Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  There is, to be sure, the problem of all long-continued series—do the characters age in tandem with the writing of the books, or do they exist in a kind of timeless present? Leon’s topics have kept up to date, closely related to Italian history and politics since 1992; but the Brunetti children, apparently trapped in eternal adolescence, are increasingly left out of the stories. That is a pity, for Raffi and Chiara are most engaging characters, and I hoped to see the marriage of their parents evolve through time. The portrait of a family—along with the subtle and vivid picture of Venice, and the enticing descriptions of what Venetians eat—is at the heart of Leon’s books, giving them the warmth and vitality that balances out the darkness of their concerns.

  Of course they are mysteries, with a crime and an ingenious solution, though seldom the rational, comforting, penny-drop solution of the whodunit. The crimes in Leon’s books are sometimes rather against humanity than an individual; the moral problems raised may be completely unsolved by arrest or punishment; and the criminals may be less criminal than their abettors in big business and government.

  One can in fact read the books as a guide to Italian corruption, inertia, favoritism, nepotism, and cynicism. Leon, an American, has lived in Italy only since the eighties, but she seems completely Italian in the cold, resigned clarity of her view, and in the apparent ability, which she shares with her principal characters, to enjoy daily existence very much and love her city passionately while in bleak despair about the government, the future, and life in general. Her website tells us that her books are translated into twenty languages, but not into Italian. She says this is to save her from local celebrity, but Venice is not a very literary city, and I doubt she’d be much bothered. The reason for her reticence must go deeper. I wouldn’t blame her if she doesn’t want the Questura to know what she’s been saying about them.

  She’s even harder on the Carabinieri, though, in Suffer the Little Children. The Italians have a surfeit of police organisations, which trip over one another in the dance of cross-purpose rivalries ending in frustration that is the supreme achievement of bureaucracy. My impression is that the Carabinieri, still carrying a taint of Mussolini, are the least popular of these entities, though their uniforms are the grandest. At any rate they don’t come off very well here, stomping into private homes and carrying off babies to be dumped in orphanages.

  But the baby in this story was illegally adopted. The Carabinieri commit a moral outrage, but in pursuit of a serious crime. The interlocking complexities, political and emotional and ethical, that surround the adoption schemes and the police actions, and Brunetti’s slow, patient search for the motivations behind it all, form an exemplary Leon plot. For those of us to whom plot is less interesting than story, the fascination lies in the easy narrative movement through the web of relationships in which Brunetti lives, the complexities of his ties with fellow policemen and women, with old friends and informers, with his wife and her family. And there is equal delight in his intense and complex bond with his extraordinary city, its calles and canals, its palaces and poverty.

  My favorite passage in the book is a brief taxi drive in inland city traffic, as experienced by two Venetians. They find the automobile and the landscape it has created for itself as exotic as most of us find the gondola, but infinitely more awful. “My God,” says the usually imperturbable Signorina Elettra, “how can people live like this?” And Brunetti answers, “I don’t know.” I wonder if any of us knows.

  Yann Martel: The High Mountains of Portugal

  2016

  The High Mountains of Portugal, in Yann Martel’s novel of that name, turn out to be grassy uplands rather than high mountains; and the book turns out to be three stories rather than a novel. The stories, connected ingeniously, vary greatly in tone and quality. The first two display so little of the author’s narrative skill that they may offer more temptation to stop reading than to go on. Liking the last part of the book much better, I could wish that it stood alone.

  In Martel’s best-selling Life of Pi, the author-within-the-story tells us that he went to India with the intention of writing a novel set in Portugal. Then he met the Indian who told him the tale of Pi, and Portugal was forgotten. It’s recollected in the first part of this book, sometimes in great detail: “He heads off down Rue São Miguel onto Largo São Miguel and then Rua de São João da Praça before turning onto Arco de Jesus”—a sort of street rosary that may delight initiates of Lisbon, but to others is made interesting only by the fact that the protagonist, Tomas, is walking backwards, and that he always does so. After some elaborate rationales for walking backwards and a farcical encounter with a lamppost, we learn that he walks with “his back to the world, his back to God,” not because he is grieving for the sudden, recent death of his wife, his child, and his father, but because “he is objecting.”

  How much of this, other than the street names, is the reader to accept as plausible? While I’m reading a story I want to be able to suspend disbelief; the more questions of authorial reliability force themselves on me, the weaker the hold of the narrative. This is a naïve approach to fiction, granted, but a tough one, since intellect, cleverness, charm, wit, tact, even fact cannot conceal incredibility. The importance of plausibility to realistic fiction is obvious, but it may be even more important to fantasy, where its failure dumps the reader out of the book onto the cold hillside where no birds sing.

  However, if a writer works on the principle that fiction isn’t true, and the reader accepts that principle, then anything goes, and Tomas can walk backwards clear across Lisbon as easily as he could walk forward. Surrealism is very like wishful thinking, you get to make up the rules as you go; the operative word is “somehow.” So a man who habitually walks backwards can continue to hold a job as assistant curator in the National Museum of Ancient Art. He can recognise from a passage in a seventeenth-century diary that a certain sculpture found on an island in the Gulf of Guinea “would do nothing less than turn Christianity upside down.” Though he has no idea what the sculpture is and only the vaguest notion where, he sets right off to locate it, walking backwards, of course, until provided a “brand new fourteen-horsepower, four-cylinder Renault” touring car, which he doesn’t know how to drive, but drives on through a scenario of more or less amusing ludicrousness to the High Mountains of Portugal, where he finds the object of his quest.

  The second section of the book takes place in Lisbon some thirty years later, in 1938 (the novel abandoned for the sake of Pi was to be about Lisbon in 1939). The tale meanders via disquisitions on religion to an autopsy, described with extraordinary grossness, at the end of which surrrealism prevails entirely and a living woman is sewn inside the dead man’s body along with an ape and a bear cub. The themes of religion, of grief, and of animals connect the story to those that precede and follow it.

  I haven’t hesitated to reveal events, because in the absence of causality plot evaporates; when everything is a surprise nothing can be a surprise. The third story, the last part of the novel, works on a different and deeper level. Despite some vast, casual unlikelihoods, it’s far more considerate of the reader’s wish to be allowed to believe what’s happening; it more successfully connects event with emotion and distinguishes miracle from mere unreason. The narration is less rococo; scenes aren’t played for mere farce or shock. The theme of the animal, the relation of human and animal, has come to predominate, and on this subject Martel is an original, strange, and subtle thinker.

  It’s a timely subject of thought. We’re fortunate to have brilliant writers using their fiction to meditate on a paradox we need urgently to consider—the unbridgeable gap and the unbreakable bond between human and animal, our impossible self-alienation from our world. Karen Fowler’s novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize) handled the relationship of ape and human realistically, with a powerful sense of the tragic potential. Martel is happier, more easygoing, and his semi-surreal, semi-absurdist mode is well sui
ted to exploring the paradox. The moral and spiritual implications of his tale have, in the end, a quality of haunting tenderness.

  China Miéville: Embassytown

  Published in the Guardian, April 2011

  Some authors fill a novel with futuristic scenery and jargon and then strenuously, even stertorously, deny that it’s science fiction. No, no, they don’t write that nasty stuff, never touch it. They write literature. Though curiously familiar with the tropes and conventions of the despised genre, they use these so clumsily, they so blithely ignore the meaning of terms, they reinvent the wheel with such cries of self-admiration, that their endeavors seem a doomed effort to prove that one can write a novel without learning how.

  China Miéville knows what kind of novel he’s writing, calls it by its name, science fiction, and exhibits all the virtues that make it an intensely interesting form of literature. It’s a joy to find this young author coming into his own, and bringing the craft of science fiction out of the backwaters where it’s been caught lately between the regressive drag of publishers marketing to a “safe” readership and the bewildering promises of change and growth offered by postmodernism in all its forms and formlessness. Embassytown is a fully achieved work of art.

  Only the trash forms of science fiction are undemanding and predictable; the good stuff, like all good fiction, is not for lazy minds. Where the complexity of realistic novels is moral and pyschological, in science fiction it’s moral and intellectual; individual character is seldom the key. But Miéville’s characters are deftly sketched, and his narrator-protagonist, Avice, is a subtler portrait than she seems at first. Nothing in her behavior offers conventional signals of femininity . . . or unfemininity . . . an indication that gender may be differently constructed when humanity finds itself dealing with genuine Others.

  There are men right now who have never learned how to talk to women. How will we talk to somebody really different—aliens? The Ariekei of Embassytown are immensely unlike us. The problem of communication, the nature of language and of spoken truth, is the novel’s core.

  When everything in a story is imaginary and much is unfamiliar, there’s far too much to explain and describe, so one of the virtuosities of sf is the invention of box-words that the reader must open to discover a trove of meaning and implication. The imaginative leaps involved in decoding such inventions and appreciating their wit can give a reader much pleasure. China Miéville sets the bars rather high, but most of his neologisms come clear with a nice shock of revelation. My favorite is the immer, which is to our space-time reality as the sea is to our lands: therefore, to travel through space is to immerse. Other elegant images follow, for this is a book by a writer who loves language. And then there are new twists on ordinary words: such as Avice’s realisation that she is a simile. Before she could speak the Ariekei language, they made her part of it, a figure of speech, like our boy who cried wolf. She is the girl who ate what was put before her.

  The Ariekei want similes because their language, which is innate, does not permit lying. Like Swift’s Houyhnhnms, they cannot speak that which is not. This contradicts the nature of language as we know it—language is a wonderful vehicle for untruth and perhaps a necessary vehicle for invention, the leap to the not-yet-existent. But why should all language be like ours? The Ariekei have got on very well with only truth, cultivating a high biotechnology that Miéville describes with gleeful poetry, the living houses with their parasitical furniture, the great farms lurching over the countryside behind their keepers. . . . I wondered how the Ariekei thought of making such creatures if they can think only of what is, but that question may be indirectly answered: it seems they crave that which is not, the unthinkable untruth, the lie.

  Our species has put a colony on their planet, and we are certainly well qualified to teach them how to lie. They are eager to learn but no good at it at all. A different kind of human Ambassador is sent to Embassytown, one who can give them what they want—or an intoxicating imitation of it, a misuse of their language producing a kind of false lie. Such paradoxicals, once heard by the truth-tellers, act on them like heroin or meth—utterly destructive of their grip on reality, and fatally addictive.

  The picture of a society shaken, shattered, wrecked to the foundation by a universal drug addiction infecting even the houses, even the farms, for they are all biologically akin, is apocalyptic vision on the grand scale—curiously beautiful, alien in every vivid detail, yet psychologically and socially only too familiar. Science fiction, like all fiction, is a way of talking about who we are.

  The story, at first a bit hard to follow, very soon attains faultless impetus and pacing. If China Miéville has been known to set up a novel on a marvelous metaphor and then not know quite where to take it, he’s outgrown that, and his dependence on violence is much diminished. In Embassytown, his metaphor—which is in a sense metaphor itself—works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigor and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and even the old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a protagonist become more of a person than she gave promise of being. And all along we thought she was only a simile.

  China Miéville: Three Moments of an Explosion

  2015

  Much contemporary fantasy is quite violent, perhaps in an attempt to win the respect of people who assume fantasy is all fairies and fluff; but I doubt if that’s why so much of China Miéville’s work is so in-your-face gruesome. More likely he’s meeting the expectations of a readership used to the endless kill-count of sensational films and electronic games, and is quite bloody-minded enough to enjoy doing so. But, knowing him as a writer avowedly committed to Marxist principles of social justice, with an intense sensitivity to contemporary moral and emotional complexities and a thoughtful mind that finds expression in lucid, cogent talks and essays, I wonder if he uses the horrific at least partly as a brilliant barrage of blanks concealing a subtler, deeper engagement with the dark side.

  Brilliant: you can’t talk about Miéville without the word, whether it’s intellectual brilliance, as in “The Limits of Utopia,” an essay that opens genuinely new ways to think about our future, or the dazzle of his prose, as displayed in this new collection of stories. Stylistic brilliance often implies some coldness, a spectator pose. The reader’s not expected to identify and suffer with the characters, but to watch the fireworks go off, and gasp, and say Wow! And indeed some of these stories are pure fireworks. A whizbang, a starburst, a bright configuration of unpredictable, momentary elegance—gone. Many writers, and many readers, ask no more.

  Fortunately for plodders like me, it’s not all pyrotechnics. The writing, never less than excellent, takes many tones throughout the twenty-eight stories, some showy, some not. Pastiche, when present, is so skillful it can go unnoticed. Subjects of real weight are handled with unobtrusive ease but never glibly and never diminished by facetiousness. There are even a few characters one can, surreptitiously, suffer with. None, however, to rejoice with. Happiness is not currently on the Miéville menu.

  But his wit dazzles, his humor is lively, and the pure vitality of his imagination is astonishing—even in a trendy gross-out such as “After the Festival” (zombies, rotting meat-masks), more so in tales that develop creepy concepts such as feigned symptoms of illness becoming genuinely contagious (“The Bastard Prompt”), or a school of psychiatry that routinely uses murder as a cure (“The Dreaded Outcome”). These are essentially horror stories, self-circumscribed by the curious objectives of the genre. Readers who don’t find being scared or disgusted satisfying as an end in itself will prefer the more ambitious stories, such as “Covehithe,” which with marvelously unnerving poetic justice describes wrecked and sunken oil rigs clambering back up onto land to suck more oil from the earth and returning to the ocean to spawn. With such a subject, in its playful yet deeply disturbing reference to the ill times we have brought upon the world, the author is arousing not a pleasurable make-believe shudder, but the
real fear we’d rather pretend we don’t feel, a fear that is not simply irrational.

  Brilliance is often in concision. As I read “The Rope Is the World,” I kept imagining the 500-page science-fiction novel it could so easily have been, crammed full of detailed scientific and technological arcanities, with a complex plot involving the machinations of the powerful and the fate of cosmic enterprises or empires, routinely punctuated by descriptions of sexual activities. But Miéville didn’t take the easy route. He wrote it all in five pages.

  The offhand density is superb:

  Initial outlays were clearly gigavast, but lifting one ton of cargo out beyond everyday gravity to orbit by elevator was this or that many times cheaper—some absurd margin—than doing so by rocket, by shuttle, by alien indulgence. Now that the space elevators, the skyhooks, the geostationary tethered-dock haulage columns, were shockingly feasible, research projects were all human-spirit this and because-it’s-there that. As if, faced with them, the mere savings were as vulgar as they in fact were.

  This is science fiction to the nth. To unpack all that would take hours, and the result would be blah.

  The next story, “The Buzzard’s Egg,” is told in the quiet, rambling voice of an ignorant old slave who serves in a temple/prison for idols taken in war—captured gods. He, their priest and jailer, is himself a prisoner. Alone, he talks to his latest god-prisoner. This one-sided conversation or confession or meditation is the whole story. I found it fascinating, full of suggestion and implication, and beautiful.