Norstrilia

Cordwainer Smith Norstrilia (1964)
It's taken me a year to get through this one. I started it in April last year, failed, read something else instead, tried again, failed again, read a different book, then came back to this one and returned it to the shelf in defeat, telling myself I would get through it when the time was right.

This time, I cracked it. I even enjoyed some of it, although it remains painfully apparent why I stalled and stalled again back in 2021. Cordwainer Smith spins a wild yarn informed by Chinese folklore, amongst other things, not in terms of characters and situations but in the general rhythm of his fiction, the way in which it feels a little like a parable and makes narrative twists and turns with the cadence of a dream. In practical terms, this means we have something which very much foreshadows Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time in relating only loosely to the rest of science-fiction as a genre, and generally doing its own peculiar thing in the expectation of the reader being able to keep up.

Norstrilia begins on a planet which is essentially a colony of Australia complete with all the stuff about hats with corks dangling from the rim. Rod McBan is a sheep farmer, tending flocks of giant immobile sheep which exude some substance that bestows immortality. One night he's gambling on his computer and wins so much money that he comes into possession of planet Earth, to which he then travels disguised as a cat person - you get the picture.

It's all very entertaining, and it doesn't quite feel like the series of random twists of gratuitous surrealism possibly implied by the above description, but Cordwainer Smith tends to jabber, and all it takes is one paragraph's worth of lapsed concentration and you're fucked, with no idea of what's going on or who the hell these people are supposed to be.

Anyway, I did better this time around - although I've no idea why. I hung on tight and discovered the first half to be massively entertaining as well as impressively weird. The appendix refers to Norstrilia having originally been broken up into two parts and published as separate novels with the addition of supporting material, so my guess would be that the first of the pair was the strongest. I didn't have so much trouble with McBan's travels on Earth as I did with the first half back in April, 2021, but it felt a little surplus to requirements, possibly because by this point the reader has come to expect the arbitrary swerves as a matter of course. Given Smith's background, it seems fairly likely that Rod McBan is intended to be a sort of rough edged Buddha or Christ figure coming in from the wilderness, then walking amongst mankind, anonymous and yet heir to all the riches of heaven; but unfortunately, I found it hard to care, and if anything profound was said, it wasn't said in any language with which I'm familiar. It's not difficult to see why this guy has such a reputation, but for my money he works best in short, sweet bursts.