Asimov's SF, July 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  we ALL know what he meant.)

  —

  And here is as much as most folks

  will want to know about

  Freud and the boys—

  whether you can meet your dreams

  on the AB itinerary

  will determine whether

  you look yourself in the eye

  when you do, or blink if you do—

  or want to wave.

  —

  ...and God's in there, too, some place, I think.

  —W. Gregory Stewart

  Copyright (c) 2007 W. Gregory Stewart

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  ON BOOKS

  by Paul Di Filippo

  My Dirty Little Literary Find

  Where is Liz Jensen on your SF radar screen?

  If you're anything like I was just a short time ago, you'll have to honestly answer “nowhere."

  Jensen is not marketed as a genre author, nor reviewed in genre venues. And she doesn't exactly rate big coverage from mainstream, establishment publications either—a result, I believe, of her slipstream nature, and her consequent falling in between two camps. And she's British, which, sadly, often militates against a wide audience in the USA. (I suspect, based on the praise-filled British blurbs for her books, that she's got a much higher profile in her native land.) These factors make it unlikely that Asimov readers will have a deep familiarity with her work. And that's a darn shame, given her superb prose, witty fantastical conceits, narrative drive, and mature sophistication.

  Her name first jumped out at me when perusing a monthly circular from the Science Fiction Book Club, which, to their vast credit, is offering her latest novel, My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (Bloomsbury, hardcover, $23.95, 305 pages, ISBN 1596911883). We'll get to this book in good time. But let's have a look first at her five prior books.

  Jensen's maiden voyage was Egg Dancing (1995), and it possessed all the satirical verve and zing of a Kit Reed or George Saunders production. Bedraggled, hapless Moira Sugden is married to your typical mad gynecologist, Gregory, who is, unbeknownst to Moira, using her as an incubator to test his new treatment that will theoretically create a “perfect baby.” When Moira proves genetically unsuitable, he turns to his lush co-worker Ruby Gonzalez and scientifically knocks her up. Moira, understandably, finds this a bit much. When you factor in having to deal with a sister, Linda, who's besotted with a TV evangelist, and a madhouse-incarcerated Mum who's busy pottering about in an imaginary greenhouse (a mental construct that turns out to have real-world repercussions), then you can just imagine how Moira's world threatens to collapse tragicomically around her ears—until she learns how to take names and kick some ass.

  Jensen experiments bravely throughout with shifting points of view, and regales us with plenty of memorable quips and apercus amidst the shambles of Moira's life. Moira thinks about her rival Ruby: “She was very flirtatious for a fat woman. Or perhaps just very fat for a flirtatious one.” All in all, a bravura debut.

  Would Jensen simply repeat herself for her next outing? Far from it. Although her second book, Ark Baby (1998), arguably also centers around fertility and marriage, it is cast not as a contemporary melodrama but rather as a mixed steampunk/near future satire. One track concerns rogue veterinarian Bobby Sullivan. Sullivan lives in the then-future era of 2005, at a time when all of the UK is suffering from an inexplicable sterility plague. (His humiliating specialty is ministering to pets that act as child surrogates.) Forced to relocate, for various reasons, to a rural peninsula called Thunder Spit, he finds his life intersecting with two strange women, the twins Blanche and Rose Ball. The heroic sexual efforts of this trio will eventually shatter the sterility plague.

  But the contemporary track takes a back seat to the wacky and resplendent Victorian half of the book. Here, we witness the strange birth and career of one Tobias Phelps, offspring of the Gentleman Monkey and a contortionist female. Phelps will eventually find the love of his life in the form of the immense Violet Scrapie, despite Violet's having had the misfortune once to cook up the carcass of Tobias's father. And of course Jensen sews up the two halves of her canvas expertly, melding past with present.

  Jensen exfoliates her parallel plots with a wealth of hilarious details and incidents, much like John Barth or Neal Stephenson. Dealing with the hot-button Darwinian issues of human descent, she manages to extend the mantle of humanity across several species, illuminating the maxim that human is as human does, and that genes do not necessarily make the man. And once again, Jensen's formalistic and linguistic experiments contribute to the enjoyment rather than get in the way.

  With her third book, Jensen confirms her delightful and irrepressible hummingbird habits, as she flits to yet another mode. With The Paper Eater (2000), Jensen creates one of the best dystopias of recent memory, easily comparable to the work of Max Barry and Rupert Thomson. The man of strange habits from the title is a certain Harvey Kidd. The realtime frametale finds Harvey on a floating prison ship, where chewing on scrap paper to produce papier-mâché has become his sanity-preserving habit. (His skin is grey from ingested inks.) As Harvey interacts with his cellmate, we eventually learn his life story.

  A psychologically troubled youth without a family, living on the artificial island “utopia” of Atlantica, Harvey created a virtual set of relatives for himself. He eventually went on to utilize these avatars in a giant series of fraudulent financial transactions. Betrayed by his real-life daughter, Harvey is imprisoned. He finds true love in the arms of Hannah Park, a government employee who exhibits her own psychological crippling. Meanwhile, the Orwellian government of Atlantica, which has been taking in the world's hazardous waste for profit, finds that Harvey's imaginary family provides the perfect hook for a terrorist explanation of why Atlantica is ready to sink in garbage. (I suspect that this whole riff is a clever homage to the 1998 episode of The Simpsons entitled “Trash of the Titans.") But despite the government's best (worst) efforts, the forces of reform win out, leaving Hannah and Harvey to live happily ever after—in their mutually supportive damaged way.

  With echoes of Matt Ruff, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and William Gaddis, Jensen's third book is a small neglected masterpiece.

  Jensen surprises yet again with her fourth book—because at first she seemingly reverts to the near-mainstream domesticity of Egg Dancing. But as we soon learn, she's really taking us to a different territory altogether.

  War Crimes for the Home (2002) is the life story of Gloria Winstanley, an elderly Cockney lady with a life full of “secrets and lies,” to use the relevant title of Mike Leigh's 1996 film. Like Moira's mother in Egg Dancing, Gloria is an old lady confined to a not unpleasant but none-theless stifling nursing home. Her son Hank and daughter-in-law Karen make frequent visits but are unable to disturb Gloria's façade, alternately dreamy and abstracted or irritable and spiteful. Gloria claims she has Alzheimer's, but the reality is vastly more complicated. Gloria's memory, we eventually learn, was tampered with hypnotically during World War II. In parallel tracks (as with Ark Baby), we witness the seminal events of the war that damaged Gloria's psyche, as we also witness the events in the present that just may heal her, albeit with a certain measure of pain.

  Gloria's characterization of her plight as being caught up in a “time muddle” is a clue as to how this surreal, at times stream-of-consciousness book should be read. It's really the female, homefront equivalent of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), whose protagonist was also unstuck in time. This becomes explicit at the end, when Gloria sums up her experiences thus: “I didn't have no war like Izzi's war, or any man's war, I thought. The war I had, it was my little war, a woman's war, a nobody's war. There were millions of us living that war, thousands of girls like me.... “Jensen is out to portray the damages that warfare produces even many miles from the front line. And she does so with her typical humor and ingenious plotting and symbolical constructions. Gloria's story becomes both macroscopically e
mblematic and microscopically unique.

  By now I think you will note that Jensen's protagonists are all a damaged lot, even bastards sometimes. Yet they are utterly empathy-inducing. It's a hard trick to bring off, and the fact that Jensen succeeds over and over again is testament to her talents. The reign of warped souls continues in her fifth book.

  Her fourth book, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2004), ventures firmly into Patrick McGrath or early Ian McEwan territory: New Gothic. The child character, a nine-year-old French boy, who tells his story in a truly eerie, psychotic yet wise-beyond-his-years voice, has survived a cascade of near-fatal childhood accidents. Like a cat with nine lives, he's used up eight, he feels, and is now embarked on his ninth. And what a life it turns out to be. An accident during a family picnic sends Louis into a coma. He is placed at a long-term-care institution run by one Dr. Pascal Dannachet. Attendant upon her son is devoted mother Natalie Drax. Seemingly no more than a bereaved parent, Natalie hides dark secrets about her and Louis. We learn through a series of convoluted revelations that she is really the monster behind the scenes of her unfortunate son's malaise. But before the ultimate disclosure of her own madness and perfidy, she will ensnare Dr. Dannachet as yet another victim. His half of the narration chronicles an amour fou or folie à deux, and how he fights his way courageously back to sanity.

  Did I mention that from his coma Louis is able to witness events and influence people telepathically? Oh, sorry, that's just Jensen's delicious black icing on the cake of madness. This book is the closest you can come in print to a film by Pedro Almodovar.

  Surely you will have noted by now that Jensen is a tragicomic writer, mixing humor and pessimism in equal parts, or perhaps even favoring humor a tad. But The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is unremittingly bleak. As if to counterbalance this, Jensen turns in her latest novel, the aforementioned My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, to more or less pure farce (embellished delightfully with several B&W illos by Peter Bailey). What she delivers here is, improbably, a timeslip romance. But not the debased and simple-minded bodice-ripping kind. Rather, it's a mix of Tom Holt and Kage Baker, Harry Harrison and H. G. Wells, James Blaylock and Lemony Snicket.

  The year 1897 in Copenhagen finds our young heroine-narrator, Charlotte Schleswig, struggling to make a living as a whore. Burdened by the care of a gluttonous and slatternly mother (except Charlotte insists that Fru Schleswig, the slovenly pig, cannot possibly be related to a beautiful princess such as Charlotte), our working girl is always on the alert for a more lucrative scam. She believes she's landed on easy street when she and her mother get a housecleaning job with Fru Krak, a rich and egotistical widow. While the elder Schleswig labors away sweeping up dust bunnies, Charlotte pilfers whatever's not nailed down to pawn.

  Fru Krak's husband, it turns out, mysteriously vanished seven years ago. His disappearance is connected with a locked room in the basement of the Krak manor. Charlotte's curiosity is aroused, and she breaks in one night with her mother. They discover a curious contraption, and before you can say “Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits,” they are accidentally transported to our era's London. There they find Professor Krak hale and hearty, living among a surreptitious refugee community of fellow time-traveling Danes. (If this notion does not inspire immediate laughter, stop reading immediately.)

  Charlotte is transfixed by the modern age, especially when she falls in love with a dashing young Scottish archaeologist named Fergus McCrombie. Soon she induces Professor Krak to sponsor a Christmas visit back to 1897, to introduce Fergus to her native era. (The visit coincides with the Professor's own schemes anyhow.) But once back in “history,” everything goes wrong. Charlotte is separated from both Fergus and the Professor, and only her own ingenuity can restore the lovers.

  Jensen has immense fun with this setup. Her depiction of period Copenhagen is rich and sensorily deep. (Nor is this choice of nationality for Charlotte merely arbitrary. Jensen invokes, both overtly and covertly, the spirit of Hans Christian Anderson and his famous fairytales as a template for Charlotte's life story.) Of course we also get the expected but still humorously contrived reactions of a visitor from the past to modern life, as well as some neat chrono-paradox mindblowers. The characters are all humanly endearing, with every high-minded, principled stand undercut by carnality or vice-ridden selfishness. And yet the whole narrative is full of warm good-heartedness. All of these virtues are couched in Jensen's vibrant prose that goes down easy, but which is also full of nuggets of observation and wit. “The Pastor ... was a paunchy man in his middle to late years, with clattering false teeth that seemed to roam his mouth like a tribe of nomads in search of land on which to pitch camp."

  Discovering the work of Liz Jensen is like stumbling on a time-machine in a basement: you have no idea of where it will take you, but you know it'll be a hell of a ride.

  * * * *

  Everything Old Is New Again

  In 2004 I had the privilege of attending the Utopiales Festival in Nantes, France, the birthplace of Jules Verne. Wandering the historic streets of that city in the company of such folks as Bruce Sterling and Walter Jon Williams, I began to commune with our famous literary ancestor. And when we were taken by the Festival organizers to the library that holds Verne's papers and allowed to gaze in wonder at his original manuscripts, the bond became even deeper.

  You too can achieve something of the same sensations through the medium of a new book: Gonzague Saint Bris's The World of Jules Verne (Helen Marx Books, hardcover, $28.00, 86 pages, ISBN 1-885586-42-1). Issued in 2005 in France to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Verne's death, and now translated by Helen Marx for an English-speaking audience, this book is an impressionistic, hop-scotching journey through Verne's life. Mingling journalism, scholarship, criticism, and fannish encomiums, Saint Bris seeks to convey Verne's character and historic stature and the pleasures that his “extraordinary voyages” deliver. In this effort, he's aided immeasurably by beautiful illustrations (in what I take to be watercolor) by Stéphane Heuet.

  The bite-sized chapters are arrayed along a mostly straight line of Verne's life, from his early boyhood days in Nantes to the heights of his worldwide fame and posthumous career. Saint Bris has a talent for conjuring up the immediacy of a bygone era: clipper ships, the dawn of electricity, and so on. His grasp of the virtues and vices of Verne's fiction is admirable. And he drops neat little anecdotes and tidbits from the present into the mix. Heuet's drawings are charming in the extreme. Not really aligned with Hergé's “clear line” style, they nonetheless embody some of the same bold forthrightness and verve of a Tintin adventure.

  Taken all in all, this affectionate and satisfying tribute volume will surely encourage readers to delve more deeply into Verne's biography.

  Verne was famously disserved for decades by bad translations. Around 1965, a revolution in Verne scholarship opened the floodgates on better, more mature and complete versions of the famous novels, and the freshet of reenvisioned titles continues unabated today.

  You can learn all about this movement to restore Verne's full grandeur by reading the ancillary material connected with The Meteor Hunt (Bison Books, trade paperback, $15.95, 227 pages, ISBN 0-8032-9634-7). The scholarly apparatus and translation of this novel is provided by Frederick Paul Walter and Walter James Miller, who estimate that all of Verne's oeuvre will finally be available in good clean versions no later than the end of the first quarter of our new century. With this novel, they have made an admirable contribution to that effort.

  The Meteor Hunt was a very late work of Verne's. In fact, it remained in manuscript at his death in 1905, and was only published in a hacked-up, remixed version by his son Michel in 1908. (Michel Verne's many sins against his father's work are catalogued precisely by the editors in an appendix.) Hailing from the end of Verne's life, this book breaks no new speculative ground for its period. But in place of revolutionary insights and predictions, we get assured comedy, drama, satire, and scientific rigor. Not a bad package at all
. In fact, the whole effect of this fizzy, lively novel (whose engagingly colloquial translation is the direct result of wise choices by Walter and Miller) is rather as if the classic film It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) had been predicated around a scientific premise rather than simple buried treasure.

  We are in Virginia, in the mythical town of Whaston, watching the doings at two households, both of which are headed by amateur astronomers. Mr. Dean Forsyth and Mr. Stanley Huddleston are friendly rivals whose respective children—Francis Gordon, a nephew of Forsyth's, and Jenny Huddleston, daughter of Stanley—are engaged to be married. (The tale of another pair of more mature lovers, Seth Stanfort and Arcadia Walker, is tellingly intermingled in the narrative as well.) But then the two sky-watchers both discover a new meteor at precisely the same time. Each man lays claim to the rock, and their subsequent bull-headed contention seems to doom the romance.

  But when the meteor is revealed by spectral analysis to be composed of pure gold, the whole world goes as crazy as the citizens of Whaston.

  Verne has lots of fun showing the very contemporary-sounding media, legal, and political circus that results from the astronomical find. He pokes fun at his own famous writings ("the pipedreams of some wool-gathering French novelist"), and in general exhibits great glee in the folly of mankind, before letting love triumph in the end. (The editors tease out the autobiographical components of this tale very well.) He cleverly avoids his first sleek infodump until nearly fifty pages into the story, by which time we are already hooked by the premise and the characters. In short, the craft of a lifetime of writing is brought to play on the simple conceit, and it's milked masterfully for all it's worth.

  Our editors in an endnote at one point compare Verne to Henry James in his concerns, and it's not a stretch. The old savant from Nantes, forever in some respects a wide-eyed naïve boy marveling at the wonders of the globe, had also become, through hard-earned experience, a cosmopolitan citizen of the world.