Gossip still remains the basis of sociality on Eden, even in the present time of the novel. Several of the book’s “newhair” (teenaged or adolescent) narrators complain about it at length:
You can’t do anything in Family without everyone knowing about it, and weighing it up, and picking it over, and making their bloody minds up about what they thought about it … every bloody little thing that happened, in no time everyone in Family was talking talking about it and poring over it and prodding it and poking at it and clucking their tongues over it … In fact, we were so on top of one another, so in each others’ lives and in each others’ heads, we were hardly separate from one another at all … it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe.
This suffocating intimacy is only reinforced when the whole Family gathers, every “Any Virsry” (anniversary), to perform the rituals that bind them together. They retell the gossip-turned-myth of the True Story. The Oldest, victims of dementia, and propped against a wall “like three empty skin bags,” drone on about the early days of the colony. “Mementoes” (i.e. relics, objects that once belonged to Angela and Tommy: “the Boots, the Belt, the Backpack, the Kee Board”) and “Models” (i.e. replicas, chintzy little toy models of spaceships and airplanes and cars and houses) are passed around for inspection. One of the tribes does a “Show,” a dramatic reenactment of the saga of Angela and Tommy. As the ceremony goes on, the older people are relieved and reassured, the children are entertained, but the newhairs are alienated and “bored.” The stasis of tradition, or of gossip-turned-myth, can only do so much.
Dark Eden actually starts at the point of a looming social crisis, although this only becomes apparent gradually. The material cause is environmental stress. The Family lives in one small valley, closed off from the rest of the planet by dark, icy mountains. As their numbers expand, the people find themselves overexploiting and depleting their limited resources. Animals become scarcer and harder to catch; people are forced to adopt food sources they previously disdained. Tradition doesn’t offer any suggestion for dealing with the crisis, aside from working harder and eating less. Family can only fumble about, as it is
full of stupid people, full of hateful, disappointed people, full of sour people, full of ignorant people who never thought anything through for themselves.
The end of abundance means, however, that something has to change. The combination of scarcity with adolescent boredom and restlessness, not to mention male aggression no longer held in check, makes for an explosive mix. The novel is mostly concerned with how the established society of Eden breaks down, and what replaces it. Dark Eden therefore provides the narrative of what in other language might be called the Fall of humanity – albeit this is a secularized and materialistic Fall, driven by ecological limits rather than by original sin.
There is a complex irony to this account. For, as we have already seen, the society of Eden, at the start of the novel, is already a fallen one. It defines itself largely in terms of exile and deprivation, and yearns for a supposed lost plenitude. And yet, this minor, diminished society is still a sort of paradise, from which the people suffer yet another Fall. In the course of the book, we descend from gossip-turned-myth into history, from harmony and stasis into rupture and betrayal, and from peaceful, egalitarian matriarchal communism into patriarchy, private property, and militaristic violence.
The storytelling of Dark Eden is divided among eight first-person narrators. As the unity of Edenic society is shattered, we cannot understand what is going on from a single point of view. The various narrators both embody, and focus, the tensions beneath the surface of Family life. Most of them are newhairs, but they also include the querulous Mitch London, one of the Oldest, and Caroline Brooklyn, the official Family Head, the closest thing to a leader that the old society has. The divergences among these narrators work to convey the way that Eden’s small society splinters in the course of the novel. One index of this general collapse – much more a symptom than a cause – is the end of common assent to the Family’s mythical narrative. People stop believing in the value, here and now, of a communal life; some of them also stop believing in the promise of an ultimate salvific return to Earth. At the end of the novel, the people even discover the crashed vehicle in which the three missing astronauts tried to call for help. It is evident that they died without ever having a chance to do so. This destroys the people’s hope, but it is also a potential source of renewal, or secular rededication: “now we know for sure we can just get on with things and don’t have to wait around for Earth.”
John Redlantern is the most important of the book’s narrators, and the character who is most instrumental in changing Edenic society. John is a restless newhair; he perceives the danger of limited and decreasing resources, and he feels stifled by the Family’s conservative adherence to tradition. First he disrupts Any Virsry with his impertinent questions; then he coolly and deliberately desecrates the Family’s central symbols. As a result, the Family sends him into exile – something that has never happened on Eden before. When John leaves, he is joined by a few other newhairs, who in effect become his acolytes. This sort of hierarchy between a single leader and a mass of followers is something else that has never been seen on Eden before. John’s followers are united, at least, in the hope that his vision will make it possible for them to establish a new social order elsewhere.
The exodus of John and his followers requires – and indeed leads to – an energetic burst of social and technological innovation. There isn’t enough room for them in Circle Valley; aside from the limited resources, they are still too close for comfort to the Family. John wants to cross the dark, snowy mountains – something that tradition opposes, and that nobody has ever thought to do before. But in order to accomplish this, John and his followers must devise new means of transportation, domesticate some of the native fauna, and produce warm clothing for the first time. By the end of the novel, John and his group have succeeded in all of these tasks; on the other side of the mountains they find a new fertile region, one that is far larger, and richer in resources, than Circle Valley.
John Redlantern might well be the unproblematic hero of a more traditional science fiction novel. And indeed, in her review of Dark Eden, N. K. Jemisin accuses Chris Beckett precisely of this:
What really dims Eden’s glow, however, is the 1950s ethos underpinning the whole thing … John himself is that most threadbare of science fiction types: the impossibly handsome, impossibly forward-thinking young man who gets the prettiest girl with no particular effort, and saves the day through sheer bloody-mindedness.
(Jemisin 2014)
I think, however, that this is an ungenerous, and unfairly reductive, view of the novel. For Beckett gives us a far more nuanced and – dare I say? – dialectical view of John Redlantern, and the changes he initiates, than Jemisin implies. Social tensions (or what traditional Marxists call contradictions) may well impel or necessitate change, but this does not mean that the change is automatically progressive or good. It is true that John is genuinely imaginative; he is able to see problems before other people become aware of them, and to envision alternatives that wouldn’t cross anyone else’s mind. However, although John knows that things have to change, he only wants – and he will only accept – change on his own particular terms. He hates when somebody else takes the initiative. As the Family Head Caroline Brooklyn tells us, what John’s disruption “was really about was him being the hero of the story, and no one else.” Or as John’s first supporter and sometime companion Tina Spiketree puts it, John “can’t leave a thing alone, he can’t bear anything that hasn’t got his personal mark on it.”
John has something of a messianic obsession. No matter what happens, he requires his followers “to go on believing in me,” and not listen to anyone else. He is always calculating the angles and looking for a tactical advantage. When his friends first come to join him in exile, for instance, he doesn’t go out to greet them, but hides instead, because “it needed to be them
coming to me, not me going to them. I didn’t want to have to owe them anything, not when I had so many plans.” And later, when the group runs into difficulties that he cannot solve, and his cousin Jeff Redlantern works things out instead, John regards his cousin’s success as “yet another problem that I had to figure out how to fix.”
In order to maintain his authority, John never tells anyone what he really feels and thinks. He always keeps his face “still still like a mask.” He continually monitors and manipulates the image he projects to others. He knows on some level that he needs collaborators, and that he cannot accomplish anything alone. But as Tina notes, he is “scared” of her, or of anyone else whom he might have to treat as an “equal” instead of a follower or a hanger-on. Tina joins John’s group, in preference to staying with Family. But she is continually annoyed that John had “expected us to follow him and trust him, but he hadn’t trusted any of us at all.” Indeed, John doesn’t even seem capable of respecting others or treating them with any degree of reciprocity. Jeff complains to John at one point that he is acting as if “everything in the world is just stuff for you to use for your plans.” And Tina says that John “just didn’t quite get it. He didn’t quite get that other people apart from him had their own thoughts and their own plans and their own things in their heads.”
Moreover, since John’s talent consists in “breaking out of something old and making something new,” he is only satisfied when he is shaking things up. He is “happy happy happy” even or especially when he has “bad bad news … he liked having trouble to deal with.” On the other hand, John is unable to accept situations in which people are actually settled and contented. As Tina puts it, “ordinary waking-by-waking stuff seemed to make him restless and uneasy: the chit-chat, the joking about, the little arguments, the kids, the chores.” When John’s group finally reaches a situation of sufficient abundance so that “you didn’t need to have everyone working working all waking long just to get enough to eat,” all John can do is fret and brood and complain. He scorns his own friends and followers as people who
just try and make things easy and comfortable right now … if I left it to the others, no plans would get made. They’d just eat and sleep and play and slip, until something happened to stop them.
In other words, John is somebody who doesn’t want to live, under any circumstances, in a peaceful, egalitarian, and unfallen condition. He scorns the very idea that things could be “easy and comfortable.” Even if Eden had not already been in a state of crisis, he would have sought to provoke one – although, without the objective existence of economic stress, he probably would not have succeeded. John compulsively needs to break things, if only so that he can be the one to fix them. In showing us this, Dark Eden offers a critique, rather than an endorsement, of the “1950s ethos” of golden-age science fiction about which Jemisin complains.
John’s opposite number, and his biggest enemy, is his somewhat older kinsman David Redlantern. David is by far the nastiest character in the book, and the closest the novel gets to a traditional antagonist. He is not one of the eight narrators, and we only see him through others’ eyes. From the very beginning, David is highly unpleasant, with his “angry spluttery voice,” his aggressive sarcasm, and his inclination toward violence. He always has it in for John, in particular. David is one of those angry men who “want the story to be all about them,” and who “turn into bullies and try and control people.” He is “cruel and cold and hard,” a “sour sarcastic lump of misery,” and nobody likes him – but many people fear him, even at the start of the book, when Eden is entirely peaceful.
Questions of disability have their place here as well. (Chris Beckett, a former social worker, is sensitive to issues of disability and ableism.) Some people in the Family say that David is the way he is because he is a batface: he is embittered because he is ugly, and because he has always been “left on the outside of things.” Ableism is certainly a problem in Edenic society; as the batface Sue Redlantern (John’s aunt and Jeff’s mother) remarks, “we batfaces took a lot of stick and we had to stand up for each other.” Nevertheless, it is worth noting that other batfaces, especially the women, are generally described as “kind and giving,” or “always cheerful cheerful,” or “as sweet-natured as anyone could be.” David’s anger cannot be blamed on his disability; he exhibits a distinctively masculine pathology, though it is initially kept in check by Eden’s matriarchy.
David Redlantern is the very first to take offense at John’s transgressions; and he is louder about his objections than anyone else. But David’s ostensible defense of tradition is just as destructive of the old order as John’s innovations are, if not more so. When John desecrates and destroys the Family’s central symbols, David immediately demands that he be put to death: “Hang him up from a spiketree like we hang a buckskin out to dry … Spike him up to burn, like Hitler did to Jesus.” (The name “Hitler” is known in Eden’s lore as the murderer of “the Juice” – i.e. the Jews – and their leader Jesus; this combination of the Holocaust and the Crucifixion, neither of which is really understood by anyone on Eden, is another example of how the Family’s oral tradition works.)
David, like John, is quick to recruit followers and flunkies – and especially disaffected newhairs – to his cause. Soon he has formed an (all-male) order of Guards, with himself as the Head of Guards. The Guards are “thirty forty young men, [who] grinned and smirked at each other with their big blackglass spears over their shoulders.” They intimidate everyone else, and arrogate special privileges for themselves. Caroline Brooklyn and the older women are stripped of authority; they are simply ignored by David and the Guards, and eased out of the picture. Everyone else is intimidated into obeying the Guards’ instructions. Almost without anyone’s concrete awareness of what is going on, the Family is transformed from a peaceful, egalitarian matriarchy into a violent, militaristic, and hierarchical patriarchy.
The last time we see the formerly peaceful people of Circle Valley, they have become a lynch mob, vowing vengeance against John and his followers, all of them chanting: “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!” Events outpace deliberative awareness. Many of the people, and even some of the Guards, are still a bit “troubled by what was happening.” But as Sue Redlantern tells us, “it made no difference, though.” If members of the Guard “didn’t do what they were told, they were at risk themselves.” In other words, David’s militaristic coup has a self-reinforcing dynamic. People are impelled to join in, because other people have already joined in. If I don’t want to get in trouble by showing my doubts and hesitation, I had better prove my loyalty by persecuting anyone else who dares to express their doubts.
The clash between John’s and David’s factions leads, inexorably, to the (re)invention of rape and murder: practices that are all too familiar to us on Earth, but that were previously unknown on Eden. Even though a truce between the two groups is ostensibly in place, some of David’s followers go out to stir up trouble. They beat and very nearly kill Jeff, and they are on the verge of raping Tina. But John and some of his other male followers come to the rescue; in their turn, they kill the three aggressors. Having committed the first murders on Eden, John and his associates have evidently (as Tina puts it)
changed. They’d changed completely. They were trembling worse than me, they were shaking all over, and their faces were all blotchy and twisted and puffed up, so you couldn’t tell if they were scared or angry or excited or ashamed or what.
There is no going back from a change like this. And although John and his friends did in fact act in self-defense, this is not really an alibi. Murder and rape are no longer unthinkable; they are now real possibilities in Eden. And John and his people are just as capable of these deeds as David and his people are. Once again, there is an obvious Biblical parallel: the story of Cain and Abel. But in Dark Eden’s secularized version of the Fall, the first murder is not a consequence of eating the apple and being expelled from the Garden; rather, it is the prec
ipitating and irreversible moment of the Fall itself.
Dark Eden, however – in this matter quite unlike the Bible – insists that the state of a given society’s gender relations, in addition to being of concern in itself, is also an index, and a harbinger, of social relations more generally. Tina Spiketree, despite being one of John’s first supporters, is presciently aware of what his innovations will do to gender relations. “The time of men was coming,” she reflects; “in this new, broken-up world it would be the men that would get ahead.” Women will not only be subordinated under David’s rule, but under John’s as well. Having sex will no longer be entirely consensual on both sides; “a time was coming,” Tina reflects, when a man would be able to “do to me whatever he pleased and whenever he felt like it, with whichever bit of my body he chose.”
Tina’s grim premonitions are correct; and they apply to John’s group, as much as they do to David’s. When John sets up his new society, he becomes obsessed with enforcing monogamy, so that a man “knows which kids he was the dad of.” John also pays no attention to child-rearing, which he regards as women’s work – except when he is assured that the child in question is biologically his own. John and Tina are sort of a couple, and he doesn’t want her to have sex with anybody else. Tina is strong and independent enough to reject John’s demands; but it is unlikely that her children and her grandchildren will have a similar freedom. John also tries to hide from Tina the fact that he himself is doing precisely what he wants to stop her from doing: having sex on the side with other people. The double standard, and the sexual division of labor, go together with John’s overall drive to put his stamp on everything, and to reform Edenic society in his own image.
Extreme Fabulations Page 13