Half A World

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora is a space odyssey with a difference. Generations of people live in a craft the size of a city. As the founding pioneers die out and the ship moves through deep space without finding anything of interest, the younger spacefarers become disillusioned with this whole exercise and turn the craft around for home. On return to terra firma, the cosmonauts find themselves denounced by the scientific establishment – to them they are quitters and cowards. But the idealism and wisdom is with the ones who quit. Why build spaceships instead of cleaning up the environmental mess of our home planet? If we find another habitable planet wouldn’t we just ruin that one like we ruined Earth? Robinson quotes the poet Constantin P Cavafy:

New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.

The city will follow you. You will roam the same

streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;

in these same houses you will grow gray.

Always you will arrive in this city. To another land – do not hope –

there is no ship for you, there is no road.

As you have ruined your life here

in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.

Or as Freya puts it in the novel: Wherever you go, there you are.

Iris Cohen is exhausted and sad and bored. She works in a digital marketing job she doesn’t understand, drinks too much, falls in and out of meaningless relationships and struggles with a traumatic past. Salvation appears in a reality TV show set on the planet Nyx, recently discovered through a wormhole in the Pacific Ocean. Nyx offers a new life – a chance, its founder says ‘to leave all that behind: the emails, the messages, the notifications, the constant communication with people you hardly know. Instead, you’re going to enjoy a closer connection with the people and the world around you.’ Millions apply for Life on Nyx: Iris works her way through AI conducted interviews to the final few thousand, who live in a self sustaining biome on the new planet, farming, exercise, talking and procreating. Someone asks what Iris did for a living back on earth.

‘I was a digital innovation architect.’ She covered her face, laughing with delight at how far away she was from her old life.

‘What does that even mean?’ said Hans.

‘Honestly, I don’t know.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ said Elizabeth. ‘None of it did.’

There’s one catch – the door is one way and there’s no coming back. Iris makes her decision subconsciously and by increments. There’s a wonderful scene where Iris wanders through London at night:

Iris carried on walking down a residential road, where a fox casually crossed her path, then past Hackney Downs. She crossed through Dalston, where the shops were shut, though some still shone their neon lights. The sound of cars kept her company. Usually, whenever she walked alone, she would listen to music or a podcast, but now she just listened to the world. Each bird sang in its own particular pattern. It was amazing that they chose to live there, in the city, and not in a nice green field. They were used to it, like Iris.

She is saying goodbye to the city. Everyone knows it. Everyone in Iris’s life tells her not to leave. Even the Nyx panels give her every chance to pull out. They even track down the love of Iris’s youth – but Iris again is disillusioned with the present self of the woman she fell for. ‘On another planet, in another universe, we’re still kids and it’s summer, and it always will be. That was the planet she wanted to go to.’

It’s hard to write about Everything You Ever Wanted without spoilers, but to convey a sense of this remarkable novel I must at least hint at them. Nyx in itself doesn’t seem lethal. Outside the biomes there are birds, insects, even a great lake. One lesson of the novel is that no one can guarantee that you will always be looked after. Seven years in, the colony starts running out of food and resources. Despite this scarcity, the Nyxians do not turn on each other. Relations remain friendly and supportive. One aspect of the utopia holds.

Still, the last hundred pages are not an easy read. There is an enduring and spooky sadness almost unbearable in its intensity, that leaves the reader waiting on a deus es machina that – spoiler alert – never comes. Everyone on Nyx ends up missing aspects of their home planet – Iris has several chapters devoted to lists of commonplace delights, to cheeseburgers, painkillers, bacon and eggs, chocolate, pigeons, foxes, makeup, the tubes, even work and ‘the moment on Friday evening when she would turn off her computer and already feel the glow of alcohol in her chest.’

I could mention – with my political head on – that the worst ideological movements then and now are the ones that think of humanity or nations as having some authentic self that civilisation just gets in the way of. Rivers Solomon‘s novel An Unkindness of Ghosts takes this on with her story of a spaceship run by white supremacists heading for some mythical Aryan paradise. The Nyxians don’t go anywhere near that far and the lessons are not for Iris alone.

What Iris discovers is that the clutter of modern life isn’t some white noise that gets in the way of the true essence of humanity – the clutter is the humanity. Luiza Sauma has written a profound and beautiful novel about our irrational desire for a meaningful existence. Wherever you go, there you are.

And yet there’s no sense that Sauma is lecturing us. Humans are risk takers and it’s our nature to go on mad quests, whatever the cost. To quote Kim Stanley Robinson again: ‘a consciousness that cannot discern a meaning in existence is in trouble, very deep trouble, for at that point there is no organizing principle, no end to the halting problems, no reason to live, no love to be found. No: meaning is the hard problem.’ It certainly is and Sauma makes an attempt at solving it as brave and stylish as anything you’re likely to read in fiction.

Captive States

(Spoilers for everything)

On a corrections bus travelling to begin her double-life sentence, Rachel Kushner’s protagonist Romy Hall reflects on her fate. ‘I was assigned a public defender. We were all hopeful things would go differently. They did not go differently. They went this way.’ Kushner’s novel The Mars Room follows Hall into a Central Valley woman’s correctional where guards and bureaucrats constantly reinforce the fact things went this way: ‘your situation is due one hundred per cent to choices you made and actions you took.’ Later, she considers this: ‘The lie of regret and of life gone off the rails. What rails. The life is the rails. It is its own rails and it goes where it goes.’

The Mars Room is about bleak situations, but it’s not a bleak novel. It’s not a grind.

I watched the final of Orange is the New Black this week. ONTB shares with Kushner’s novel the trick of compelling but not miserabilist drama in reduced circumstances. It’s from Jenji Kohan who created Weeds, a comic drama about a suburban widow who sells dope to support her family – a lighter Breaking Bad, may it do ya. Weeds started off really well but later became too silly and surreal even for me.

ONTB has plenty of Kohan’s trademark quirkiness. There are big musical cues, weird sexual hijinks and absurd set pieces. It was also pretty baggy, with very long episodes that didn’t go anywhere. If you’re on series one or two, stick with it though, because there is plotting, you just don’t see it until much later. Myles McNutt at the AV club complains about the wonky timeline but for me Kohan does a masterful job of conveying six years of gradual change in what’s supposed to be an eighteen-month period.

ONTB is about the minimum security Litchfield federal prison that’s run reasonably well but not perfectly. The authorities sell out to a corporation, which brings in a new head guard: the foul Desi Piscatella. He has been kicked out of the male system for burning an inmate to death and brings his ironfist ethos to Litchfield – notwithstanding that the prisoners there are mostly harmless kooks and drug dealers. Piscatella’s bullying leads to the death of the well liked inmate Poussey Washington, which in turn provokes a riot, after which the prisoners are relocated to the maximum security facility down the road. The old Litchfield is turned into an ICE detention centre.

‘This isn’t Oz,’ a guard tells Piper Chapman on her first day in. And it’s not. There are few murders or violent episodes. Up until end series four, you’re basically watching a gentle comedy set behind bars. (An interesting comparison with Tom Fontana’s show is how they establish what each character’s in for: while the crime flashbacks in Oz last seconds – men who blow their lives away in one impulsive moment – ONTB spreads a single inmate’s memories over whole episodes, illustrating that fate can be one decisive act or more usually a series of slips and bad decisions.)

It is once the inmates transfer to max, that things get serious. Facing far longer sentences for their participation in the riot, the prisoners cave. Nicky sells out her mentor. Daya turns drug baron. Even tough old Frieda Berlin crumbles. There’s a grim scene where senior prison officers and politicians plan their riot response, focused on a whiteboard with boxes labelled ‘LIFE’, ‘LIFE’, ’10 YEARS’ – they already know the punishments, they just need to find individuals to fit them. It is up to inmates to deal themselves out.

The barter of intel and sentence time is the contradiction in Western justice. Commit a crime and you will be punished – unless you have something to sell. UCL professor Alexandra Natapoff‘s exceptional book Snitching details the absurdity of a deal system that lets serious criminals loose to kill, sell drugs and god knows what else, because they have been basically been put on state payroll. She quotes one court: ‘[n]ever has it been more true that it is now that a criminal charged with a serious crime understands that a fast and easy way out of trouble with the law is… to cut a deal at someone else’s expense.’ Note the cheers from the public gallery when Tasha (‘Taystee’) Jefferson pleads not guilty to killing Piscatella, rather than admitting to a crime she didn’t do which would draw a lighter sentence.

There is a dark, hilarious scene in series four where warden Caputo’s girlfriend, corporate exec Linda, takes him to a prison convention called ‘Correcticon’. As Kathryn Van Arendonk wrote in her recap at the time:

It’s hard to resist the urge to just list every little detail of CorrectiCon. It’s shiveringly well-tuned, hitting notes that rest on the delicate edge between humor and outrage. On one side of the aisle, a booth sells menstrual cups for women’s prisons. It’s a product that might be seriously useful for Litchfield, which has such a dramatic tampon shortage that one inmate tries to use a disposable plastic cup meant for dispensing medicine. On the other side of the exhibit hall, a vendor dressed as an inmate distributes ‘prison slop — fully prepared,’ and Caputo is appalled. ‘Ugh, I have enough of that in my life,’ he tells Linda. ‘It’s just for fun, silly!’ she replies. ‘I think it’s ice cream.’

In one scene the nature of the prison industrial complex is exposed. Prisons are big business and also big job creation – jobs for wardens, guards and clerks, and a big economic lift for the communities where the prison industry chooses to build. The boom in migration detention centres and the atrocities along the Amexican border are just an extension of this Keynesian pump-priming. If we do a deal with Trump’s America, the fate of the NHS may be the least of our worries. Communitarianism defines itself by who is excluded or detained, and there is jobs and money in exclusion and detention.

OTNB critiques tend to focus on privilege and intersectionality. That’s part of it of course: in the last episode of season four we learn that the guard who kills Poussey was as a young man let off for the same possession charge that got Poussey six years – and that, during a night out in New York, Poussey encountered her killer in passing. (There is also another subtle, telling scene when Suzanne Warren, deprived of medication, has a psychotic freakout in a guard’s office with a ‘NO STIGMA’ mental health poster on the wall.)

Piper Chapman, by contrast, benefits from white privilege and class privilege. Like Tobias Beecher in Oz, she represents the viewer and her character is a hook for the show to introduce less privileged characters and tell their stories. But while Beecher learned both compassion and self reliance in Oz, Piper takes her sense of entitlement into the prison and leaves with it intact. She is released at the end of series six, while Taystee faces life without in total innocence. But the social justice warrior critique only goes so far. Piper is human, we recognise her mistakes and feel for her when she is released only to be shunned by her family and friends: the virtue-signalling liberals of her peer group see her as a novelty at best and inconvenience at worst.

What the show does more than this is bring home the arbitrary and transitory nature of prison experience. Much loved characters are transferred, ghosted out or disappear for no clear reason. It is the blur of boundaries between free and not, citizen and not, American and not. Blanca and Maritza have every right to citizenship but are ‘unAmericanised’ by the border state. There is a very moving scene in the final series where deportees on a plane literally fade away, one by one – as Pennsatucky does outside the prison gates. The communitarian ideology depends on disappearing people, and that’s put in contrast with the genuine connections made by people on the inmates – broken people who connect, and in connecting manage to make each other a little less broken. That’s something real, and it’s freedom, of a kind.