minor character in the Hugo Lamb section. The revenge is more successful than he anticipated, with consequences so terrible for the reviewer that Hershey is subsequently racked with guilt. As with the preceding sections, there is a supernatural vein in Hershey's story, culminating in a confrontation that deepens the sense of mystery.

Up to this point the fantastical elements of this novel consist of brief episodes and subtle shadings on the periphery of the otherwise non-fantastical lives of the various narrators. It is the kind of story that would fit neatly into the category of slipstream fiction. Taken together, the supernatural episodes paint a just-fragmented-enough-to-be-alluring fantasy world existing in parallel to the real one, which is interesting enough on its own: the novel's non-fantastical components up to this point are captivating and expertly written. Mitchell's famous facility with character voice and pacing and colorful turns of phrase are on full display during these first four sections.

But then comes the fifth section, An Horologist’s Labrynth, and something changes. During this section the fantasy world that has thus far remained just far enough below the surface to tantalize readerly curiosity here surfaces in all its epic fantasy genre-inspired glory. Which would have been great had Mitchell's take on the epic fantasy genre not been so goddamn terrible.

The events in An Horologist’s Labrynth occur in 2025 and follow an immortal named Marinus, the leader of a small group of benign immortals, as he wages a war against another group of immortals--an evil one. I won't attempt a summary of the immortals, their war or the fact of their immortality in the first place. The backstory is complex and dense, and requires many leaden "as you know, Bob" dialogue dumps of which an older Holly Sykes, thinned and weakened from a battle with cancer, is the unfortunate recipient.

This section, however, opens promisingly enough: a series of strange coincidences lead Marinus to believe that an old friend, Esther Little, whom he long thought was dead, is in fact still alive. The way these coincidences unfold, as well as the story of how Marinus first met Esther, are some of the best parts of the book. It's what happens next that curdles the milk.

As these two groups of immortals wage war, Marinus's faction recruits Holly. Only this Holly is a thin caricature of the Holly from prior chapters. Whereas in the preceding sections Holly Sykes is a fully-formed character with coherent motivations, here she is a two dimensional white space upon which the story is projected. She departs from the Holly Sykes we knew and becomes a spunky urban fantasy cliche complete with snappy one-liners and naive questions posed for maximal expository effect. 

Add to this the bad guys, who are mustache-twirling psychopaths straight off a C horror movie call sheet, and the fantasy world setting, the "Chapel of the Dusk of the Blind Cathar," which reads like an outtake from the Eye of Argon, and you have what amounts to a bubbling cauldron of cheesy cheese.  

Which is a crying shame. Mitchell is an adept genre mimic. Cloud Atlas contained some first-rate mystery, thriller, and post-apocalyptic SF parts. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet was a masterful historical novel. I get the sense that Mitchell's conception of fantasy is as a garbage bin of new age camp and retrograde spiritualism. If anything I want to mail him a large box full of Gene Wolfe, Jeffrey Ford, Caitlin Kiernan, and Jonathan Carroll books in the hopes that something will sink in.

After this mess we get the final section, Sheep’s Head, which takes place in 2043 in a post-collapse world. Holly Sykes is an old woman living with two young children (to say more would be a mild spoiler) as the world falls to pieces. We tick all the post-collapse boxes--fuel and most other forms of energy are extremely rare, the Chinese own nearly everything, mercenary militias terrorize the weak, plagues and gigastorms and environmental toxins abound, and a failing nuclear reactor might just irradiate half the people in Ireland, where Holly now lives. Finally, Marinus arrives delivering one final deus ex machina, along with a semi-happy ending.

I remember in the weeks after 9/11 listening to WNYC, the local NYC public radio station. Their FM antenna was on the World Trade Center and it went to static immediately when the planes hit, and their studios were in lower Manhattan, so they had to broadcast out of another office uptown, sending their signal out from a tower somewhere in New Jersey. The voices sounded fuzzy and full of a sad confusion, and the regular music that filled the spaces between segments was no longer the usual bourgie pop but some quasi-atonal clarinet melody that seemed to pour salt on all the bad feelings. But still, I listened every free moment I had, to the point where it started to feel almost like a chore or a daily penance.

I hadn’t thought much about those days recently, but early on in Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, it all came back to me. About thirty pages in, the BBC’s Director of Programme Planning pulls the plug on a French general’s rant on live radio without telling anyone, the effect of which Fitzgerald describes like this:

For the past ten minutes there had been total silence on the Home network. The fifteen million listeners had heard nothing. But their reaction was not surprise so much as a kind of relief, the interruption of their programmes being exactly the kind of thing which everyone had expected from the moment war was declared, but which had failed to happen, holding the listeners’ attention in a supersaturated solution which had failed month by month to crystallize.

The circumstances are different—this is London during the blitz, when the possibility of a Nazi invasion seemed all but certain—but the sentiment is similar.

Human Voices tells the stories of a handful of people in the BBC’s broadcasting department in 1940, at the beginning of the Nazi blitz. But this is neither a pulse-pounding tale of survival nor a tragic drama of romance and loss, though there is certainly a dash of romance and loss tossed into these pages.

Instead, Human Voices chronicles these characters through the mundane activities of their daily lives, following them as perform the not-so-exciting tasks associated with producing radio—gathering recordings, juggling schedules, facing off with other divisions of the British government that want to commandeer the airwaves for their own purposes—and lead their lives in whatever small spaces remain outside of work and the war.

What I really came to love about this novel is how its characters find solace from the overwhelming stresses of air raids and the threat of imminent invasion in the humdrum of bureaucracy. There are very few conversations about the war in general in this novel. The closest we get are conversations like the following, between Jeff Haggard, the BBC’s Director of Programme Planning, and another administrator:

The day the United States declare war on Nazi Germany, the Central and South American Republics will follow suit… Now Mr. Haggard, all of them are going to want representation at the BBC. That in turn means fifteen new sections … they’ll all of them want carpets, chairs, desks, typewriters adapted to the Spanish alphabet and steel filing cabinets….”

“I hadn’t thought of the position exactly in that way,” Jeff replied.

“I daresay you hadn’t, very few have. Decisions are made, as you know, with very little thought as to how they’re to be carried out.”

“You have my sympathy.”

“But what do you suggest I do?”

“Pray for a negotiated peace,” said Jeff.

“Now, Mr. Haggard, you don’t mean that, we all know you don’t mean half of what you say.”

“I don’t at all mean that it would be desirable. I’m simply saying that it’s the only solution for the problem of the steel filing cabinets.”

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is very short. It's kind of a tea sandwich of a fantasy novel which tells a charming, if somewhat twee, story about a normal young boy who has a fantastical adventure, book-ended by two deeply-felt episodes that glancingly attempt something more.

The book begins with our unnamed first-person narrator returning to the house of his youth on the occasion of (I think) a funeral. These opening pages are freighted with a deeply introspective world-weariness, and it felt like the story was gearing up for a kind of self-realization narrative.

But once home, our narrator encounters a mysterious neighbor, and this encounter summons the memory of an experience the narrator had as a child. That story, as recalled by the narrator, is the meat of this novel, and it's interesting and just as full of monsters and fairies and magic as you'd expect from the byline. There are some dark moments, and a twist of tragedy. But it all comes across as very harmless and safe, even in some of the less comfortable and sad moments.

For me, though, the novel only became interesting in its final pages, after the narrator finishes recounting this experience he had and is talking with the mysterious neighbor. Without getting into specifics, it is only at the end that the story starts trying to broach some of the self-realization hinted at in its opening pages. But before it goes anywhere, the book ends.

Here is a crime novel that does something different. Driver, the semi-eponymous protagonist, is a Hollywood stunt driver, one of the best in the business, and on the side he puts his skills behind the wheel to use as a getaway driver for petty criminals. Until something goes wrong. That's the logline, anyway.

Yoon Ha Lee's Effigy Nights, published in Clarkesworld in January, 2013, tells the story of Imulai Mokarengen, a city that "lies at the galaxy’s dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon." After a century a peace, the city, whose residents are "connoisseurs of writing," finds itself under attack.

I really dug the space operatic fabulism that suffused this story. It's not a vibe I get from a lot of science fiction. It felt like a little like Invisible Cities meets Downbelow Station (or Kalpa Imperial meets The Culture?). In any event, it was fascinating and evocative.

The protagonist, Seran, a disgraced surgeon-priest, is called upon by a city warden to summon a warrior to defend the city. This warrior, a girl called the Saint of Guns, is an image drawn on paper that Seran literally summons off the page using water:

Working with steady strokes, he soaked the schematic. The paper absorbed the water readily. The warden winced in spite of herself. The girl didn’t seem capable of facial expressions, but she dashed to one side of the schematic, then the other, seeking escape. Finally she slumped, her long hair trailing off in disordered tangles of artillery tables.

The Saint of Guns goes on a killing spree, but is soon burns up. Seran summons more warriors from the city's collection of stories to fight the enemy (resulting in the effigy nights of the title), but they, too, get consumed. The growing hopelessness leads Seran to take desperate measures, which results in a dark and satisfying twist of sorts I was not expecting.

Between the imaginative richness of the world, the effectiveness of the story, and the poetic beauty of the language (which is a quality I wish SF/F fiction valued more highly) Effigy Nights is a story that will stay with me for a good long while.

I've had a thing for longer novels this year. In 2013 if it was over 300 pages I'd think twice, but I guess this year I'm trying to balance the scales. These are three longer novel I've read recently, but don't have the brain juice to write about in depth:

Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

I enjoyed nearly everything about this novel: the convincing, heartfelt romance between the two main characters, the apogees and perigees of each of their separate stories, and the painfully true yet hilarious depictions of how white Americans interact with people of color. It's kind of a there-and-back-again story but not like any I've ever read. But the thing I enjoyed most of all was the deep social interconnectedness of the characters. The main characters' friends and family are never far from the page. So much fiction these days (at least the books I've picked up recently) default to lone wolf protagonists with few or no real connections to other humans--they're just cyphers moving through a landscape. Lone wolves are probably easier to write, just like a puppet with a hand hole is easier to operate than a multi-string marionette, but it's just not how most real human beings go through life. The social webs Adichie weaves for her characters, on the other hand, make them all the more vivid and memorable. 

Hyperion, by Dan Simmons

Last month I needed a jolt of good old, epic senswunda space opera, and man did this book deliver. This 25 year old sci-fi classic might look a bit odd sandwiched between new fiction by 21st century lit-fic superstars, but Simmons's obvious love of classical literature, with a plot structure borrowed directly from Chaucer and frequent shout-outs to Keats among others, never lets the reader forget that the author is a classical literature super nerd. The only downside is that the novel ends in a cliff hanger of sorts, but because the slow reveal had already given me a sense of what was going on, and because the the plot threads were starting to fray a bit towards the end I didn't feel the need to dive into the second book right away. Perhaps I'll save it for the winter.

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

(Image by Lindsay Archer)

Selkies, almost by design, make for tragic stories. The mythical sea creatures that look likes seals but become human when they shed their skin, they constantly long to return to the sea. The humans who have coaxed (or forced) a selkie into human form must hide their skin away, because he moment the selkie gets their skin back, they turn into seals again and disappear back into the sea, immediately abandoning every human relationship they have made, including any spouses or children they acquired as a human.  In every story of a selkie returning to the sea, there is the story of the people they left behind.

In Sofia Samatar's Selkie Stories Are for Losers, which Strange Horizons published on January 7, 2013, the narrator's mother just up and left one day, abandoning her husband and only daughter (the narrator) with no explanation. All we are told is that the narrator was looking for a book in the attic and found a coat instead, and that her mom put it on, got in her car and drove away, never to return. 

The story doesn't quite come out and say the narrator's mother was a selkie, but there are strong hints (such as "As for Mom, she never talked about her relatives. I asked her once if she had any, and she said they were 'no kind of people.'" and "My dad says Mom was an elemental, a sort of stranger, not of our kind."). On top of which, the narrator has an obsession with selkie stories, which she loathes, and the story contains a few condensed selkie legends from folklore.

Still, despite the strong nudge-nudge throughout the narrative, the story attempts a kind of fantastical multistability, allowing the reader to believe either that the mother is an actual selkie and that that coat in the attic was her skin being returned to her, or that this is world where of course selkies do not exist and the narrator's selkie obsession is a kind of displacement mechanism for a more mundane (but no less traumatic) maternal abandonment. And on the whole I think this ambiguity was very successful. I've read it three times and both interpretations sit right in my head.

Interwoven throughout the story of the narrator's mother and her selkie obsession is a kind of love story. The narrator has an unrequited crush for Mona, a waitress at the restaurant where the narrator works, and we get one or two paragraph snippets of the story of their friendship (and the narrator's deepening crush) interspersed between one or two paragraphs of the narrator's back story. Section breaks make up a not insignificant proportion of this story's word count.

While the effect can be pleasantly disorienting and slip-streamy, this kind of rapid fire, short attention span toggling sometimes comes off as too coy, particularly when only one or two short sentences are presented as a stand-alone section. It feels more like a cheap effect than evocative writing.

Quickness of style and thought means above all agility, mobility, and ease, all qualities that go with writing where it is natural to digress, to jump from one subject to another, to lose the thread a hundred times and find it again after a hundred more twists and turns.

-- Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium (p. 46) 

Calvino, in the above quote, is discussing a characteristic element of folk tales. The narrative speed of folk and fairy tales accounts for their immediacy and the ease with the reader accepts certain implausibilities.

Genevieve Valentine's The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is one of the best embodiments of Calvino-esque quickness that I've come across lately. A story about twelve sisters in 1920's Manhattan, sequestered by their petulant, reclusive father in their Upper East Side town house, who sneak out every night and dance their feet off at prohibition night clubs, the novel packs a lot of story in its 277 pages.

Jo is our protagonist. The eldest of the twelve sisters and their de facto leader (their "general," as her sisters call her), she becomes a sort of surrogate mother after their real mother dies. Befitting her nickname, Jo is a master tactician, especially during her and her sisters' nightly escapes to the nightcblub, cooly and efficiently ushering her siblings to and from taxis, into the clubs, monitoring for trouble and organizing a hasty but organized retreat when trouble arrives.

But Jo's leadership comes at a cost: her responsibility to her sisters precludes her from the fun: she doesn't dance, but sits at the night club table and watches her sisters like a hawk. And when a love interest appears in the form of Tom, the owner of their regular night club, she is compelled to rebuff him, and then some.

As difficult as Jo's life is already, her challenges are compounded when her father announces his intention to marry off each of his daughters, setting off a series of events that, before the novel is over, leaves the sisters scattered across the country, enmeshed in various new friendships and relationships, and even running their own night club.

I kept thinking of the above Calvino quote, and the essay, Quickness, from which it is taken--so much so that it didn't come as much of a surprise when I later found out that Girls at the Kingfisher Clubias a retelling of sorts of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, a German fairy tale fist published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Unfamiliar as I was with the original fairy tale while I was reading this novel, the Calvinoesque quickness with which Valentine's story unfolds nonetheless left me with that distinctive fairy tale feel.

But this novel's quickness is both a feature and a bug: the fast pacing (coupled with a large cast of deeply interesting and economically drawn characters) kept me engaged and intensely interested, but it also let the story get off easily with some rapid hand-waving around a few key plot points.

One scene in particular where the narrative quickness comes at the expense of believability occurs at one of the most crucial moments in the story.

[NB: following couple of paragraphs contains spoilers.]

After Jo and Tom spend their first night together, Jo convinces Tom to enter into a sham marriage with Jo's eldest sister, Lou. Not only does this involve Tom marrying someone he doesn’t love (he loves Jo, and Jo loves him back), but it means Tom will abandon his night club business and moving to Chicago. That's a lot to ask anyone ever, let alone some guy after only one roll in the hay.

This is an impossible request and the narrative does nothing much to show us what kind of tidal shifts in Tom's character had to occur for him to agree to it. Basically, when Jo and Tom are laying on the bed enjoying post-coital intimacy and, after Jo tells Tom about the conditions under which her father keeps them, she looks him in the eye and says “I need a favor.” We see Tom’s resistance to the idea, and Jo’s ultimate ability to persuade him, only during snippets of flashback in the scene that immediately follows. Tom is driving Jo back to her house. Before the reader even learns what the favor was, we are told that:

The ride was silent; everything had been silent after she’d asked for the favor and they’d fought.

(“Do you know how dangerous this is?” he’d shouted, after he’d stopped saying no, no, no; after he’d stopped trying to explain as he would to a child that what she was asking had risks.

“No worse than being trapped in that house,” she said, buckling her shoes. “No worse than that.”

If he thought she could be frightened into seeing the comforts of staying quietyly at home, he’d picked the wrong fight.) 

This is an important moment for the story, where a character has to be persuaded to do something that is so against his will that it seems implausible. To believe this as a reader I need to see that persuasion in action, and Tom's gradually diminishing resistance and ultimate capitulation if I'm going to go along with it. But all we get is the above four short paragraphs. It certainly moves the story along, but at the loss of dramatic tension and readerly disbelief.

(One other thing, which is more of a stylistic quirk but kind of related, I think: Valentine is very fond of extended, multi-paragraph parentheticals, such as in the above quote. It's not that it doesn't work, but more than once I felt like story elements that deserved more real estate were wedged between parenthesis for the sake of narrative momentum.)

REDEPLOYMENT, by Phil Klay

The twelve stories collected in Redeployment use the structure and devices and tropes of contemporary literary short fiction to add a different kind of depth and perspective to the way soldiers’ experience of war in the 21st century are understood. More than The Hurt Locker or Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Redeployment uses the strictures of a mature art form to communicate certain things that are not necessarily possible in other forms.

Putting it like that might make it sound like Klay’s stories are didactic editorials—and, indeed, some of them do come off that way (more on this in a moment)—but these are all first and foremost very engaging, often captivating stories. Klay has a talent for catchy, fast-paced openings that, at their best, got me invested in the story almost immediately. Here, for instance, is the first paragraph of the title story, Redeployment:

We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot.

But the grim glibness of this opening does not foreclose the possibility of emotional depth, Later in this story, when the narrator returns home from his tour of duty to find that his own dog is terminally ill and must be put down, he does the deed himself, and Klay makes the reader feel the full weight if the act.

Which is not to say that glib machismo doesn’t have its uses. In Frago, after as a squad is on the way to the hospital to visit one of theirs who was wounded during a violent mission earlier that day, we see this humor being put to theraputic use:

We’re quiet as we get close, and then McKeown says, Sergeant, that was really fucked up.

But now’s not the time to have that conversation, so I say, Yeah, that’s the most blood I’ve seen since I fucked your mom on her period. And then the guys laugh and bullshit a bit, and it breaks the mood that was settling.

But Klay also shows us the shortcomings of such humor. In After Action Report, a character, in the midst of a dark, confusing attack, shoots a young boy who was brandishing an AK47. Afterwards, back at the base, the narrator shows the limitations of levity and the thin line separating dark humor from the deeply serious:

When we finished the convoy, Timhead helped me out of the gunner’s suit. As we peeled it off my body, the smell of the seat trapped underneath hit us, thick and sour. Normally, he’d make jokes or complain about that, but I guess he wasn’t in the mood. He hardly said anything until we got it off, and then he said, “I shot that kid.”

Klay deploys a similar level of emotional nuance and subtle intelligence in dealing with other aspects of the experience of returning soldiers. Living with PTSD, self-medicating with alcohol, and coping with disfigurement, the suicides of friends, sexual repression, and the trauma of taking human lives, even enemy lives, are omnipresent themes in these stories. When not foregrounded, they are often artfully and discretely lurking in the background.

Not all of them, however. Some of the stories in Redeployment come across as editorials, or even outright polemics, costumed in the fashion of technically competent literary fiction.

In Bodies, the narrator is a marine returning from Iraq where he was on Mortuary Affairs duty. His job was to pick up and dispose of the corpses, some of which are severely disfigured. While the morbid nature of his experience, and the fish-out-of-water scenario of his return home was enough to keep me turning pages, the thrust of the story felt more like a sermon. After an unsatisfying reunion with the narrator's ex-girlfriend, he goes to a bar and rattles off some gruesome war stories to a civilian man. When the man tells him that he respect's what the narrator has been through, he responds:

"I don’t want you to respect what I’ve been through," I said.

That confused him. ‘What do you want?" he said.

I didn’t know. We sat and drank beer for a bit.

"I want you to be disgusted," I said.

Preachier still is Psychological Operations. The narrator is a Marine who had a pretty easy tour of duty doing PsyOps in Iraq. He returns home and goes to college on the GI Bill, where he meets Zara Davies, an idealistic fellow student whose sincerity and liberalism is the oppposite of the narrator's practiced military cynicism.

While at first they clash, to interesting effect, the story quickly turns into a monologue, with Zara listening to the narrator tell her about his life and experience in Iraq. The monologue has flow, and it culminates in an interesting little tale about taking out an Iraqi warlord, but Zara the semi-mute interlocutor is a waste of a good character. Zara is colorfully drawn and, for my money, more interesting than the narrator, and could have been more fully realized if she were more than just the narrator's sounding board

This story is one of two where the narrator is in college, and it brought to mind an interesting parallel with literary fiction’s current zeitgeist, the campus novel. There are some interesting parallels between the literary campus novel and literary war fiction as Klay writes it.

Critic Stephen Marche, writing in the LA Review of Books diagnoses the campus narrative (or, as he terms it, Franzenite fiction) as follows:

The arc of Franzenite fiction goes from leaving the bosom of an institution to finding a place in the world of markets and neighbors. This journey is often shared by the members of a clique, a group somewhere in between friends and an economic tribe.

Franzenite novels are not afraid of becoming institutional profiles. Camps and universities are natural subjects for the bourgeois novel of the moment because they have become expensive ways of replicating privilege, of falling in with the right sort of people, of learning the prerequisite social codes.

If the ur-story of the campus novel is the journey from the bosom of cozy university life to the harsh realities of mating and career-dom, the ur-story of literary war fiction seems like the campus novel in reverse: a return from chaos and murder to a place of relative order and peace. The social codes acquired during war are at best irrelevant back home, and any privilege and power soldiers in war zones posses vanish. 

Even the people--the close friendships forged during war time--can only help so much. Klay captures this, too. The chaplain who is the narrator of Prayer in the Furnace has the following interaction with a soldier who has lost friends to suicide:

I fingered the small cross. "In this world, He only promises we don’t suffer alone."

Rodriguez turned and spat into the grass. "Great," he said.

The mere 966 words that make up Rachel Swirsky's If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love first appeared on March 5, 2013 in Apex Magazine. In addition to being nominated for a World Fantasy Award it has also been nominated for a Hugo Award, and it recently won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. And just last week blogger Andrew Sullivan (not someone I normally look to for fiction recommendations) (or much else, actually) gave it a shout out. That's a lot of love for such a short story. Is it justified?

In short, yes. If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love adopts the rhetorical structure of Margaret Wise Brown’s classic 1942 children’s book, The Runaway Bunny, which features a young bunny telling his mother all the different things he would turn into to run away from her, and the mother describing all the transmogrifications she would undertake to catch him. The cadence of Brown's story--If you become a [X] I will become a [Y] and [do Z] to find you--gives it a delicate, incantatory (and, honestly, somewhat creepy) feeling that Swirsky expertly captures and puts to excellent use.

(Tangential aside: Margaret Wise Brown, most famous for her books that charm children and scare the living fuck out of most adults, was a fascinating character in her own right, as Katie Roiphe describes in this Slate article from a few years ago. Brown deserves to be the subject of an indie film, or at the very least an off-Broadway play. Screenwriters take note!)

(illustration of krathongsby Victo Ngai, originally published with this story on Tor.com)

Since I'm attending the World Fantasy Convention this year (my first convention ever!) I've set myself the task of reading (or re-reading) and writing about every piece of fiction I can get a hold of that has been nominated for a 2014 World Fantasy Award. First up is Thomas Olde Heuvelt's The Ink Readers of Doi Saket, which was published on Tor.com on April 24, 2013. It has also been nominated for a Hugo Award.

This story is set in the small Thai village of Doi Saket (a real place), during Loi Krathong (a real festival), in which people float krathongs (a floating basket traditionally made from banana tree or spider lillies) down a river or canal, and make a wish. Except in  Heuvelt's story, the krathongs that float past Doi Saket contain notes with the sender's wish written out, along with a monetary offering. The residents of Doi Saket, you see, are famous for granting wishes.

(Image from tourismthailand.org)

The story begins with the death of Tangmoo, a young boy, whose dying screams--not coincidentally--enhance the coitus of passing dragonflies. From there we flash back to the beginning of the Loi Krathong festival in Doi Saket. We see the spectacle of krathongs sailing down the river, the wishes being read, the money being collected on a tree. If the krathong's journey down the river renderes the wish illegible, there are elaborate procedures in place for divining the sender's original desire. And we are given a peek at the dishonest (possibly criminal) ways certain citizens of Doi Saket go about "granting" these wishes and perpetuating the village's supposedly magic wish-granting ability.

Unlike the rest of his fellow villagers, however, Tangmoo actually does have the ability to fulfill the desires of those around him. Except no one, not even Tangmoo, is aware of this ability, and they never do become aware of it, even after his death.

For me, the most enjoyable parts of this story are of Tangmoo unwittingly fulfilling people's desires. Here, for instance, is Tangmoo inadvertently fulfilling his hungry brother's sincere desire to quickly pass the time until dinner:

A bit farther down, where the tranquil Mae Ping River was now the scene of a splashing and churning bustle, Tangmoo picked a butterfly orchid, merely on impulse. As he did so, the orchid’s calyx shook, causing minute grains of pollen, invisible to the naked eye, to drift into the air and be carried upstream by a sudden gust of wind. A tremor went through the village. Those who peeled rice looked up from their work. Lovers fell silent. And the pollen? It landed on one of bored little Nataphun’s nostrils. As soon as the boy took a breath, a rare allergy made him fall asleep instantly, only to be woken by the chirping of crickets about an hour later. Surprised by the swift fulfillment of his wish, Nataphun ran home to fill his growling stomach.

After each such incident, the narrator insists that the Tangmoo's role in fulfilling the wish is mere coincidence, a mantra that gets increasingly tongue-in-cheek as the story progresses.

When Tangmoo mistakenly overhears something he shouldn't and runs afoul of the people who run the village's unseemly wish-making racket, he is murdered. The irony of the one person truly capable of granting wishes despite being unaware of it being killed by people who pretend to grant wishes but really don't is compounded when Tangmoo's death unleashes a frenzy of sudden wish fulfillment among his fellow villagers. The story winds down in a gloss of letter-writing, gong-chiming and love-making.

The Ink Readers of Doi Saket has its charms, particularly the subtle way it portrays Tangmoo's wish-granting powers. However there is a kind of campy orientalism to this story that I found a little gross. Every character in the story, including the ultra innocent and sincere Tangmoo, verges on orientalist caricature. There is the fat character whose nickname means "hugely fat" who was "[w]inded as a consequence of the oversized behind that had given him his name." There is the "adulterous rice peeler Somchai," whose name means “real woman” and who "had once cheated on her husband with three neighbors and a shopkeeper from a nearby village after she had been spotted on the phallic altar, touching herself and wrapped in nothing but silk ribbons." And there is the exalted abbot whom everyone in the village believes to be capable of floating meditatively over his prayer rug but who is, in reality, "a senile old man who had trouble reading the verses and, more important, who drooled a lot." 

ALL OUR NAMES, by Dinaw Mengestu

The wistfulness in Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names is so tactile you can almost feel it through the paper, at least if you read the hard copy. The first-person narratives of two lovers unfold in alternating chapters, separated by time (a few years) and geography (Uganda & the United States), and also by cultural differences, secrets, and silence. It’s a kind of love story, but it feels more like a story about the limitations of love. It is not inherently tragic or violent or even unhappy, but even now, a few weeks after having finished reading the novel, I get distinctly wistful melancholic pang thinking back on it. And I’ve finally figured out why.

But first…

Our two narrators are “Isaac” and Helen. I put “Isaac” in quotes because it is not his real name, and also to differentiate him from the real Isaac, another character in this story who is, for a time, “Isaac’s” best friend.

“Isaac’s” narrative takes place in Uganda in the early 1970’s, and chronicles his deep and tragic friendship with the real Isaac. Helen’s story takes place in the American Midwest a few years later, when “Isaac” has fled to the United States and met Helen through the social services agency where she works. Helen’s narrative chronicles their relationship over the course of about a year.

At no point is “Isaac’s” real name revealed. Early on in the novel “Isaac” tells us that, “When I was born I had 13 names. Each name was from a different generation, beginning with my father and going back from him. I was the first one in our village to have 13 names.” All we know beyond this comes from a brief passage later in the novel when we are told that it starts with ‘D’ and sounds to Americans like “Daniel.”

Outside of Isaac and Helen he does not seem to have any friends. His family gets only a few brief mentions, and apart from a taste for Victorian literature and a vague desire to become a writer we know very little about him. The extreme blankness of “Isaac’s” slate allows the reader to write in details large and small, which lent him a strange mythic quality, despite the distinct non-mythic nature of his story.

“Isaac” and Isaac meet during their freshman year at university in Kampala. Isaac is charismatic in extremis, gregarious and funny and endowed with a satirist’s eye for politics. “Isaac” is very nearly his opposite: introverted, shy, and very serious. Opposites attract, and so of course the two become fast friends.

A word about the historical setting: this is Uganda in the early 1970’s. Idi Amin has recently seized the presidency from Milton Obote in a military coup, and though neither person is mentioned by name Mengestu depicts the place and time with such specificity as to make it perfectly clear. In September 1972 Obote’s supporters, aided by members of the Tanzanian military, attempted to recapture the presidency from Amin, and failed.

Isaac and “Isaac” find themselves caught up in this coup, or at least in Mengestu’s fictionalized version of it. When the Isaacs realize the rebellion is a lost cause, Isaac, who has become an officer in the rebel army, decides to stay and fight to the end. He gives “Isaac” his passport and his identity, and tells him how to get to the United States. The violence of the rebellion mutes the sadness of their parting . Thus ends “Isaac’s” narrative, just as Helen’s is about to begin.

If “Isaac” is introverted, Helen is completely closed off. “Isaac” at least had his friendship with the real Isaac. Helen seemingly has no platonic relationships, with the possible exception of her boss at the social services agency. While Helen’s relationship with “Isaac” develops naturally enough, even at their most intimate there is an abyss of secrets between them that they confide only in the reader, an abyss that persists more-or-less unbridged through the end of the novel.

And here, I think, is the source of the novel’s ingrained, underlying sadness. Helen and “Isaac’s” parallel narratives, with their extensive interiority and introversion, reminds us that whatever trauma and tragedy and joy and rage and sadness we contain, only a tiny fraction of it escapes the gray matter between our ears to be shared with others. It’s as if we spend our whole lives with the deepest, thickest, juiciest, hairiest roots of our identity wrapped within a hermetically sealed garden into which only our dearest intimates can sneak the occasional peak. Among other things, All Our Names is a graphic, somewhat exaggerated illustration of humanity’s seemingly hardwired reticence even, or perhaps especially, with those we love the most.