The City We Became

Some cities are just more real than others. That's the premise of The City We Became, where some cities are born and become sentient, represented by chosen citizens known as 'avatars'; they include Hong Kong and Sao Paulo -- and now New York. I haven't been 'home' in 15 years, but Jo'burg could be one of those cities. As I read, I couldn't help but wonder what the avatar of Jo'burg be like. He (why a 'he'?) would be a hustler, a survivor; he wouldn't be from there but he'd be of there; he'd place value in watches, cars, houses but also in fortitude, in smiling through the pain, in never saying never.

In The City We Became, the neonatal New York and its six avatars (five boroughs plus one to rule them all) have to fight for survival against an ancient enemy known as the Woman in White (snappy name). To do this, they have to find each other and fight as one. The premise is original, but the plot is well-worn -- for a reason: it makes for great storytelling. And the author, NK Jemisin, tells a great story. There's just one catch.

I have a theory -- let's call it my 'He was in the vicinity' theory. Authors and writers create bad guys (and sometimes good guys) who are larger than life and apparently impossible to defeat -- until ... until some flaw or accident or characteristic unique to the hero (that the hero usually doesn't know how to exert or control) cuts them down. But the flaw or accident or characteristic is just so insignificant next the legend of the bad guy that the author has created. The defeat is tainted because the victory seems coincidental, rather than earned, but we give it to the hero because, well, he was in the vicinity.

The City We Became suffers from Vicinity syndrome. The Woman in White is not only ancient, she's angry (as it turns out, not unjustifiably so) and she's everywhere. The author describes in excruciating detail the feathery white tendrils that adorn buildings, roads and even people, in some places forming portals to another dimension that are like wide cables that extend from the ground into the sky. 

By contrast, the city's avatars are newborns. Only two of them have any conscious understanding of who they are and what they can do, one more so than the other. They bounce from encounter with the Woman in White and her lackeys to encounter, surviving mostly by dumb luck and occasionally instinct. In the process, they glean some information about who or what they are, because the antagonist can't resist the opportunity to monologue.

Ultimately, they survive, because this book has sequels and why would someone read a sequel with no surviving characters? But they do it by obliterating two of the initial premises, which I call cheating. So not only do the characters win against an enemy who outranked them but they do it by changing the rules. This is a corollary to my initial theory: sometimes the only way for an author to defeat their own villain is to prove that one of their own statements about said villain or about the universe they have created is untrue. Sometimes they get away with it; sometimes it triggers my existing trust issues. In this book, it was the latter.

When I think about this book, the adjective that comes to mind is 'slick'. The author is quick to distract us from the destruction of the laws of her own universe and on to happier things. Much like she does in other sections of the book, for example, when the avatars find out the tragic truth behind how their city comes to be sentient and the reason for the Woman in White's anger. One of the avatars briefly has an existential crisis, but she gets over it remarkably quickly and doesn't mention it again.

Rarely does a review criticise a book for being well written and edited, but this book could stand to be rougher around the edges. It is too neat, distracting the reader from the shapes the plot is contorted into to convince you that good is good and coincidently it's also the side that's telling the story. I want a story where the Woman in White is not only manipulative, she's also right; she's just telling a different story. 

I also want a story that doesn't violate its own premises so that those in the vicinity can claim victory.

Rereading People's Act of Love: The end

For years now, the protagonist of my adolescent novel and I have been pacing the streets of our imaginary, historical city (which is also the base of any 'real' city, so perhaps he and I have a chance of Pinocchio-ing it out and finding - what?), wondering what we are doing here. Where we are going. Because a quest isn't complete without a path - a 'from' and a 'to' - right? Let's follow this alleged path, like - you guessed it - like a certain young woman and a rabbit with a pocket watch. There it is - a hole in the ground within which the laws of relativity jump into the quantum realm - without unifying jack.

To confuse the issue, Calim (my protagonist) and I are sitting outside the entrance to the hole (a sudden eruption in the pavement before us, or perhaps the work of municipal workers doing something municipal, or a hole we dug ourselves). We are just sitting there, a convenient place to sit, taking a break, not saying anything, not doing anything but considering these roiling contradictions that don't unify anything, when there is a movement within the hole - we hear it more than see it. (This doesn't make any sense, I know - a movement without the rabbit to-ing and fro-ing, but quantum physics forgives many literary licences.)

It's the plot of That Book, the one that either shook my soul or resonated with a soul that was already shook. Calim hears it too.

This is the book I want to write. A book that unifies nothing and everything and shakes all sorts of shaken souls. That is a little ambitious, so I am content to write a book through which themes creep like the roots of an oak tree trapped in a pavement that was laid around it, like a noose. You know the kind, the thick-as-your-thigh roots that heave up the concrete around it and you imagine the roots as roiling, but so slowly that it would take lifetimes and clever filming to see.

Ok, this too is a little ambitious, but I like the taste of that cliche: go big or go home.

So many post-modern authors (go ahead and call them what else you will; labels are for students - this adjective is merely a placeholder) bury their themes beneath accusations of relativity, as if beating the critics to the punch. Ah, isn't relativity wonderful (I keep typing 'real-' instead of 'rela-', which spell check says is incorrect and which my brain is inclined to agree with but my heart made of spongy hope protests)? No, it really isn't wonderful. It's a plug in a drain; it's a sad replacement for the security of religion.

People's Act of Love pulls no such punches. Life is... awful. Oh no, you yell! I can't bear to write another monologue about how awful life is. Let's compromise: life can be awful and sometimes it can feel... something else. I'm getting to that part.

This novel says what I have been saying, but better. As per my previous post, it offers you alternatives and you are almost giddy with it, with these academic offers, whose academic-ness convince you of their authority. At the same time, the novel asks you to empathise with cannibals and castrates (yes!), because morality is a set of emotional decisions made rational, like it or not. Then it asks you how you can empathise with such creatures, such fundamentally weak creatures, enslaved to an Idea. You take it as a judgement when really it is a question driving you towards the truth that such things exist in all of us and that perhaps we need to pass through each of these moral states to find a way to live.

Life is awful. So grow a pair. Make lemonade. Live within society because the alternative is bleak 'wildness', but find your way to reconcile yourself with it.

I like to believe (look how I've grown!) that somewhere in that reconciliation is... acceptance? Not accepting the awfulness, but accepting that being angry and lashing out is not going to get you or anyone else out of the awful. Hoping (personal projection here) that the way you find might be able to do something, even if only to record the lows and highs.

Richard Pare, Shabolovka Radio Tower, Moscow, Russia. Vladimir Shukhov, 1922. Photograph © Richard Pare 2007.

The Man Who Was Thursday

"The most thrilling book I have ever read." This is one Kingsley Amis's endorsement of The Man Who Was Thursday. I'm sure it wasn't meant specifically as an endorsement at the time but those marketing b^$#@**$ will gobble anything and regurgitate it.

It worked though, because I bought the book. And read it too. And two days later, I'm not sure whether I enjoyed it or not. It definitely is not the most thrilling book I have ever read, although it is definitely one of the more bizarre. Reading the book so many years later, in light of the influence it has had on modern fiction, it's difficult not to find it staid and predictable. The story tells of a recently recruited but cunning detective who infiltrates a circle of anarchists, shortly before an assassination is due to take place. Hijinks ensue and the story devolves into a nightmare that ends in a bizarre rendering of the Last Supper. (No spoiler here, trust me.) There is some kind of moral here about anarchy and social order perpetuating each other, but quite honestly by this point I was too bored to thread it out.

It's not a bad book; it's just been done. That's not the fault of the book itself, only the fate of most revolutionary literature: to be outdone by their successors.

Having said this, the first paragraph is perfect - atmospheric, enticing, intriguing. I judge a book on three things: the first paragraph, the smell of the pages and the cover. Check it out on page 3 of Project Gutenberg and see what you think.