The Beautiful Acausal

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy takes place in a near future where the red planet has been colonised. It is a multicultural democracy full of cities and commerce. The Mars project is led by John Boone and Frank Chalmers, two powerful personalities as different as darkness and noon. John is the brave handsome space pioneer who is always trying to do the right thing. Frank is a volatile intellectual brimming with repressed passions. Inevitably, they begin as friends but end as rivals. The prologue of Red Mars begins with John making a speech on a planetwide party night. ‘We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings,’ John says. ‘All lies,’ Frank thinks. Using the cover of the festival, he arranges a hit on his old colleague. John is set upon and beaten to death. Doctors labour for his life, but to no avail. Frank hangs around at the hospital, says all the right things, and then walks out into the night thinking: Now we’ll see what I can do with this planet. 

Among other things, Kate Mascarenhas’s novel develops the same theme – that technology can’t fix human nature. She begins with the invention of the time machine. Time travel is a very broad and elastic theme and SF writers learn to set rules. Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife dismissed the idea of changing casuality very early on, instead focusing on the love affair between her two leads. Mascarenhas’s rules are a little more liberal. You can’t time travel before 1967 (which is when the protagonists, four women in a remote Cumbrian lab, first perfect the technology) and you cannot travel beyond a few hundred years in the future. There seems little opportunity to alter the course of events.

Another departure is the social aspect of Mascarenhas’s vision. Time travel, invented in the UK, quickly becomes the preserve of a technocratic elite. The technology is based in the Conclave, a gated community outside the law – like the City of London with space rays. As with all the top professions, entry into this world is extremely difficult. Seasoned time travellers sleep around, play pranks and games, and look down on the ’emus’ – the mass of unenlightened civilians, who plod through life one moment at a time. New people entering the Conclave are subject to nasty hazings: they have to tell children when exactly their parents will die, or fire bullets into a time-travel box that can ricochet to wound the initiate, or some hapless passerby in another time. And like so many English institutions the Conclave is aggressive in its secrecy. Anyone who leaks secrets is dealt with by the Conclave’s internal justice system, and its penalties include execution. An emu reporter, trying to investigate the organisation, receives future photographs of his dead family through the mail.

Mascarenhas builds her world in deft comprehensive steps. You buy it, and then start focusing on the characters. The Psychology of Time Travel is about the impact on human beings of chaos and disorder. When the four pioneers invent time travel, the impact drives one of them crazy. Barbara Hereford takes a short journey through time – a mere hour into the future. But the cost is substantial. When the pioneers appear on TV that evening, Barbara becomes agitated and starts babbling nonsense. She is sectioned that night. Her colleague Margaret (very much the Frank Chalmers of this story) is enraged that Barbara’s mental breakdown has made the time travel project seem eccentric. She takes control of the project and screens future applicants carefully for any sign of mental disorder (a table of psychometric tests is included in the novel’s appendices). But Margaret builds the Conclave along the lines of her own toxic personality, so mental distress still proliferates. Time travellers drink hard, and dream scary dreams. Finally one of the book’s protagonists is brave enough to denounce Margaret to her face:

You think you’re entitled to people’s compliance. You try to enliven your loveless world by inflicting pain on others and sensation-seeking with games like Candybox roulette. The Conclave is dysfunctional because anyone who doesn’t fulfil your narcissistic needs is eliminated, or self-selects out. You’ve made the whole organisation narcissistic. Convinced of its specialness or distinction from everyday people, obsessed with novel and high risk activities, and blunting its members’ empathy from the first day of their employment.

Mascarenhas leaves an open question whether the Conclave can redeem itself. Is its evil simply a failure of empathy and organisation? Or is there something about time travel that disassociates people from the world and time, killing their fellow feelings and undermining their sense of reality? We don’t know. But The Psychology of Time Travel is a bold and marvellous read. It gives you an appreciation for all things mortal and unknowing and brief.

(Mascarenhas has some amazing diorama art from the novel on her own site, and the Zeus website)

Great Unwritten Books

I am always trying to break new ground as a book blogger, but all the titles I write about are commercially available. Today I thought we’d do something a little different, and discuss books that were only ever published in fictional worlds or alternate universes. This is the list I have come up with – I hope you enjoy it – MD

Night Journey, Hugo Driver 

Never published in the real world, Driver’s novel was a cult success within the narrative of Peter Straub’s The Hellfire Club. Driver’s book emerged from the legendary Shorelands writer’s retreat in the late 1930s. It was the kind of novel that obsesses people, and defines lives. There are even ‘Driver houses’ where people live as Night Journey characters for months on end. The action of The Hellfire Club begins when protagonist Nora Chancel investigates the Driver mythos and finds that Driver – not a pleasant fellow by all accounts: fellow author Creeley Monk described him as a ‘nasty sneak’ – may have plagiarised his great work from somebody else. Nora plays a dangerous game because her entire family’s reputation is built on Night Journey‘s success.

Driver’s story itself is a mystical adventure story featuring a child who is rescued from death and taken to a fantasy world by the mysterious ‘Green Knight’. Parts of it are excerpted throughout The Hellfire Club. I’ve read some of Straub’s early stuff and I suspect that Night Journey was the epic book Straub had tried and failed (particularly in Shadowland) to write – the book that takes us to ‘the heart’s glade, where the great secret lay buried’. But The Hellfire Club is an underrated classic, a novel about literary rivalry which is genuinely thrilling, scary and compulsive.

The Runner trilogy/cycle, John Rothstein

I’ve touched on this briefly before, but Rothstein is the most interesting of Stephen King’s many invented novelists. He wrote an Augie March style trilogy about young iconoclast Jimmy Gold and the Runner books follow Gold’s journey from wild child to suburban complacency. Following the trilogy’s success, Rothstein retired to live a recluse’s life in New Hampshire, where he wrote two more Jimmy Gold books – available in a very limited edition of a few dozen Moleskine notebooks buried under a tree somewhere near Massachusetts. King might have created Rothstein as a composite or satire but he can’t help his natural talent and affection seep into the glimpses we get of Rothstein’s prose. The lost Runner manuscripts would tempt any serious reader, though mostly not to the extent of shooting the author dead.

Untitled, Richard Tull

Tull’s early novels fell off the radar as they were too considered too ‘difficult’ for average readers to cope with. Instead of caving in to market pressure, Tull doubled down with this modernist classic. Untitled features ‘an octuple time scheme’ with a ‘rotating crew of sixteen unreliable narrators’ – the prose is so complex that it proves literally unreadable: early readers succumbed to migraine headaches, vasomotor rhinitis, and organic lesions. (James Diedrich, in Understanding Martin Amis, says this is autobiographical – apparently friends of Amis felt sick and headachy after reading his drafts. It seems likely because so much of The Information is autobiographical and lines from it keep coming up in Amis’s personal reflections elsewhere.) Tull comes to believe that Untitled is ‘clearly and entirely hopeless as a novel’ but I feel he was too hard on himself and the book could easily find a home perhaps at an indie press or very highbrow commercial publisher. There could even be an element of masculine competition as critics risk their health to plough through the book. Can you get past page nine?

Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, Adrian Mole

The trunk novel to beat all trunk novels, Lo! explores ‘late twentieth-century man and his dilemma, focusing on a ‘New Man’ living in a provincial city in England’. Originally written without vowels, Lo! was described by a Faber reader as ‘a most amusing parody of the English naïf school of fiction.’ Mole believed it was more than that and while I don’t think Lo! would ever be a GCSE set text as Mole would have liked, chances are that the daring title and deliberate provincialism would find his novel a home at an indie press, probably even a couple of prize shortlists. All together now: ‘Put your foot down! Take me to the nearest urban conurbation!’

History of Leith, Daniel ‘Spud’ Murphy

Coming down from a heroin addiction and looking for a project to keep the jitters away, Murphy wrote a history of Leith at some point around the turn of the century. Covering incorporation into Edinburgh in 1920 right up until the HIV epidemic of the 1980s, Murphy’s book is a fascinating history of this distinctive port town, albeit that it’s handwritten and full of grammatical and syntactical errors. A local publisher described the History as ‘a badly written celebration of yob culture and of people who haven’t achieved anything noteworthy in the local community’ – what critics said about Irvine Welsh’s novels so many, many times. Spud is humiliated by this rejection and burns the manuscript, illustrating a Welsh theme that it’s the winners who write history. All this happens in the novel Porno – in this year’s Trainspotting book, Dead Men’s Trousers, there’s a possibility that Spud might find literary success after all. But will he be around to enjoy it?

America Works, Tom Yates

The Underwood administration is known for its secrecy, but in some ways it was surprisingly open. There have been great American writers who were close to power – Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal – but none of these legends got to live in Pennsylvania Avenue full time, or have an affair with the First Lady. Yates was originally commissioned to write a book about Frank Underwood’s flagship employment programme, but outlived his usefulness when he began to explore Underwood’s biography and motivations. On his death, Claire Underwood told the American Observer that ‘What happened to Mr. Yates is a tragedy. Not only was he a talented writer and a valued member of our staff, but he was also a friend. Sadly, he was a man of vices. Men, women, drink and drug. I only wish I could have gotten him the help he needed in time.’ As the House of Cards series has got so messy, the fate of Yates’s manuscript is unknown.

Sterling’s Gold, Roger Sterling

Every Mad Men fan remembers the episode ‘The Suitcase’ for its emotional punch. But it’s also notable because we get a glimpse of Roger Sterling’s memoirs. Late at night, a drunken and giggling Don Draper listens to tape recordings for the autobiography, including highlights of Miss Blankenship’s ‘flapper years’ and how Bertram Cooper lost his balls to an incompetent surgeon, who performed an ‘unnecessary orchiectomy’ (‘I think he had him killed’).

All About Edelstein

There’s a common British anecdote that goes: ‘We had some American friends here on holiday, and on the third day they drove to Stonehenge!’ The idea behind it is that because the UK is a small island, even driving to the next village seems like an epic poem. But Americans grow up on an enormous continental landmass, so travelling long distances comes naturally. If they come to England, they want to see Stonehenge.

Is there truth in the joke? Writer Jean Hannah Edelstein lived in Paris as a young woman, fell in love, followed the man to London, and begins her memoir when she is moving to New York via Berlin. Edelstein’s story is full of odd switchbacks and doublings. Her mother grew up in Scotland, married an American, moved to the US, took citizenship after twenty years, but returned to Glasgow after her husband died. Edelstein grew up with dual citizenship and only returned to the States when her father developed terminal cancer. Her father had something called ‘Lynch syndrome’, which is hereditary – and soon after his death Edelstein discovered she had it too. This Really Isn’t About You is a book about separation. And how love and family thrive despite separation. Maybe even because of it.

Edelstein sees things with the seasoned traveller’s clear eyes, and writes with crisp brevity about people and places. Moving to New York in her early thirties feels like going to some legendary houseparty that is just beginning to hinge:

Behind the people at the door of the party, behind the people who are getting their coats, are the people who are determined to stay until the bitter end. Some of them are the life of the thing, absolutely. You can tell by the way they’re dressed that they have money. The party has gone well for them so far. They’re sticking around to enjoy what else it has to offer. But some of the people who are still at the party are unravelling around the edges. They’ve overdone the drugs and booze, or they’re feeling pretty bad because at their age it is no longer fun or interesting to be the footloose and fancy-free life of the party.

It’s always interesting to read foreign writers talk about your own country. Edelstein’s London chapters are a delight of observational humour. I never lived in London and the difficulty of living full time in that city still shocks me. ‘By now the water pressure in the flat on Cephas Street was so bad that in the colder months there were many hours a day when we had no water at all… my friends expressed regret but never suggested that we move.’ Edelstein lived on two bowls of oatmeal a day, and worked for a literary agent well known in the business for her overbearing attitude towards staff. ‘Here are some things that my boss shouted at me about in her distinctive voice:’ begins one passage. Edelstein was clearly going through a nightmare at this company, but no one did anything to help: ‘For the most part the extent of the powerful people’s acknowledgement of my existence was to leave Jewish-themed books and magazines on my desk’.

And this was in the mid 2000s: god knows what the housing and job market is like now, and worse for young women, I think, because on top of everything else they have to fend off battalions of gropey middle aged married guys. Edelstein never complains. Again, she’s the seasoned traveller who takes nothing for granted. Her epigraph is from Nora Ephron: ‘Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.’

She only tires of London when watching the royal flotilla in 2012, and has coalesced her disillusionment into one elegiac para:

Inside the living room, there was indeed little enthusiasm. There were sandwiches and Victoria sponge and several of the cheeriest people I knew, but there was also a devastating spectacle, the pride of a nation represented by a joyless and troubling procession of boats listing to and fro in the storm. I was transfixed: the sheets of rain were coating the television cameras just as they had my glasses, making it difficult to see. The boats drifted down the river, manned by soaked skippers. On a special barge, the Royal Family watched with gritted teeth.

It’s when Edelstein returns to her family, and comes to terms with her father’s death and her own diagnosis, that the prose gains a new burnish and intensity. It’s the simplicity of these lines that hits you:

My father was not crying, but I looked at him and he looked at me and at that moment I felt that I knew very clearly that even if your parents are very old and have had rich and well-loved life, if you love them there is never a time in your life when you will feel that you don’t want them any more. It was not something that I had ever considered, but at that moment I looked at my father and he looked at me and I knew that there would never be a time in my life when I would regard my parents and think: Yes, I’m ready.

It’s amazing to think that no matter how well equipped you are and how much you’ve endured, there are some life experiences that you just won’t be prepared for. In Edelstein’s book there’s none of the tweeness and sentimentality that makes many family memoirs unreadable, just a subtle and economic demonstration of family love – that most subtle and undemonstrative kind of love, that you take for granted because it always seems to be in the background, like the brisk hum of air conditioning: until, finally, that too flickers out.