The Summer Isles
Page 1
PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF IAN R. MacLEOD
The Light Ages
“A meditative portrayal of an exotic society, fascinating in its unhealthy languor and seemingly imperturbable stasis … so powerfully recalls Dickens’s [Great Expectations] that this affinity animates the entire work.” —The Washington Post Book World
“MacLeod brings a Dickensian life to the pounding factories of London in a style he calls ‘realistic fantasy.’ It’s a complete world brought to life with compassionate characters and lyrical writing.” —The Denver Post
“Stands beside the achievements of China Miéville. A must-read.” —Jeff VanderMeer
“An outstanding smoke-and-sorcery saga to rival Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.” —Michael Moorcock
The House of Storms
“Ian MacLeod writes like an angel. He strings together ideally chosen words into sentences that are variously lush, sparse, subtle, bold, joyous, mournful, comic, or tragic … But it’s on the character front that MacLeod truly expends his best efforts and achieves the most.” —SF Signal
“One of the finest prose stylists around, and—borrowing as he does much of the melodrama of Victorian literature, along with the revisionist modernism of later authors like D. H. Lawrence—his writing is unfailingly elegant.” —Locus
The Summer Isles
Winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History
“Projecting Nazi Germany onto the England of the [thirties] is a most effective counterfactual device; and in the opposition of the narrator, historian Geoffrey Brook, and Britain’s Fuehrer, John Arthur, MacLeod sums up very neatly the division in the British psyche at the time, between Churchillian grit and abject appeasement.” —Locus
The Great Wheel
Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel
“A serious, thoughtful work of futuristic fiction, this haunting novel is a bridge between Huxley’s Brave New World and Frank Herbert’s Dune.” —Publishers Weekly
Song of Time
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award
“Confirms MacLeod as one of the country’s very best literary SF writers.” —The Guardian
Wake Up and Dream
“Set in an anti-Semitic U.S. drifting towards collusion with Nazi Germany, Wake Up and Dream slowly picks at the artifice of Hollywood to reveal its morally rotten core.” —The Guardian
The Summer Isles
Ian R. MacLeod
Contents
Introduction: Isles Lost, Isles Found
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Part Two
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
A Biography of Ian R. MacLeod
Isles Lost, Isles Found
by Ian R. MacLeod
EVERY NOVEL CONTAINS AT least three stories. Of course, there’s story in its pages. But then there’s the story of its writing. And there’s also the story of its reaching, or not reaching, the bigger world of its readers. As these things go, The Summer Isles proved a remarkably easy novel to write. But then it hit a wall which only now, through the book you hold in your hand, it’s finally managing to break through. At the time, I was puzzled and hurt. It is, I still think, my most rounded and complete work, and deals with an important, if not vital, subject. The success of the novella, which I created from the book at Gardner Dozois’s kind suggestion, only added to my confusion.
I don’t have any explanations to offer about the strange progress of this book. Novels aren’t about certainties, and introductions to them even less so, and writers must learn to exist in lands of confusion. Alternate history, by any standards an honorable strand in speculative fiction, has often been said to be in the doldrums by people who claim to know such things. There’s this book’s very Englishness. There are the sexual leanings of its main character. Then there’s its politics. But I firmly believe (as I writer, I think I have to) that that which is worthwhile will eventually rise to the surface. And here they are; these risen pages.
The Summer Isles explores the undeniable fact that we humans are pack animals. That, most of the time, we keep in with the crowd and do what seems to be expected of us. This process—our ability to enter the mind-set and attitudes of the culture we find ourselves in—is vital to our survival as a species. After all, if every decision and precept were continually challenged, life and society would soon grind to a halt. We live and comply each day with innumerable petty demands, hierarchies and regulations. In any other direction lies chaos and madness. But this instinct to comply runs far deeper than our willingness to pay parking good, and what we think of as evil.
Sometimes, an entire society can become so skewed in the standards it sets itself that to find an understanding of the things which are done in its name can seem, in retrospect, barely possible. But the instances in history of such events happening are worryingly many. There’s the Terror during the French Revolution. There’s the mechanised slaughter in the trenches during World War One. There’s Nazi Germany.
When I set out to write The Summer Isles, I wasn’t so specifically concerned to mirror any particular episode of what might be called social madness as to make a general exploration of it. The necessary choice of a time and place, however, dictated that some parallels were more obvious than others. If England had suffered what Germany suffered in the 1920s and 30s, it seemed to me not so much plausible as inevitable that the so-called certainties which we English still merrily cling to would drift and darken towards some form of fascism.
But the politics was incidental. Fascism, when you attempt to analyse it, is a will-of-a-wisp of meaningless prejudices and hopeless aspirations in any case. What I really wanted to show was that, like the participants in Milgram’s famous experiment, people will mostly do what they are told, even when the things they are told to do, or witness, or conspire in or turn their backs from, are terrible. And I wanted to show how ordinary our compliance would feel—and then, being an Englishman, just how English.
Prejudice exists. People condemn and dislike and persecute. You see it in the news. You encounter it when to talk to otherwise charming people at parties. You’ll also find it in your own heart, if you’re prepared to look deeply enough. So much of what happens in The Summer Isles, and many of the things which are said by its characters, is simply a reportage and reflection not of some oddly twisted alternative universe, but of the way things really are.
You scarcely have to look far in this current world of ours to see similar horrors and stupidities. It seems to me that deep certainty, especially moral certainty, whether it is bolstered by religion or some political philosophy, is the best breeding ground for this kind of social madness. It exists, plainly, in the minds of many terrorists and so-called freedom fighters, but it still also exists amid nations. The terminology is irrelevant. Fascism sticks out to us now only because it is currently seen as laughably outdated. Terrible things have been done in the name of such nebulous concepts as the will of the people, or of God, and in the name of science, and of freedom, and even of democracy.
History, even alternate history, has never yet stopped repeating itself. Let’s just hope, now, that it’s time for a change.
Bewdley, England
December 2004
PART ONE
1
ON THIS AS ON alm
ost every Sunday evening, I find a message from my acquaintance on the wall of the third cubicle of the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow. For a while we experimented with chalk, but everything is cleaned so regularly these days that it was often erased. So we make do with a thumbnail dug discreetly into the soft surface of the paint.
This whole place has become so bright and neat that it’s hardly like a proper Gents at all. Toilet rolls on all the holders, clean basins, polished wooden seats, and a one-armed War veteran who sits reading John Bull and smoking Capstan Full Strength in his glass cubicle. But he’s gone now. It’s past eight. The plangent sound of evensong bells carries through the tiny frosted window.
I do the obvious thing one does in a toilet—delaying the moment of looking like a child with a last precious sweet—and then I study the mark. It’s two thumbnails this week, which means the abandoned shed by the allotments past the rugby grounds in an hour’s time. I mark it with my own nail so that we’ll both know it’s been seen. A trail of other such marks run across the cubicle wall; what amounts nowadays to my entire sexual life. I see here that week in February when I was suffering from the influenza that still seems to trouble me, and tottered from what felt like my death bed to make the cross-nail sign that would inform my acquaintance that there was nothing doing. (I could have left no mark at all and simply not turned up, but we deviants are still human. That would have worried and inconvenienced him.) And here—Oh, happy, dangerous days!—is the special triple-mark that meant a back room in the hotel of a sympathetic but understandably wary proprietor. Good old Larry Black at the Crown and Cushion. He’s gone now, of course, has Larry. Quietly taken one night for the shocks and needles of the treatment centres around Ramsey and Onchan on the Isle of Man. So many have gone now that it sometimes seems that the rest of us are ghosts, going silently and unseen about these last fragments of our rituals.
The paint, like everything else in this country that once used to be so shoddy and municipal, is fresh, scarcely a year old and soaped-down twice weekly. A single erect penis raises its lonely head as I look hard for graffiti, and there are a few swastikas from that little man in Germany. Still, and almost lost from sight in the shadow of the cistern, an offer is made of intimate services at a specified time and date. I can’t help but smile at that. Could anyone be so naive? More probably, it was done as a half-sad joke, much like the fact that I and my acquaintance still use this place for our own discreet messages; a tiny monument to other, freer, times. Although, I reflect as I pull the chain, they hardly seemed free whilst one was living them.
I clunk back the lock and step out into the sweetly disinfected Jeyes Fluid air. I wash my hands, studiously ignoring the young man who stands at the stalls, humming to himself as he urinates splashingly. Above him on the wall, with what, if you didn’t know this country, you would surely imagine to be ironic intent, hangs a photograph of John Arthur. He gazes warmly across his desk, looking younger than his forty-nine years despite his grey hair. A file lies open before him. A pen waits in his hand. Papers to process. Lives to change. The photograph is brass-framed, well-polished. It could fit in the best drawing rooms in the land. Of course, no one has dared to deface it. I straighten my tie and the lapels of my jacket as my reflection lies over his on the glass, and smile warmly back at him.
To pass the required hour whilst early summer darkness thickens, I return up St Giles to the Eagle and Child. There, I drink Burton’s beer and tamp in a moist pipe-full of Four Square Ready-Rubbed beside a pleasant but unseasonable inglenook fire. From beyond a leaning doorway drift the strangulated cries of upper-class voices. There are a few genuine academics still left at Oxford, although Williams has gone, Lewis contents himself with the income he makes from children’s books, and it’s said that Tolkien soon hopes to do the same. But, still, the insults fly about Beowulf and The Cloud of Unknowing. Sham that I am, I content myself with studying the pages of today’s New Cross which, because of its Modernist leanings, has a freer hand than the supposedly more intellectual papers.
The front page is filled with the text of John Arthur’s Victory Anniversary speech to the cheeringly patriotic crowds in Sackville Street, Dublin, and with speculation about the as-yet-to-be-announced celebrations for Trafalgar Day this autumn, which is also his fiftieth birthday. It, and a photograph of the man not dissimilar to the one in Christ Church Gents, barely detain me. I flick instead past Modernist Tips For Mr. and Mrs. Newly-Married and photos of the Hyde Park Jamboree towards the central pages and the Cross’s leader column, which often has an almost supernatural prescience. Look at the way the Government responded to its pleas for compulsory identity cards. Look at the timely suicide, in his cell, of De Valera…For a while as the Latin and Middle English put-downs from the dons in the room beyond become more convoluted, I can’t help feeling that I’m the true historian here. That, just as the Cross’s masthead promises, the clumsy phrases I’m reading will be the stuff out of which the future will be made.
Today, though, the leader is nothing more than a general rant against the French and their expansionist tendencies in the Middle East. Recently, there have also been threats and arguments with them about the security of the Channel Isles, and the ownership of the land Britain has regained in East Africa, but, all in all, the whole thing has an unconvincing air. The French are foreign in a way that the Irish or the rebellious Indians and Boers never will be, and thus are much harder to hate. It’s still difficult to imagine that we could ever go to war against them.
I tap out my pipe on the edge of the grate, and ponder and then decline—my bladder being the perverse creature it is—the prospect of a second pint of Burton’s. Still, I feel light-headed as I stand up. Ghost whispers fill my head, and my hand trembles noticeably as I bear my empty glass towards the bar.
Outside along St Giles, twilight has descended, yet the warmth of this early summer day remains. Bicycles whiz by. Bats flit around the street lamps. A few of the newer or expensively refurbished pubs already boom with patriotic songs. A convoy of trucks lumbers around the cobbles, filled with bewildered-looking conscripts on their way to the sprawling camps in the southeast of England.
I pause to relight my pipe as I pass St John’s, fumbling through several matches, then drawing in one sweet puff before something foul catches in my throat. I lean spluttering against a wall and cough up out a surprising quantity of stringy phlegm onto the pavement, watched over by a small but disapproving gargoyle. Odd, disgusting habit—hawking and spitting. Something that, until recently, I’d only associated with old men.
There’s still some life out on the playing fields. Undergrads are wandering. There are groups. Couples. Limbs entwine. Soft laughter flowers. The occasional cigarette flares. Glancing back at the towers of this city laid in shadows of hazy gold against the last flush of the sun, it’s all so impossibly beautiful. It looks, in fact, exactly like an Empire Alliance poster. GREATER BRITAIN AWAKE! I smile at the thought, and wonder for a moment if there isn’t some trace of reality still left in the strange dream that we in this country now seem to be living. Turning, sliding my hand into my pocket to nurse the encouraging firmness of my anticipatory erection, I cross the bridge over the Cherwell as Old Tom begins his long nightly chime.
Despite all the back-to-nature and eat-your-own-greens propaganda, the shed at the far end of the allotments and the plots it once served remains abandoned, cupped as it is in a secret hollow, lost by the men who went to the War and never came back again. Tangled with nettles and high grass, rich with sap and cuckoo spit, the whole place has a satisfyingly disreputable air. It would make an ideal haunt for a boyhood gang. But there are no brown-skinned savages here, no secret rituals—none, anyway, other than those that I and my acquaintance perform. Delinquency per se is out of fashion: although far stranger ceremonies than ours, it seems to me, have been shamelessly enacted at Carfax in broad daylight and outside New Buckingham Palace.
I lever open the shed door and duck inside. As always, the dim
smell reminds me of my father’s old shed. Tools and seeds and sweet dry manure. But no sign yet of my acquaintance as the floorboards creak beneath my feet and I risk striking a brief match to confirm that all is well. Unchanged. That potting bench in the shadows. The dangling webs of long-dead spiders.
The match stings my fingers and hisses out. I wait. The darkness, even as my eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, becomes near-absolute as night settles outside. The Christ Church bells have long since stopped chiming. Only some more distant tower ripples a muffled shipwreck clang. The late train to London rattles by in the distance, dead on time. The last grasshopper gives a final trill.
My acquaintance is late. In fact, he should have been here first. As I pushed back the door, his younger arms should already have been around me. The first anticipatory explorations of flesh against flesh. He trembles often as not when we first lock together, does my acquaintance. After all, he has so much more to lose.
Despite the darkness and the secrecy with which we pretend to cloak our meetings, I know exactly who my acquaintance is. I have followed him home. I have studied the lights of his house shining through the privet that he trims so neatly each fortnight, and I have watched the welcoming faces of his wife and two daughters as they wait at the door.
Checking, occasionally, the radium glow of my watch, I let a whole hour slide by as the residue of early hope and fear sour into disappointment, and then frank anxiety. But what, after all, do I know of the demands of being a father, a husband? Of working in some grim dead-end section of the Censor’s Department of the city Post Office?
At ten, I lever the shed door open and step out into the summer night, leaving my long-forgotten libido far behind me. The stars shine down implacably through the rugby Hs as I make my way back past lovers and drunks and dog walkers into the old alleys. I turn for a moment as I hear the whisper of footsteps. Could that be a figure, outlined against the mist of light that seeps from a doorway? Could it be my acquaintance? But by the time I’ve blinked, it becomes nothing—an aging man’s fancy: the paranoias of love and fear.