Halfway Human

Carolyn Ives Gilman Halfway Human (1989)
I read Gilman's Arkfall last month and was reminded that it was amazing, and that somewhere or other I'd made a mental note to read more. It's taken me a while, but has been mostly worth it. Arkfall gave me the impression of an author who is particularly adept at writing weird, unfamiliar environments - much as was Brian Aldiss - yet with the focus on human interaction and plausible characters lending her work a quite different, and frankly refreshing, tone to that of many of her contemporaries.

Halfway Human, apparently occupying the same continuity as Arkfall, explores a post-human society through the travails of one of its dissidents, specifically a subterranean post-human society divided into male, female, and a third, ungendered slave caste. Given the premise, it's probably no great surprise that this might be considered feminist science-fiction, but Gilman writes without any of the slightly wearying didactic quality of, of the top of my head, Smilin' Margaret Attwood, expanding her argument to encompass social power structures in the broadest possible sense, and all aspects of the small print without even a trace of generalisation. Most impressive of all is that the argument unfolds and reflects upon itself at an absolutely natural pace without any sense of either slogans or shoehorns.

Our main character is Tedla, a representative of the aforementioned ungendered slave caste, or a bland as they are termed, and through it - being neither he nor she - Gilman examines pretty much everything which has been shitty about our own society since records began, from the small scale of rape, coercion, and even just taking others for granted, to class, capitalism, and the evils of hierarchy. Described as such it probably doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun, and fun isn't exactly the word in any case, but it is compelling, and, rather oddly, is compelling in the same way that Jane Eyre is compelling with similar emphasis on the personal perspective, and even a narrative rhythm not unlike that of Jane coming to realise that Rochester is kind of an arsehole in certain respects.

Older readers may recall my stating that the wait has been mostly worth it, back during the heady days of the first paragraph when we were all much younger than we are now; and I say mostly because, for all that it's an unusually powerful and well-written novel, Halfway Human feels just a little too long, long enough to communicate what are fairly complex arguments - as it should be - but unfortunately so long as to tread water at a couple of points, particularly the courtroom dramas which feel a little as though we're having the plot and its subtext explained to us all over again; but as a criticism, this is a minor one which I mention only because I felt it got in the way of everything the book otherwise does so well. I probably still prefer Arkfall for its brevity, and for doing something so unusual at such a modest word count, but it's a close run race, and it's been a while since I read something with such emphasis on message which spoke so clearly or so well.

Women

Charles Bukowski Women (1978)
I was told this one wasn't so great, but I can't remember the specific thrust of the objection. As with Factotum, Post Office and the rest, it's fictionalised autobiography with the author recast as Henry Chinaski presumably so as to allow for a little wiggle room where an artistic truth makes more sense than a literal one. Being rooted in autobiography, references to Bukowski's career as a writer - by this point fairly successful in so much as that strangers are now paying him to fly across the country to give readings - seemed initially awkward, at odds with the tone of the novel and its focus on smelly realism; but I stopped noticing once the narrative settled into a steady rhythm of arbitrary fornication. There might also, I suppose, be some objection on the grounds of it being difficult to mistake Charles Bukowski for Margaret Attwood, but I'm not convinced accusations of misogyny really hold, excepting readers who just really need to find something over which to get pissy.

If I had been born a woman I would certainly have been a prostitute. Since I had been born a man, I craved women constantly, the lower the better. And yet women—good women—frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price. Either way I was lost. A strong man would give up both. I wasn't strong. So I continued to struggle with women, the idea of women.

Women might therefore be regarded as Bukowski struggling with the idea of women but failing to achieve any solid or consistent understanding. He drinks, he writes, he visits the race track, and he falls slowly apart as a seemingly endless succession of women beat a path to his bedroom door, one after another, each grubby union doomed before his pants have even hit the floor. His success, if we're going to call it success for the sake of argument, is bewildering, but its occurrence is massively enlightening, not through explaining anything but because of the range of questions it raises; and through all of this, despite Chinaski's raging libido and one track mind, he never quite reduces any of his girlfriends to just another series of holes. He remains transparent and committed to the truth, not least to the truth of his own bullshit.

I poured another wine. I couldn't understand what had happened to my life. I had lost my sophistication. I had lost my worldliness. I had lost my hard protective shell. I had lost my sense of humour in the face of other people's problems. I wanted them all back. I wanted things to go easily for me. But somehow I knew they wouldn't come back, at least not right away. I was destined to continue feeling guilty and unprotected.

I tried telling myself that feeling guilty was just a sickness of some sort. That it was men without guilt who made progress in life. Men who were able to lie, to cheat, men who knew all the shortcuts.

Women as a feminist text is probably a bit of a stretch, but it scores higher than you might think, at least as an unflinching inspection of one dude's attitude to women; and of course, he writes like a dream so it doesn't really matter whether we approve of his serial knobbing. No-one but an absolute fucking twat is going be cheering him on, or reading Women as an instruction manual.

The Chrysalids

John Wyndham The Chrysalids (1955)
Without it really having resulted from anything resembling a plan, it seems I've been reading my way through the oeuvre of John Wyndham during the course of the last decade, and so - barring a few oddities and outliers such as Plan for Chaos, of which I've never seen a copy - it seems I've saved the best for last. This one's a cracker.

The Chrysalids occurs in a puritanical post-apocalyptic society reduced to a mediaeval way of life. We've survived nuclear holocaust but mutation is rife, and mutants are to be driven out with evangelical zeal; so the novel tells the story of a couple of those mutants with an emphasis which one might regard as owing a debt to van Vogt's Slan, and which certainly foreshadows Chris Claremont's X-Men comics. In fact, The Chrysalids seems to foreshadow one fuck of a lot, more or less everything Terry Nation ever wrote, quite a few subsequent takes on life after the bomb, The Handmaid's Tale and so on. The years 1949 through to the publication of this novel saw a significant upsurge in nuclear weapons research and testing across the globe, and it seems very clear that the potentially terrible consequences occupied Wyndham's thoughts.

As ever, his great strength as a writer is in the global picture as seen through the eyes of a minor player, at a more personal, almost provincial level, and so The Chrysalids doubles up as a classic children's novel about a boy saving his younger sister from a bullying father. Even better is that Wyndham held back from any of the stuff which spoiled at least a few of his books, the creaking humour and the tone which unfortunately inspired Brian Aldiss to coin the term, cosy catastrophe. This one is more than just a yarn.

'Purity,' I said. 'The will of the Lord. Honor thy father. Am I supposed to forgive him? Or to try to kill him?'

The answer startled me. I was not aware that I had sent out the thought at large.

'Let him be,' came the severe, clear pattern from the Zealand woman. 'Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled, they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature.'

See? That one still works today. In fact I'd say it's quite pertinent right now given the upsurge of those who want to ship the rest of us off to labour camps or worse.

I've read a ton of science-fiction over the last decade or so, and I think I'm approaching the point at which I will have read just about everything I'm ever going to feel inclined to read of the genre; so my future may hold significantly fewer crappy seventies paperbacks with airbrushed spacecraft on the covers, and if this turns out to be the case, I'm fucking glad this one made it onto my shelves before the shutters went down, because it's one of the very best.

The Dispossessed

Ursula LeGuin The Dispossessed (1974)
I had high hopes for this, knowing a fair few for whom it's an all-time favourite; and although I can see why, it wasn't really doing it for me. It's a decent, thoughtful read, making its point by comparison of a society divided in two, one living on the large, approximately habitable moon of the other's world. Annares is a functioning anarcho-syndicalist society living without religion, hierarchy, or any centralised power, whereas Urras is a capitalist society more closely resembling our own. While it may be tempting to read this as allegorical to the relationship of the United States and Soviet Union as was, the parallels work only in a very general sense because The Dispossessed strives to make much broader observations about human institutions; and it works because, although it ultimately comes down on the side of the individual liberty afforded by the anarcho-syndicalist society, there is no stacked deck in play, and we get to see both the relative merits and pitfalls of each system.

I read a second hand copy of this book, one which had evidently been used by a student taking notes towards a thesis of some description, so every page has a sentence or two underlined, usually with some footnote, women considered to be property and so on. This background noise was actually a bit annoying, and felt a little like having Margaret Attwood digging me in the ribs and scowling whilst coaxing me towards a certain conclusion; but happily, once I'd learned to ignore the embellishments, the narrative is revealed as mostly questions with very little that is didactic.

For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere.

Of course, I'm sure there will still be idiots who read this as a communist diatribe or whatever, or who at least come to that conclusion, presumably having had the book read to them; but there will always be idiots so there's probably not much joy to be had in getting upset over the fact.

Personally I found LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness more convincing and probably a better book, but The Dispossessed is nevertheless great.

The Best SF Stories from New Worlds 6

Michael Moorcock (editor)
The Best SF Stories from New Worlds 6 (1970)
In his introduction, Moorcock states that he prefers to simply call this fiction, while the back cover qualifies the SF as referring to either science or speculative fiction. I've never liked speculative fiction because as a term it makes me think of Margaret Attwood and Jeanette Winterson sneering about how space travel is such a boy thing, but I like science fiction as something incorporating all the weird shit which doesn't quite fit anywhere else - which is what we have here.

New Worlds was never scared of printing weird shit, and I'd say some of the best stuff from the magazine was also the weirdest, at least if we're to take a sciencey man smoking his pipe as he heads for Mars in a rocket with his robot best friend to be baseline normal. Surprisingly, whilst there's some reasonably strange stuff here, the collection feels sober by the standards of the well from which it is drawn, and is subsequently not so great as it might have been - as though someone might even be reigning it in a little, although I suspect this impression to be only a pattern emergent from possibly unfair comparisons with the magazine.

In Reason's Ear by Hilary Bailey - who sadly passed just months ago - stood out for me, as did Moorcock's The Delhi Division, a story which demonstrates how his own weirdly non-linear narratives were always so much more readable than those of the many who seem so obviously inspired by him, I guess some of whom also feature in this collection. Langdon Jones' The Eye of the Lens has an immensely promising start with page after page of dry, dreamlike descriptions of imagined machines, evolving into something even stranger, then goes on for a bit and eventually overstays its welcome, which is a shame. There's also J.G. Ballard's The Killing Ground which reinforces my hypothesis that Ballard simply isn't for me; and then there are the rest, and they're mostly pretty darn great - certainly nothing you would want to skip - but I somehow felt my brains should have been dripping from my ears by the end of this lot, which wasn't the case; so I guess that's a recommendation, but just not one entailing any significant quota of fists pumping the air.

The Book of Dave

Will Self The Book of Dave (2006)
It's hard to fault the premise of The Book of Dave - a post-apocalyptic society inhabiting what islands are left of England once global warming has melted the ice caps, having reverted to a pseudo-mediaeval culture based on teachings set down by a London cab driver some five centuries earlier; so there was really no umming or ahing over shall I buy this or shall I leave it on the shelf and keep on looking?

Dave is a London cabbie, and prone to at least some of the forthright opinionising for which London cabbies are renowned - not least concerning sexual politics in relation to access to his kiddie, the fruit of a ruined marriage which brings him into the orbit of Fighting Fathers, an organisation clearly modelled on Fathers 4 Justice. Dave goes a bit mad and sets all of his thoughts down in a book which he has printed onto metal plates and buried in the garden so that his estranged son might one day dig it up, read it and discover the truth. Unfortunately the book is instead discovered by the post-deluge remnants of humanity for whom it provides the tenets of a new religion, specifically one which forbids mummies and daddies to live together. Chapters alternate between the troubled millennial existence of Dave - a bit of a monster, but a sympathetic one; and the divided future society inspired by his words, specifically the struggle of Carl Dévúsh to locate the mythic second book of Dave, the one which refutes all the horrible shit set down in the first.

I've seen The Book of Dave billed as a satire on religion, but this is only really the means by which its subject is illustrated. As to what its actual subject could be - well, it's a lot of things, but mostly it's the strictures placed on human behaviour and interaction by abstracts and cultural codes running contrary to instinct or sense, with the knowledge as a sort of metaphor for that upon which we are all obliged to agree, despite that we keep getting lost all the same. At the heart of this is the plight of the white working class male, at least so far as Dave is concerned, an unloved and unlovable cause fated to be championed more or less exclusively by the sort of arseholes who bang on about the demise of white culture, white people as an endangered minority, the tyranny of political correctness, and so on and so forth; none of which means it isn't a cause.

On a personal note, I found myself temporarily homeless back in 2006, specifically about to be homeless in London where average rent had risen to a sum in excess of my weekly wage. I went to the council to see if they had any places available and was actually told that it wasn't even worth putting my name on the housing list because, as a single white male, I was of such low priority that it would be about ten years before my number came up. Being a single white male I was counted amongst the least at-risk demographic in context of everyone else who needed somewhere to live, which sounded to me sort of like if you end up on the street, then it doesn't matter because you'll probably be able to cope somehow; and keep in mind that this was a council employee telling me this through a perspex window in the neighborhood office on East Dulwich Road. Of course, there are very good reasons why single white males might be considered low priority in terms of housing, but it can be quite difficult to take this in when you are one and you're about to be turfed out onto the street. It isn't the fault of dole scroungers, single mothers, lesbians, Muslims, or the Polish hoovering up all those cushy council places despite your having fought in three world wars, but understanding this doesn't make you feel any less inclined to do something which might get you arrested; so unfortunately the phenomenon of the white working class male as generally shat upon is not a myth simply by virtue of it having provided a rallying cry for arseholes in white vans decorated with the Cross of St. George. Capitalist society tends to shit on all but a small conspicuously wealthy minority of those concerned, including the white working class male, possibly also explaining why he remains the most at risk group when it comes to suicide statistics. So while white privilege is nevertheless a thing, it doesn't neatly divide society into the shat upon and those doing the shitting, and The Book of Dave seems like an attempt to address some of this - to defend not so much the indefensible as that which is more commonly defended almost exclusively by wankers.

Happily, Self avoids the obvious cliché of the racist cab driver spouting Sun headlines and asking wood jew fackin b'lieve it?, instead populating the book with rounded, plausible characters with no resemblance to the middle class idea of a working class person doubtless anticipated by Self's critics. On the contrary, despite slowly going mad and a generally misogynistic failure to understand women, Dave otherwise displays at least as much nobility as at least a few of the postmen with whom I worked at Royal Mail. He's not a bad man, just somebody trying his best and failing, and inadvertently shaping the world to come by writing it all down.

A few years before they had tried stratagems to make the marriage work. They'd gone away for a weekend at a hotel, leaving the boy with Michelle's mother. But once Michelle had had her spa treatments and they'd eaten stodge in the chintzy dining room, they were left even more profoundly alone together in their room, the four-poster bed corpsing them with its stagy insinuation. Michelle read property adverts in Country Life. Dave smoked at the window, blowing brown fog into the white muslin curtains. they went home early and in silence. They picked up Carl from the flat on Streatham Hill and were grateful for his unceasing eight-year old twitter, birdsong in their rotten garden.

The Book of Dave is massively depressing, but mostly engaging, often funny, and painfully true to life regardless of half the page count essentially being Margaret Attwood's Oryx & Crake, but better written and without the didactic tendencies. Unfortunately it's also a fairly tough read, particularly with half of the chapters written in some future argot descended from the present-day chatter of working class London - not just rhyming slang but phonetic spellings; most of which I can follow, but then I lived there for a couple of decades and even I found some of it a bit too impenetrable. Given that my copy was picked up from a sale at the local library here in San Antonio, I can't imagine it having translated too well for whoever read it last.

I customarily ignore the commonly made accusation of Will Self being too clever for his own good because it seems predicated on an essentially ludicrous notion related to the idea that knowing too many long words is a bad fing innit, but just this once, I wish he'd reigned it in a little.

The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula LeGuin The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
I've now read most books published by most of the authors I really, really like. I have therefore reached that point of realisation that if it's considered a science-fiction classic and there it is right in front of me on the shelf in the second hand place, then I may as well bag me a copy providing it isn't Heinlein. Whilst Ursula played a blinder with The Left Hand of Darkness, it somehow didn't quite inspire me to run out and grab everything else carrying her name. I'm not even sure why not, but anyway, here I am four or five years later, submerging that toe to greater depth.

The Lathe of Heaven is characteristically beautifully written in so much as that it reads like a proper book - you know, even Margaret Attwood might enjoy it; and I suppose it belongs to the satirical tradition of science-fiction in the broadest sense. At least it has enough in common with later Philip K. Dick as to account for why a LeGuin quote should in particular have graced the covers of so many of his novels when Granada reprinted them back in the eighties.

Our man in The Lathe of Heaven has dreams which change the world, leaving only himself with the memory of how things were before his own subconscious somehow influenced reality. He seeks psychiatric help, but the psychiatrist only primes his patient with suggestions leading to dreams which depopulate the Earth and bring on an alien invasion. There's no explanation for how the dreams of one person can have such a devastating effect, but that's hardly the point of the novel, and the point of the novel is, I suppose, that one should be careful what one wishes for. It's neither inordinately original nor particularly profound, but nevertheless makes for just the kind of well-rounded, satisfying read you probably expect from Ursula LeGuin. I suppose my only criticism, if we really need one, is that it felt like an overly extended short story rather than a novel in the sense of The Left Hand of Darkness and so doesn't seem to quite attain escape velocity equivalent to that of the aforementioned, although of course they're both very different books.

Still - very readable and better than a kick up the arse.

A Princess of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs A Princess of Mars (1912)
Whilst I appreciate the general concept of Edgar Rice Burroughs as an institution, I've had some trouble with his books, or at least with the two I've read. Both Tarzan of the Apes and Pirates of Venus seem reasonably well written but suffer from certain cultural details so resolutely of their time that I just couldn't get past the sound of my own wincing. A Princess of Mars, so I was told, was the one to go for, written before Burroughs' prose began to crumble under the pressure of curling off yet another sequel every three days; and against all odds, I enjoyed the recent film adaptation for what it's worth.

Just to get it out of the way, I suppose we should acknowledge that A Princess of Mars is roughly what has come to be known as pulp fiction, a term deriving - at least so far as I understand it - from the more populist magazines, the Astoundings and Amazings, having been used as pulp to pad out crates of more important stuff during the war - reet classy leather-bound editions of The Lord of the Rings for example, proper books which might be read by doctors or dentists. Whilst it's true that the tastes of the reading public tended to dictate the general kind of story which appeared in the Astoundings and Amazings, pulp as a vaguely pejorative term equating to gob-punching tales for thickies is misleading and generally akin to returning that Ramones album to the record store because you got it home and found it sounded nothing like Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Of course, some pulps were shite, but this is generally true of publishing regardless of whether it's the sort of thing one might find in the home of Margaret Attwood or people with 'O' levels; so it really comes down to either personal taste or snobbery, specifically the ideas that literature can do only one thing, or that there are certain things which it should refrain from doing if it wishes to hang out with the cool kids. The most amusing example of such double standards I have encountered was, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the book section of a Doctor Who bulletin board where discussion of Cody Schell's Señor 105 novellas prompted one individual to ask but are they not a little pulpy? I suppose I can see how our man might have wished to be forewarned in the event of his unwittingly dedicating time to the perusal of something of less philosophical complexity than Doctor Who and the Giant Robot. In my view, art must be judged principally on how well it does that which it sets out to do. Whether that which it sets out to do was worth doing in the first place is a quite different thing.

Returning now to the author of Tarzan of the Apes and Pirates of Venus, A Princess of Mars turns out to be similarly of its time, but not cripplingly so, at least not beyond allowing for the fact that swashbuckling adventure aimed at a particular kind of audience will tend to involve goodies and baddies. John Carter is a proud southern gentleman with most of the attendant associations, and yet nothing reading too much like the politics of a nutcase; and of course, he arrives on Mars with certain advantages over the people who actually live there because he's a white bloke and he understands chivalry and being a good egg and suchlike, although if that is an issue then it's one you probably should have anticipated before picking up a book with Edgar Rice Burroughs identified as author on the cover.

The only real problem here is that for my money, A Princess of Mars is barely science-fiction in so much as that it does very little of the stuff I like my science-fiction to do, the things which tend to keep me interested; and for all that it's at least as well written as anything by Wells, A Princess of Mars could just as easily have been set in North Africa, the wild west, or anywhere on Earth where English isn't spoken and they eat a different part of the cow. So it doesn't really do a great deal outside of the traditional adventuring furniture of captive princesses and bad-tempered natives who grudgingly accept you as one of their own after you've beaten up that one guy on the high council whom no-one really liked in the first place. To be fair, the Martian element - presumably in part inspired by Edwin L. Arnold's Gullivar Jones - is well drawn, but low on detail beyond a few faintly unsatisfying excuses made about special kinds of ray; and so the bulk of the page count is spent on fighting, with different groups of Martians battling each other for reasons which were probably mentioned somewhere or other; or on the well-being of a Princess -  quite a nice looking one too, surprisingly; or on our man coming up with all these great ideas and everyone agreeing how brilliant he is.

I suppose how much you're likely to enjoy this sort of thing depends on how much you enjoy this sort of thing, and whilst I don't actually find it offensive, and I can appreciate that Burroughs had an agreeable turn of phrase, A Princess of Mars just isn't my bag. That isn't to say I particularly disliked any aspect. On the contrary, there's plenty to recommend this one, not only the local colour and the pleasant, well-tuned prose, but even the fact of at least one party of warring Martians almost certainly amounting to Red Indians in space and revealing, in this instance, a degree of cultural sensitivity I hadn't really expected from Burroughs.

The Sparrow

Mary Doria Russell The Sparrow (1996)
I had this friend called Nellie, a Turkish woman who worked at Royal Mail. One night she was involved in a terrible car accident, or would have been had the Lord Jesus Christ not levitated her beloved Mini across the crash barrier at the crucial moment thus saving her life. She later offered this as proof of his divine glory, and yes I am aware of my not having capitalised the personal pronoun.

'It must have been Jesus,' she explained. 'How else would me car have ended up in the other lane, on the other side of that metal fing?'

Nellie, for all her likeable qualities, was essentially mad; and mad as in requiring serious medication in order to function within the community as opposed to just being a bit kooky. I'm not sure if her madness derived from nature or nurture but I'm inclined to blame the latter. Firstly, being lesbian, she already had a tough road to travel, born to a traditional Turkish family which viewed male children as beloved of God and which viewed a daughter as something by which one might procure a hard-working son-in-law. I'm not sure whether she was beaten as a child, although I recall darkly hinted mumblings along those lines, and I know her father sometimes left her locked inside a cupboard for up to six hours.

Eventually she found a job, a combination of pills which took the edge off the more extravagant gymnastics of her brain, and Jesus, who I would like to think helped in some way; but she was not generally speaking a happy bunny. She laughed, and was often very funny. She was a long way from being stupid or in any sense an unpleasant person, but always I had the impression of her being broken beyond repair; and she died of cancer in her forties, which was tremendously shit really.

I tended to nod, smile, and wait for it to pass when Nellie got onto the topic of himself upstairs, my reasoning being that if it was something which helped her through the day, then it wasn't really for me to point out how it was probably bollocks and in any case I wasn't interested. On one such occasion we were walking in Dulwich Park when I saw a jay, quite a rare sight in that part of London.

'Look,' I said, excited and pointing. 'A jay!'

Nellie shrugged. 'It's just some bird, innit?'

This made me sad. Colourful birds are not so common in England, and her comment struck me as typical of the attitude of a certain religious mindset which is seemingly unable to appreciate the wonder of almost anything unless viewed through its own specifically theological lens, like the moron who stands before Niagara Falls only able to consider its splendour in terms of something God did. Whilst religious themes might work as painting, particularly landscape painting, or music - forms of expression which, done right, can still communicate regardless of theological context, the written word seems more problematic, at least where The Sparrow is concerned.

I could be wrong but I get the impression Mary Doria Russell views love as the most powerful force in the universe. I myself suspect it's probably something like gravity or what you get when you smash a couple of atoms together. Her debut novel places a bunch of Jesuits in the position of being the first humans to travel to another planet and make first contact with an alien species for the purpose of learning to love them as they love all God's creations. For what it's worth, it's plausibly and intelligently done with nothing to upset Isaac Asimov in terms of the mechanics of such a voyage. The problem is that for me at least, The Sparrow lives up to few of the claims made by those glowing reviews quoted in the introductory pages, and once you get past the setting and the furniture of Christians in space or amongst the natives of the planet Rakhat, the rest is some bloke looking at Niagara Falls and thinking about Jesus a whole lot. The landing, for example, starts well before getting bogged down with ruminations upon one of the characters reconciling his Christianity with being a gay Texan through the infinite love of him upstairs. I realise this may seem a little harsh, but to paraphrase Burroughs, you cannot take bullshit into space.

Rarely is there a science-fiction novel that some bloke from some Seattle rag can recommend to his literate SF-challenged friends, it says here amongst similar accolades promising something more cerebral than the usual robots and spacecraft bollocks, the sort of mind-stretcher one expects from Margaret Attwood and her peers, the sort of sophisticated shit you can enjoy whilst sipping on some real fancy wine and that. The humour, highlighted by at least a few of the reviews, is at the level of smart comments made by characters from an episode of Friends, mostly followed by descriptions of how hard everyone laughed in response, I presume so as to show us how these are cool Christians rather than the stern, disapproving types. This actually constitutes reportage of wit rather than wit in its own right, I would argue; and these characters are neither especially memorable nor even easily distinguished from one another, not even our main man, the Priest Emilio Sandoz who just comes across as a bit of a cock. It probably didn't help that he is described as being madly in love with God, which for me places it all on the same level as Nellie's Mini Cooper miraculously levitated to safety by Jesus. I'm sure it communicates to those who are already there, but to the rest of us it suggests a lack of perspective.

On the other hand, the writing is okay, certainly readable if a little formulaic and overly reliant upon the attempted characterisation of a group of people for whom it is sadly difficult to care - a competently completed exercise submitted as part of some novel writing correspondence course.

I'm not averse to religiously themed fiction and, if anything, probably prefer it to the other tub-thumping extreme of droning atheism, but there's a way to do this stuff which communicates beyond those already converted - Philip K. Dick and Clifford D. Simak being two that spring to mind - and then there's Christian science-fiction just as there's Christian heavy metal, forms which, if they were really that bothered about engaging with the rest of us, might like to spend a bit more time on the means by which they communicate their message.

The message, or specifically the dialogue of The Sparrow is a response to the question of how a loving God can allow a universe of rape, murder, torture, and small Turkish girls locked in cupboards without food or water for six hours at a time. The subject, when at last it shows up, is handled extremely well and is presumably what has inspired those comments quoted on the opening pages. However, it's immensely aggravating that all of this good stuff should be concentrated in the concluding fifty pages with Russell finally getting serious and living up to the promise of the reviews; and it comes as so much of a contrast as to feel like the work of a different author. Following on from 450 pages with all the philosophical depth of a John Lennon motivational poster, all the supposedly spiritual shite that actually isn't anywhere near so profound as even Life of Brian, it's wonderful but still too little too late.

 

Onel Mehmet

 Rest in Peace

Hope you found what you were looking for, girl...