by Zadie Smith
When these worlds come under attack, we feel the violence personally, not least because Le Guin writes as well as any non-“genre” writer alive:
One little girl fought so fiercely, biting and scratching, that the soldier dropped her, and she scrabbled away screaming shrilly for help. Bela ten Belen ran after her, took her by the hair, and cut her throat to silence her screaming. His sword was sharp and her neck was soft and thin; her body dropped away from her head, held on only by the bones at the back of the neck. He dropped the head and came running back to his men.
The Wild Girls is, in part, concerned with the old virgin/whore dialectic: back in the City we meet with a Crown culture not entirely alien to our own, in which women are simultaneously venerated as mothers and debased as sexual property. With its feminist and socialist themes, Le Guin’s work has a certain radical chic, and her books have been interpreted, over the years, as overt support for agendas as disparate as anarchism, communalism and lesbian separatism. But just as SF can be misread by ignorant snobs, it can be misconstrued by its greatest fans. In interviews she defends herself, a little archly, against the sloppy, all-purpose label “progressive”:
I am not a progressive. I think the idea of progress an invidious and generally harmful mistake. I am interested in change, which is an entirely different matter. I like stiff, stuffy, earnest, serious, conscientious, responsible people, like Mr. Darcy and the Romans.
Darcy, with his set ideas and slow emotional evolution, seems to have cast a shadow over Dr. Shevek, hero of The Dispossessed, who travels from his home planet, an anarchist world he considers perfect, to a capitalist planet he finds repulsive. But the lessons learned on this journey between utopias are ambiguous: when Le Guin’s characters encounter other worlds—and other consciousnesses—it usually provides an opportunity to reflect critically upon their own most strongly held assumptions. For her readers, the same principle holds. Le Guin—like Austen and (genre leap!) Seneca—envisions and depicts change seriously, conscientiously, responsibly.
• • •
Some would say Magnus Mills writes a kind of SF in which the S stands for “speculative.” Others might link him to that older tradition of storytelling that includes Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake and Shakespeare—really anyone with a working and fantastical imagination. There seem to be fewer and fewer of them around these days, which makes Mills’s achievement the more striking. He is a tall-tale-teller in an age of milder fiction and careful reportage. His Three to See the King was an excellent fable about the vanities of asceticism. It begins like this: “I live in a house built entirely from tin, with four tin walls, a roof of tin, a chimney and door. Entirely from tin.”
It’s never clear to me how self-conscious he is as an allegorist: his stories are neither closed systems nor point-for-point transpositions of philosophical arguments. He is regularly compared with Kafka, but the differences are more telling than the similarities: Kafka left us—in the form of his letters and diaries—plenty of evidence of the esoteric underpinnings of his “simple” style. Reading Mills in interviews, one can’t tell whether he’s innocent of the big ideas people tend to extrapolate from his work (Pynchon is a fan), or else an artful dodger (on his writing process: “I try not to repeat the same word twice on the same page”). Either way, the comparison with Kafka is not inapt: Mills shares Kafka’s commitment to the integrity of the stand-alone paragraph or page, excising all commentary, never undermining irony by explaining it. In a million dissertations the bug in The Metamorphosis means a million things: in The Metamorphosis itself the bug is only a bug, as Mills’s man in a house of tin is a man in a tin house.
For both writers, freedom is illusory and the men who seek it are ridiculous. Women, when they turn up (not often), bring with them emotion and, worse yet, the interruption of routine. Chaos!
At first sight I knew it had everything I could need: somewhere to eat and drink and sleep without disturbance, protected from the elements by a layer of corrugated metal and nothing more. A very modest dwelling I must say, but it looked clean and tidy so I moved in. For a long while I was quite content here, and remained convinced I would find no better place to be. Then one day a woman arrived at my door and said, “So this is where you’ve been hiding.”
I find those lines delicious: a reduced jus made from a watery sauce. Mills has a way of winnowing narrative tropes to their essence. In his Explorers of the New Century men set out into the heart of darkness (“the Agreed Furthest Point from Civilization”) but bring their unequal ideas of civilization with them; in The Scheme for Full Employment everyone is employed driving “UniVans” which each carry a consignment of UniVan parts to UniVan warehouses where more UniVans are built. Work not only fails to make you free; it’s perfectly circular. In each case the prose opens wide and featureless to admit the allegory in. What arrives when a woman turns up? Worldliness? Sin? Madness? Mills isn’t telling. “You may ask: who was this woman? Well, I hardly knew her really. A friend of a friend I suppose you might say.”
In his new novel A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In Mills is back in the world of absurd, inefficient men, men without women, and men perverted by power. He is also back in the realm of archetypal narrative, in this case, an absconded king:
As the clock struck ten, Smew opened the register.
“Let us begin,” he said. “Chancellor of the Exchequer?”
“Present,” said Brambling.
“Postmaster General?”
“Present,” said Garganey.
“Astronomer Royal?”
“Here,” said Whimbrel.
“Present,” said Smew.
“Present,” said Whimbrel.
[. . .]
“Surveyor of the Imperial Works?”
“Present,” said Dotterel.
“Pellitory-of-the-Wall?”
“Present,” said Wryneck.
“Principal Composer to the Imperial Court?”
“Present,” I said.
“His Exalted Highness, the Majestic Emperor of the Realms, Dominions, Colonies and Commonwealth of Greater Fallowfields?”
Smew waited but there was no response . . . “Absent,” he said, putting a cross in the register.
This is a slightly abbreviated version of the first page (the roll-call is longer). The scene is repeated in full at various points in the novel—each time with a small, elegant variation—the better to establish the Beckettian absurdity of the situation: a kingdom where the actual business of state takes a backseat to the administration of the business of state. It is “customary in the empire to grant positions of high office to people who know little about their subject”:
Our Principal Composer narrator knows nothing about composing music, the Astronomer Royal is a stranger to the concept of north.
“Why do I need to know that?” Whimbrel inquired.
“Believe me, it’s important,” I said. “Besides, someone might ask you.”
“Who?”
“Someone who wants to go there.”
“You mean by ship?”
“Yes, possibly, or even overland.”
“Who, though?”
Whimbrel was evidently unimpressed by the whole notion of “the north.”
“All right,” I said, changing tack. “What if the emperor asks you where north is? What will you do then?”
“Oh yes,” said Whimbrel, “I never thought of that.”
But the emperor remains absent, his only communication a note “expressing his wish for a courtly entertainment to mark the occasion of the twelve-day feast.” To please him, the council decides to stage an unnamed play, in which the ghost of a murdered king appears at dinner; meanwhile, in the “real” world, someone who might be the emperor in disguise keeps appearing around town with a group of traveling players—and then of course this is the twelve-day feast. Macbeth, Twelfth Nig
ht, Measure for Measure, Hamlet—it’s all swirling around in a slightly infuriating confection that won’t reveal its purpose, just as that title (Mills has a gift for the naming of novels) seems certain to be lifted from one of Macbeth’s many ornithological lines, and yet isn’t, quite. This kingdom is lost in an English fairy-tale world, relying on past glories as surely as English literature looks back to Shakespeare as its golden moment—but on the edge of the forest a new imperium is being built, by the unsentimental Scoffers, who work 24-7, have no cultural nostalgia, and dress like train guards.
With Mills the plot is the book, but I’m obliged to note that the prose style, after seven novels and three short-story collections in little over a decade, has begun to show signs of fatigue. I have no doubt that Mills can go on writing his unhinged parables until the beasts come home, but a reader also likes to feel a writer’s development, and there are few pleasures in A Cruel Bird that can’t be experienced nearly identically in his other novels. This latest, interestingly, contains more than Mills’s usual quota of (lightly) disguised defenses of his sparse style:
Taking Wryneck by the sleeve, Sanderling guided him over to the picture and started explaining it to him. Cleverly, though, he made no attempt to talk about artistic technique: brushstrokes, light, color, perspective and so forth. This would have led him straight out of his depth. Instead he described how a ship actually sailed, commencing from first principles.
What happens with buildings, tools, mechanisms, tower rooms, and trains inspires Mills’s imagination; what happens with people prompts abstraction and cliché: “I shuddered as my ninety-eight musicians drove onwards, soaring up to greater and greater heights, then plunging down to new depths.” Individually, they are deliberately inarticulate. “Good grief!” is about all they can manage, and when combined with Mills’s love of repetition, this tic of inarticulacy begins to weary rather than amuse.
For the most part, it’s a problem of length. What works in the novella space of Three to See the King or The Restraint of Beasts here strains to go the distance. There are too many passages revealing cheek by jowl Mills’s strengths and weaknesses:
Behind the station loomed tall buildings shrouded in vapor; factory hooters were blaring and smoke was rising from their immense chimneys; sparks flew inside cavernous steel sheds; beneath a gantry an iron girder descended steadily on a hook and chain; cables unwound from revolving drums; all around me the City of Scoffers was gathering momentum for the day ahead, while I could do nothing but gaze haplessly into an apparent void.
Along with the absurdity of the world, Kafka could describe the void inside human beings—he met irony with agony. Mills can only conjure the word: void. It’s still a very funny and bracingly odd dystopia, but 276 pages is a long time to spend in a toy town. You start to yearn for wilder climes.
• • •
There was no one wilder than Rimbaud. Before he was twenty-one, the boy-poet had crossed the Alps on foot, worked as a longshoreman in Leghorn, fallen in love with Verlaine (and been shot in the wrist by him, and seen the older poet go to jail for two years), enlisted as a mercenary, slept on the streets, lived in a flophouse drinking absinthe daily, walked from Charleville to Paris—oh, and written A Season in Hell, in which he predicted his next move: “My day is done; I’m leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs; lost climes will tan my skin.” Next he joined the Dutch Colonial Army and sailed to Java, where he soon deserted, vanishing into the jungle. He stayed a few months and no one knows anything at all about what he did there.
Jamie James, a former art critic for the New Yorker, has written a necessarily short, delightful book about this “lost Rimbaud.” Rimbaud in Java was intended as a novel, but James, despairing of putting dialogue in the mouth of the protagonist, veered into non-fiction: a sensible decision. His alternate route is still a high-wire performance. It’s not an academic book and it’s not really a history either; nor is it—God help us—a “meditation.” It generally spares its readers the pointless formulation: If Rimbaud had been here he most probably would have . . . Instead it offers a more honest motivation for writing, stripped of the veneer of “professionalization”: love. As James puts it, this book is “an act of enthusiasm.”
He is obsessively enthusiastic about Rimbaud, and so, like his fellow devotees, is profoundly, perhaps irrationally, interested in whether or not Rimbaud smoked opium out there in the jungle, or had a lover, or took the Prins van Oranje steamer or a local phinisi schooner on his return journey—all of which it’s impossible to know. Such speculations fascinate James, and he weaves the possibilities into his understanding of the poetry, and of the man. If it all sounds too whimsical at first (it did to me, reading the blurb), you soon realize that the best reason to stick with Rimbaud in Java is not for the facts or the fantasy but for the spectacle of reading someone write beautifully about something he finds, well, beautiful:
The glamour that has attached itself to Rimbaud’s odyssey-in-reverse, the reason some people care so passionately about reconstructing the itinerary of his ceaseless efforts to escape from home, partakes of the magnetic attraction of his poetry. It derives its potency from an essential quality of the enigma: the longer one ponders Rimbaud’s life, the more it can seem as if the pattern of riddles thrown in one’s way is a deliberate creation, a premodernist adumbration of a witty postmodernist gesture, rather than a life lived at hazard, like any other life.
You can always find a coffee-table-crushing cultural history, but I quite like the idea of learning, in a few hours, a whole lot about Java, orientalism, Rimbaud, Victorian attitudes toward homosexuality, global shipping routes and the Suez Canal. The book shines a torch down the well of the nineteenth century and illuminates a little patch on an inner wall near the bottom. Before, you had to trawl for miles through the stacks to figure out what you sought; now you know sooner, and know sooner what you’ll never find. Microhistory? If it’s the beginning of a trend I won’t complain.
Finally, a word from your reviewer. I have to fess up to my own irrational fantasy—the one where it’s possible to write a novel, teach class, bring up a kid and produce a regular column: at the moment a speculative fiction for me. With regret I must say good-bye to New Books—at least for a while—and welcome my brilliant successor, Larry McMurtry.
THE I WHO IS NOT ME*
1. Impossible Identities
Not long ago I finished working on a novel, written in a voice I’ve never used before: the first person. Oh, I’ve written essays that say “I,” and many e-mails, obviously, and birthday cards and notes for my children’s teachers, and several lectures like this one—but never fiction. Honestly, I was always a little repelled by the idea. I think because I started writing very young, at an age where I felt that any reader who picked me up would be well within their rights to say: now, who exactly does this girl think she is? My answer to that was: “no one.” It became important for me to believe my fiction was about other people, rather than myself, I took a strange pride in this idea, as if it proved I was less self-preoccupied or vain than the memoirist or the blogger or the Bildungsroman-er. No one could accuse me of hubris if I wasn’t there. Looking back, I think this moral queasiness around the first person is very much a British habit. One of the first things we learn in school about our greatest writer, Shakespeare—right after we are informed that he is the greatest—is that he was, in essence, nobody. I don’t only mean that we know very little about him autobiographically, although of course we don’t. I mean that we are consistently encouraged to believe Shakespeare the supreme example of what Keats called “negative capability,” that is, a man who appeared to hold no firm opinions or set beliefs, who lived in doubt and in a hundred personas, whose empathy for others was limitless, who is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in his famous plays, like a gnomic god. Now, another way to think about this is that Shakespeare’s ego was so very insatiable he thought he could speak for everybody: a black
duke, a transvestite girl, a carefree prince, a mad king. But we tend not to think of it that way, in Britain, instead we consider Shakespeare’s breed of impersonality among the highest literary virtues. The first-person voice, in this elevated context, presents itself as a kind of indulgence, a narcissistic weakness, which the French and the Americans go in for, perhaps, but not the British, or not very often. In Britain we are always doing this: mistaking an aesthetic choice for an ethical one.
Anyway, it was this kind of thinking which I think prompted me to write my novel On Beauty in the form I chose, a very elevated third person, which sounded almost Victorian. This voice I then applied to a world that was not mine, to a family I never had, a childhood as distant from mine as could be imagined, at least by me. The children in that book grow up on a university campus, their father is a white, male academic. And then, at other moments in the novel, the narrative voice seems to live inside that white, male academic, and sometimes in his black British teenage lover, and sometimes in his African-American middle-aged wife, and sometimes in a seventeen-year-old, white Midwestern girl, who sits in the back of this academic’s class, confused and baffled by the lesson. This is the kind of fiction I have always loved to write and read: worming itself into many different bodies, many different lives. Fiction that faces outwards, toward others. But after my book was finished and I had a chance to reflect upon it I could see more clearly how the I who is me ran through it all in a subterranean way. On Beauty is not my life, but it’s certainly full of my loves, my interests, my ideas. Mozart’s Requiem was a passion of mine, at the time, as was Haitian painting, and I dig hip-hop and Rembrandt makes me cry and I adore my siblings and love to swim. I had just got married and was thinking a lot about what marriage might mean. The novel is a record of my preoccupations, although they are mapped on to strangers. Meanwhile the strictly autobiographical, if it occurred at all, was deeply buried and almost entirely subconscious. But it was there. Very close to the end, for example, a teenage girl punches another girl in the face because she finds her kissing a boy the first girl has a crush on. That is the only event in the whole novel that is, in the literal sense, true. When I was fifteen I knocked out a girl for kissing a boy I had a crush on. But I did not plan to have this scene in the novel—I do not plan my novels much in general—and I certainly did not know I was going to write that scene until I did. Yet when you read On Beauty much of the plot seems to build to precisely this moment, as if the whole thing had been mapped out for this purpose from the start. Is it possible—I wondered, after the book was done—that my subconscious in some sense tricked me into writing this long novel, led me down the garden path, weaving all kinds of themes and narrative turns into its fabric, permitting me, its author, to think my book was about class or color or American feminism or whatever I, in my innocence, thought it was about, when all the time she, my subconscious, had constructed the whole thing simply to create a convincing stage upon which to work through the traumatic memory of a single left hook from twenty years ago? It’s a funny idea and, to me, a slightly unnerving one. I am someone who likes to be in control when I write, who prefers to believe she is making basically impersonal and rational aesthetic choices. And with On Beauty I really set out to be a voice from the mount, the kind I remembered fondly from my childhood, the measured voice of Victorian fiction—I felt I needed that authority. I didn’t want to sound like some furious fifteen-year-old girl still licking old wounds.