Asimov's SF, July 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The first story, “The Year of the Gibbet,” is told from the vantage of an elderly man in the early 1800s who's dying of cholera. He uses the moment of his mortality to reflect on the pivotal event of his life, which occurred during his childhood, in the year of the American Revolution when the redcoats invaded New York. The year in which his mother was hanged as a spy.

  Told in the first person—as are the other two novellas—this tale establishes the tone, symbology, and style of the whole volume. McGrath is primarily concerned with parent/child relationships, with the shifting, ever-developing character of New York, and with ghosts both literal and metaphorical.

  At first “The Year of the Gibbet” paints a vivid picture of colonial New York, with its bustling port and small sprawl of modest buildings. But no sooner is this landscape reified through McGrath's cool but not un-compassionate prose than its equally vibrant destruction by fire and pillage and warfare is depicted. In this devastated new territory the unnamed narrator, his siblings, and their defiant, daring mother try to survive, while still foiling the invaders. As in Ballard's Empire of the Sun (1984), the child's viewpoint endows the narrative with an off-kilter feverish quality. Then, through a single act—either sinful or innocent, the reader must decide—the narrator betrays his mother. She is tried and executed, and for the next fifty-five years returns as an objectively real ghost to haunt her son.

  The middle piece, “Julius,” takes place later in the 1800s, and exhibits a vein of Washington-Irving-style comedy amidst its tragedy. The title character is the absent-minded, weak-willed scion of a rich family, a gentle naïf with pretensions to artistic talent. McGrath's comic portrait of Julius allows his tragic downfall to register even harder. Julius falls in love with an artist's model, but the stern codes of his father demand a breaking-off of the affair, a cruel action that the father pursues covertly rather than honestly. This parental duplicity results in madness, disfiguration and slow shattered decline for practically the whole extended family. Along the way, we witness the spectacle of a city truly coming into its rich Gilded Age heyday.

  Lastly, “Ground Zero” takes place immediately after 9-11. A woman psychiatrist counsels a male patient who's taken up with a struggling female artist who supports herself as a prostitute. The artist's prior lover died in the fall of the WTC, and has returned as a specter, amidst the smoke, fear, and confusion of a new terrorist era. The psychiatrist warns her patient of the madness that awaits him, should he continue to see this obviously unstable woman. But is the psychiatrist herself acting morally? Or does she harbor unprofessional feelings toward her client?

  Although each of these superb stories stands confidently on its own, the resonances among them make this book a unified masterpiece. The parallels among all the pairings of domineering parent/impressionable child are the most striking element. (In “Ground Zero,” the psychiatrist confesses that she views her patient as the son she never had, thus opening up all kinds of Oedipal issues she ignores.) The theme of hauntings is the next most obvious link. (Julius emerges from twenty years in an asylum as a kind of ghost from a vanished era.) And the tenuous role of the artist in society figures prominently as well. (Julius and Kim Lee, the painter/hooker of “Ground Zero,” are obviously akin, while the narrator of “Gibbet” has spent his life as a “hack,” a writer.) Finally, the background “documentary” of the rise, fall, rise, and fall of New York City is a constant sustaining thread. (When, in the final tale, we revisit Trinity Church, a site which figured prominently in “Gibbet,” we've completed an eternal circle.)

  McGrath's technique is admirably understated and elegant, precise without being over-explicit. He's able to introduce chills unexpectedly and without showiness. A simple statement such as this one from “Gibbet"—"Before me on the table now I have her skull"—does more to evoke the macabre than any splatterpunk SFX. This book is also suffused with a tender melancholy, a kind of O. Henry/Thomas Wolfean godlike view of the suffering million-footed beast that inhabits the USA's greatest city.

  Sometimes it takes a foreigner to point out the qualities of a place all the natives take for granted.

  * * * *

  The Emperor in Her Head

  Brian Aldiss's mastery of his craft is brilliantly on display in his latest Wellsian novel, Sanity and the Lady (PS Publishing, hardcover, $45.00, 218 pages, ISBN 1-904619-24-X). Here's a book that deals with a host of serious topics, which depicts global sociopolitical consternation and a sea-change of history, which ends in what could be arguably construed as a cosmic disaster, yet which does so with a lightness of spirit and a playfulness that carries the reader along frothily and entertainingly. At one point in the narrative, characters praise the show tunes of the 1940s—songs by Cole Porter, et al.—which managed to deal with serious adult topics in a carefree, blithe, yet mordantly rueful way. By this standard, Aldiss is Cole Porter reborn.

  It's the day after tomorrow when an Earth-impacting meteorite seeds portions of our planet with nanoscopic alien invaders, who come to be called “emperors” or “autons.” These invaders (possibly bits and pieces of an ancient alien AI) take up residence in the brains of random citizens in the UK, the USA, and France. (Note immediately the satirical possibilities in the choice of these three particular nations.) The autons begin a conversation with their hosts, seeking to learn the most basic things about the strange new world on which they've inadvertently arrived. (In these dialogues, Aldiss has great fun questioning everything we take for granted, much in the manner of Heinlein's Michael Valentine Smith.)

  The three governments involved react in fashions typical of their traditions. The US President orders all autons and their hosts sacrificed for the good of mankind, on the off-chance that the autons are hostile. The French savor and protect the newcomers. The British reaction lies somewhere in between.

  Our focus for all this interstellar brouhaha is Laura Broughton, a middle-aged novelist who becomes a public defender of the autons (she carries one) and the possibilities they offer, such as a deeper understanding of the universe. (The fact that an auton has cured her grandmother of a fatal illness doesn't hurt either.) Her principled stand brings her to France, Canada, the USA and 10 Downing Street. But she accumulates enemies along the way, and is soon in jeopardy. At the climax of the book, she and her auton retaliate in the only way they know how. What results is an unpredictable twist ending.

  Aldiss has great fun depicting Laura's eccentric extended family (they all share a huge country house in a Wodehouse manner). His delight in their quotidian affairs—high tea, dogs at play, amateur drama productions—is a perfect foil to the grander themes and doings. His text argues convincingly that all our high-flown rhetoric must be embedded in the day-to-day realities of living, which perhaps ultimately outweigh the cosmological concerns.

  Like Poul Anderson's Brainwave (1954) or John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951), this novel shakes up the status quo with an eruption from the great beyond, simultaneously showing us how little mankind figures in the spacetime continuum, and yet how unique and irreplaceable we are, while advocating general humor and a certain strain of don't-take-yourself-so-seriously as the essential survival tactics.

  * * * *

  Pack Your Own Lunch

  Here's an interesting question for you: is every book that features a teenaged protagonist necessarily a Young Adult novel? Is Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951)? I'm inclined to think not; that having a youthful hero or heroine does not automatically stamp a book as something geared solely toward juveniles. But the marketplace may disagree.

  This is possibly why Graham Joyce's newest—something of a departure for him, in both tone and focus—is not labeled a YA book, although it features a sixteen-year-old boy at its heart, and could conceivably have been slanted toward that demographic. There's too much emotional and intellectual substance here to exclude any potential reader, of whatever age group.

  Joyce's novel, TWOC (PS Publishing, hardcover, $45.00, 205 pages, ISBN 1-9
04619-37-1), purports to tell a very simple story at the outset. But the story delivers a hidden curveball, plotwise, and also some very rich lessons that its straightforward surface might not immediately suggest.

  The title stems from an acronym: Taken Without Owner's Consent. It's a British police term for the habit of young criminals of “borrowing” cars for joyrides. Our hero, Matt Norris, is a “twocer.” And one of his stunts has irreparably damaged his life. He and his brother Jake, and Jake's girl Jools, were cruising in a stolen car when they got into a fiery accident. Jake died, Jools got scarred for life, and Matt's hands were burnt. Now Matt has to deal with the aftermath. He's on probation and doing poorly in school. He bristles with his parents. He's alienated his old friends. Oh, and one other thing.

  Jake's ghost likes to hover over Matt's shoulder, in front of his face, outside his bedroom window, whispering a seductive chant of mortality, an invitation to join Jake in the grim afterlife.

  Matt seems to be on a downward spiral, until his counselor suggests a harsh, survival-style weekend retreat. There, with an arsonist named Amy and a graffiti-artist named Gilb, Matt will have to confront his demons. But Jake might be too strong to defeat.

  Joyce spiels out Matt's story in the engaging first-person, creating an utterly convincing character and voice. Some of Matt's witticisms are perhaps a hair too sharp and polished, but when you add in the revealed fact that Matt always did best in English classes, you can buy his keen lines more easily. After a short time, you just accept that this is his voice. And it's a swell voice for rendering events and presenting Matt's impressions of all the adults and his fellow juvenile delinquents, sardonic yet hurt.

  The horror aspect of Matt's situation is not as intense as in Joyce's other books, but it's still omnipresent and creepy enough to stir the hackles, especially in the nail-biting climax. More dominant, however, are the comedic aspects of Matt's life, and here Joyce proves himself deft. Like the Aldiss book reviewed above, this novel hews to a healthy “laugh to stop from crying” philosophy.

  At the end of his pivotal weekend, Matt is asked to sum up what he's learned in a motto. “Pack your own lunch” is what he spontaneously comes up with. As a metaphor for taking personal responsibility for one's own life and actions, this holds the ring of hard-earned truth. Matt's victory—shared with his peers—resonates for both him and the lucky reader.

  * * * *

  Family Feud

  We encounter a futuristic or alternate world that is dominated by an outright tyranny, or subject to some other inequitable system. Rebels exist. A child of privilege is yanked out of his cozy world and made to encounter the proletariat. He sees the error of his coddled ways, perhaps even with the help of a beautiful rebel girl. The fortunate, reformed scion now works to help undermine the very system that once ensured his status.

  This hoary formula is as old as the notion of warp-drive in science fiction. It formed the basis for hundreds of tales during the Galaxy era. I even seem to recall Damon Knight making fun of the plot in a critical essay. Surely no good tale could be written to this template nowadays ... ?

  Well, that's what I would have said before reading James Lovegrove's Provender Gleed (Gollancz, trade paperback, £12.99, 331 pages, ISBN 0-575-07684-4), which manages to employ this ancient narrative pattern to wondrous effect. Of course, it helps that Lovegrove's novel is basically a humorous one—admittedly with a moral sting in its tail—since any utterly serious treatment of this “great man from above seeing the error of his ways and turning his coat” McGuffin would have faced greater barriers to acceptance.

  In any case, here's Lovegrove's clever iteration of this fairy tale.

  Technically, Provender Gleed is an alternate history novel, first and foremost. The disjunction between our world and Lovegrove's occurred in the 1600s, when the Medici and Borgia families united into a powerful cartel. With this example before them, major powerful clans around the globe followed suit, becoming capital-eff Families, the not-so-secret rulers of the globe. These Families are mostly idolized by the hoi polloi, as the celebrity members go about their wastrel lives. But of course, some underlings feel hatred and envy for their overlords.

  Cut to the present day. One dominant British Family is the Gleeds. The improbably named Provender is their only son, the heir to the name. But Provender is not living up to his responsibilities. He's moony and uncooperative. In secret, he's the author of an anti-Family tract. But this mild act of dissention does him no good when two proles—Damien Scrase and Isis Necker—kidnap Provender during a giant celebration at his estate. The two intend to hold him for ransom. But what they don't realize is that Provender's father, Prosper, is convinced that a rival Polish Family, the Kuczynskis, is behind the kidnapping. Bent on revenge, the Gleeds begin using their government pawns to provoke what could easily become the Third World War.

  Provender must somehow convince Isis, the more sympathetic of his two captors, to help him escape. Then he must make his way back across a hostile landscape to home, never realizing that home harbors a traitor who was the ultimate mover in this scheme.

  Lovegrove has a grand old time setting up his faintly ridiculous but fully embraceable world. The way his Families live, and the way their “ClanFans” idolize them is a cutting parallel to our own celebrity-besotted culture. There's a little bit of Gilliamesque alternate technology on show—dirigibles, odd trams, and computer analogues—but basically Lovegrove's most concerned with the social relationships of his uchronia. His “common people” are just as fully rounded as his stars, and Isis becomes a great foil for Provender.

  Lovegrove's plummy dialogue and daft descriptions follow the core practices of British drollery, in the Pratchett or Holt mode, with maybe a bit of Wilde or Firbank thrown in for good measure (For Holt's latest, see below.) A description of the business quarters of a pair of “Anagrammatic Detectives” (themselves the best and funniest bit players in the book) relies heavily on the silliness of the word “insalubrious” without becoming tedious or boring. The public spat between Prosper Gleed and Stanislaw Kuczynski at the Family Congress has the gleefully demented air of a Marx Brothers skit. All in all, this book rides a wave of quiet chuckles that occasionally crests into loud guffaws.

  Yet in the end, Lovegrove manages to say something true and useful about class privilege, elitism, and social reform. Imagine Ron Goulart channeling William Morris or Edward Bellamy, and you'll have an idea of this book's delights.

  * * * *

  A Jolly Treacle

  I wish that I had encountered the first two books in the fascinatingly barmy saga of Paul Carpenter—The Portable Door (2003) and In Your Dreams (2004)—before unwittingly venturing onto the third volume, Earth, Air, Fire and Custard (Orbit, hardcover, £12.99, 410 pages, ISBN 1-84149-281-7). Oh, it's not that this latest Holt masterpiece of recomplicated humorous fantasy is incomprehensible without first reading its predecessors. Quite to the contrary. Holt does a fine job of filling in the backstory in bits and pieces as he goes along. Most satisfying. No, it's only this: now that I know all the secrets concerning Paul's genesis, existence, identity, and destiny, I can never read the first two volumes with the same teasing feeling of enigmas awaiting unveiling as I could have, had I been a naïve reader encountering them for the first time in their proper order. Now, when I go to them out of sequence, as I surely shall, purely for pleasure, I'll be like the hidden villain of the series, Professor Theo Van Spee: omniscient to the point of stultification and boredom.

  Well, not actual boredom. You never get that with a Holt book. But you take my meaning.

  All in all though, I suppose I did get to sample the choicest, climactic bits first. Rather like picking the fruit out of your Jell-O.

  But enough about me and desserts.

  Back to Paul Carpenter and his custard.

  Paul is a part-goblin, mostly human fellow who's been indentured to a London firm of magicians (some goblin, some not) named J.W. Wells. During his tenure at the company—whic
h makes money by rearranging reality for its clients—Paul has been assaulted in various painful ways, forced to visit the afterlife, sexually harassed by one lascivious goblinette, and generally treated like dirt. Moreover, he's lost the affections of his one true love, Sophie Pettingell, thanks to a spell cast upon her. In short, Paul's life is looking pretty miserable. Even being apprenticed to Professor Van Spee, where's he learning some nifty tricks, such as how to nudge an Earth-killer asteroid out of its orbit, fails to lift his spirits.

  Then a new partner arrives at the firm, the mysterious Frank Laertides. Laertides takes Paul under his wing for non-obvious reasons, and before Paul knows it, his life has gone from bad to worse. He's accused of murdering a co-worker; he's trapped in Custardspace, a synthetic reality created by Van Spee; he's forced to fight duels and deal with covetous goblins; his sentient refrigerator becomes uppity and lecturesome; and that's just the beginning of Paul's trials. Will he find the strength of character to win out against the vast conspiracy that's using him as a pawn? Perhaps. After all, as he resolves, about three-quarters of the way through this book: “There comes a point where the reasonable man, even if he's a born coward, has to draw the line against the insweeping tide of weirdness...."

  Holt's many talents are fully on display in this absurd, surreal comedy. Let's consider them one by one.

  First is his sheer power of language. With his gaudy, wacky meta-phors and similes, he constructs nets of hilarious language that carry the reader along gleefully. When Paul takes up a magic sword, for instance, he finds that the weapon “was tugging at his fingers, like a small child who's just sighted chocolate.” Not only is this vivid and tangible, but we know we're not exactly in Elric of Melnibone territory. Included in this facility is Holt's glorious dialogue, which skitters about the page insanely and at cross-purposes to itself. The archetypical misunderstandings of great comedy flourish here.