Gwyneth Jones - Writing of the Alien as Human All Too Human
One of the themes of my reviews is the 'first novel' especially in genre fiction. Sometimes these show remarkable ability. Sometimes they demonstrate immaturity. Sometimes the immaturity lasts for several early novels (as in the case of Grahame Greene) before the genius breaks through with practice and experience. Gwyneth Jones is an interesting science fiction/fantasy cross-over writer (where what appears to be fantastic is grounded in future science). We can compare here an early with a mature work separated by a near quarter of century.
In fact, Divine Endurance was something of a disappointment even allowing for it being a first attempt largely
because it was self-indulgent experimentalism in high science fantasy by
someone who was clearly intellectually way ahead of the bulk of genre
writers but who missed the point about narrative - out there is a reader
who must comprehend. In her later work (see below), Jones manages to
remember this fact and not lose her remarkable ability to conjure up
entirely alien ways of being and thinking but the fact that you needed a
well argued and well written lengthy postscript to understand what you
had just read is a failure.
Having said that, Jones in 1984 was
still clearly a major talent and I suspect is still underrated outside the
genre 'industry'. All the components of the Aleutian Trilogy are here
waiting to be formed into something effective and reasonably
comprehensible at first reading. The more negative assessment is a
shame because the book needed only a little tweaking to ensure that the
reader understood better who was who and the rules and evolution of the
cultures in which they operated. It did not need spelling out - just
harder work on the part of the author to fill the gaps.
What we have instead is a lengthy and very
occasionally boring and overwrought story the meaning of which is
occulted by style. The evocation of a future South East Asia which has
drifted 'back' into 'new traditionalisms' is brilliant as is the
characterisation of the players. The advanced 'toys' do not, in
this case, have to be explained - Cho, her brother and the sentient cat
Divine Endurance. They are perhaps the most comprehensible actors in the
tale. It is the relationship between them and humanity that lacks
comprehensibility. In other respects, Jones' allusive and elusive style could be
seen as magical, the essence of high fantasy. The science fiction
aspects are carefully positioned as framework for a story that is as
much political and ethnographical as fantasy. The writing taken in small
gobbets is superb,
Yet, because we need a Postscript to
explain what is going on, that is not good enough. We have a sense of what might have
happened by the end but the subtleties are lost to all but the author. We admire the writing but soon cease to care as the work becomes
something we have to work through. Of course, a truly great work
would simply be re-read with the postscript to hand but I tried that for
a while and gave up because the text was inherently 'jumpy', leaping
from moment to moment without adequate explanatory hints or connections.
That Postscript though is worth searching out. It gave me more
pleasure than the book itself because it was coherent, subtle and
intelligent and introduced some sophisticated and thoughtful (and
compassionate) 'feminist' ideas on genre literature which are as relevant today as they were
in the 1980s.
Spirit: or, The Princess of Bois-Dormant, written 24 years later, is an enjoyable and highly imaginative science
fiction romp with many good qualities but, in style, it is structured as
if it were three novella strung together. The first two fifths
is about life on an imperial earth of the future, one with strong
Chinese characteristics but partly re-feudalised and with some highly
ambiguous class relations. This is by far the best part of the book and
it is a fine achievement that stands up with the very best of modern science
fiction. This first section closes and ends with brutal firefights that
raise many more questions than they answer and therein lies the rub: you
want to know much more about the complex society that Jones is
describing. The turn into the third fifth, with its brilliantly drafted
account of imprisonment and horror, draws us towards the relative
disappointment of the last two fifths, a more conventional tale of
revenge and reconciliation.
Because we are not into spoilers, we
cannot tell you precisely why we think what might have been great
becomes merely very good, except to say that the creation of realistic
alternative worlds is clearly Jones' pre-eminent skill but that we do
not gain much if the trick is repeated too often. Our Eurasian Earth (or
Blue as it is known to the universe) and the successor worlds in the
tale, Sigurt's World (wherein come the vampiric tropes) and the prison
planet Fenmu, are brilliantly drawn - masterpieces each in their own
right - but then the invention just gets too much: too many 'worlds' and
too many themes following on far too closely. This is, however, a fault of 'modern' science fiction in general - the tendency to want to pile on ideas and leave them hanging suggestively rather than cherry-picking the best or most relevant and working them up into some sort of thoughful coherence. In this case, the flaws may even be down to the fact that the novella is often the natural medium for science fiction but 'stringing' such novella together does not make a novel.
Even in the first half or so of the book, its qualities are sometimes overwhelmed by the sheer scale
of the derivative literary reworkings - it has space opera, cyberpunk,
'future China', vampiric, adventure and even Kiplingesque references. These are the standard faults of imaginative fiction in the post-modern era, a
determination to over-impress conceptually (to the point of requiring
footnotes that are not there) as well as a need on the part of the reader to have an
impressive memory for a wealth of characters with strange names and
attributes. As other reviewers have said, she has a rare talent in
making aliens, like us but not entirely so, seem as if
they could credibly exist. It is possibly her particular genius and was already present in Divine Endurance. She is to near-human alien psychology what Haldeman or Vinge are to
time-shifts and time travel. But this ability stlll requires the discipline of coherent narrative. This lack of discipline was equally in present in that earlier book.
As a result, conceptually the book is almost too
advanced - one might say it is dizzying in its propositions. The
reader is made to feel as if he or she has either to be very clever in
understanding what Jones is proposing at each stage or might just be
being bamboozled by a Wizardess of Oz. The latter feeling arises not
just because the 'hard science' is often unclear enough to be tantamount
to magic (not wise within the science fiction genre) but because she
pulls the same trick occasionally in her dealings with her characters.
If there is an obscurity in an event between characters that is not
resolved, there is less chance that the reader will feel that Jones
knows what she is doing with the science.
Obscurity, new science
and neologisms are often used to create a distancing effect in science
fiction - usually at the beginning of a novel. The reader can then
settle in and pull out any universal message from within the imagined
world of the author. Jones works in reverse - the obscurities and
incoherence are greater towards the end than the beginning. Any
universal message then starts to drift in what, by the end, is in danger
of becoming just another political thriller/space opera hybrid despite
the massive promise of the first half of the book. What I wanted (and
what you may want) was to see less trickery in space and more depth in
the understanding of a Blue (Earth) that has transformed into something
both familiar and deeply unfamiliar although, to be fair, much of this might be found in earlier Aleutian series novels.
For example, at times, we
think that we may get some insights into gender issues with references
to gender wars in the past, the ability to choose gender and its link to
status and power and the role of sex in business and power from lowly
bot-whore through psycho-engineered humans to concubines with status in
society. This opportunity is lost and the tale moves over its course
from a modern essay on power to something that might pass for a novel of
manners in the eighteenth century as if that century had had access to
cyberpunk. It is no accident that the seminal works of the prison
phase's readings are Austen's 'Persuasion' and Clausewitz' 'On War'!
Sadly, the two separate missions of the writer are not well enough
integrated. As my old boss once said, 'if you try to sell two
things, you will sell neither'.
There is, however, one
overwhelming reason to read this book for all its relatively minor
frustrations. It is drawn from a woman's point of view from start to
finish, and a strong woman at that. This is why it has a certain integrity in the light of Jones' Postscript to Divine Endurance. Although it falters towards convention
at the end, the women in this story are not simpering. They are true
to female psychology in their own behaviour and in their perceptions of
the males. There is an undercurrent of sex-positive feminism in this
novel and room for the complexity of female responses to revenge and
reconciliation that might otherwise have been treated uni-dimensionally
by all but the most talented of male authors.
This is interesting
in another context. She writes within the British tradition which can
cope with, indeed thrives on, the dystopian. This is not a dystopian
book in itself but its 'realism' about what most would see as an
unrealistic future world seems to see no fundamental change in the
greedy, vicious, jealous, self-serving and vain aspects of human nature
over the coming centuries - nor that alien species are going to be so
very different. This is also not a world in which democracy and human
rights have entirely triumphed. On the margins, there is appalling
cruelty and injustice - just as there are on the margins of our world.
And, as in our world, the comfortable turn a blind eye.
There is
also love, goodness, honour and altruism of sorts but there are still
the marginalised and the brutalised at the bottom of society and war,
gangsterdom, great wealth and power disparities and death (even if the
latter can be conquered in some special conditions). And a requirement
for some kind of social services alongside a seemingly basically honest
police force and civil administration. In fact, the world she describes
is not that far different from the Britain of her time - gallant
attempts to maintain order and some semblance of welfare while the
marginalised sink deeper into the mire, abuses fester out of sight and
the rich and powerful cavort and compete.
There are even
Reformers and Traditionalists, two parties that seem to mimic the rule
that all modern complex societies tend to fall into equally matched
competing camps, with tribal as well as ideological differences, who can
come to a working 'modus vivendi' on how to conduct matters within a
reasonably stable society. For all the strange names, alien faces, new
technologies and differences in perceptions of space and time, humanity
is still, basically, the same old same old. Maybe that's the
message, that humanity is just, well, human even when it is alien and
that all the spacefaring and technological innovation in the universe
will still only end up in just the same struggles for power and the same
competition and confusions over love.
She is one of the
most intelligent authors writing in the genre. This is not a matter of
piling on knowing references - though she obviously can do this - but on seeing
the relevance and connections between those references. This is why I
referred above to the desirability of foot-notes: each page seems to
contain a reference back to a scientific, literary, historical or
sociological meme, theory, thought or work. This adds to the enjoyment
but only when the story line is similarly integrated. And that's the
point - she can tell a story well (at the novella level), writes brilliantly, can create vivid
characterisation and description, and can integrate her wide reading
into imaginative recreations that are stunning but there is a lack of
authorial discipline in reining in her talent so that less is more and we have a coherent self-standing novel within her trilogy.
This
sounds like a downbeat review but the downbeat reviews come when a
writer is clearly incredibly talented but just can't break through to
greatness. I so badly wanted her to break through into greatness. This
book was on the very edge of greatness. Much of what makes this
novel so good cannot be spoken of without spoiling the tale. It is
highly recommended if you like imaginative fiction and certainly if you
want to hear what a feisty late twentieth century female writer within speculative fiction had to
say.