Exhalation

Spoiler alert!

Ted Chiang’s first collection of short stories, Stories of Your Life and Others was published in 2002, the film Arrival, an adaptation of ‘Story of Your Life’ from that collection, was released in 2016.

Chiang’s new collection Exhalation came out earlier this month, and I find it ironic that it has taken a blockbuster movie adaptation for a genre writer to achieve mainstream literary attention, with reviews in the New York Review and The New Yorker.

The two standout stories for me were ‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’ and ‘Exhalation’, and it’s ironic as well, that these two stories, dealing with artificial life forms, are the most humanist, treating those lifeforms as an end in themselves rather than a means to anything.

‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’ uses AI to ask questions about the value and purpose of individual beings. ‘Digients’ are the ‘software objects’ of the title, raised from ‘infancy’ through machine learning (rather than pre-programed), and rendered obsolete when they are quickly overtaken by newer and more efficient technology, and the older digients turn out to have no immediate commercial value. The remaining handful of dedicated owners who have not switched their digients off are faced with questions about the agency of the digients, and their responsibilities towards them.

‘Exhalation’ is a story about a race of artificial lifeforms in a finite artificial universe, and an individual of that race coming to terms with the knowledge that their reality is coming to an end. The individual takes comfort in the idea that explorers from another universe may one day find theirs, and read their stories, and they will live again in the visitors’ imagination, and in the idea that their lives mattered in some way, simply for the fact that they existed at all.

‘Exhalation’ is the only story I have ever encountered anywhere where I couldn’t work out where the original idea, specifically the ‘anatomy’ of the artificial lifeforms, had come from. With every other book or story I have read, mainstream or science fiction, I can work out what the author set out to do, see where the real-world inspiration came from; sometimes I can even guess at which element of the story came first, and how the rest of the story was built up around it. Everything else Chiang has written about, alien contact, time travel, AI, genetic engineering, has precedence, but the artificial universe of ‘Exhalation’ seems entirely sui generis, self-generating, I couldn’t even begin to guess where the first spark of an idea came from.

In the story notes for ‘Exhalation’, Chiang cites a short story by Philip K. Dick called ‘The Electric Ant’, in which a man learns that he is actually a robot, and “sees a spool of punch tape that’s slowly unwinding to produce his subjective experience.” He also cites entropy, how energy is neither created nor destroyed, with energy moving from ordered (the chemical energy in food), to disordered (the heat energy we radiate).

I still cannot make the jump from that to the reality Chiang created, where consciousness is found in temporary patterns of air (although I can see the parallels between that and the patterns of biochemical connection in any biological brain), and instead of the heat-death of the universe once all the energy is converted to heat, the end of the universe comes about through gas equilibrium.

The story ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’ uses time travel (a type that is theoretically possible, according to the story notes), to negate the concept of free will. In this story, people travelling backwards and forwards through time do not change anything, there is no possibility of creating a paradox, the time travel is merely part of a story that has already been told. This goes back to ideas in ‘Story of Your Life’, that the visiting alien’s different perception of time meant that they “are neither free nor bound as we understand these concepts; they don’t act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptapods’ mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history’s events; it is also that their motives coincide with history’s purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology.”

Another story ‘Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom’ uses communication between parallel universes to examine the idea of free will. If there is always another version of you who makes the opposite choice, is there really any free will involved when you make a decision, or is it all just randomness?

‘The Truth of Facts and the Truth of Feelings’ is a speculative technology story with the same emotional punch as the best Black Mirror episode, but subtler and more ambiguous than a TV show can ever be.

‘Omphalos’ is a story set in a version of Earth where the bible is literal truth, where archaeologists find primordial trees with no growth-rings at their centre, and mummies of primordial humans with no navels, because they were created, fully formed, by God at a specific moment in the past. This story involves not just world building, or universe building, but reality building, from the basic rules of physics on up.

I avoided reading any reviews in advance to avoid spoilers for the stories that were new to me, and to allow me to form my own opinions first. One of the specific pleasures of a good science fiction story is working out what’s going on, not just the characters’ stories, but the reality they are living in as well.

I was expecting the snobbish, ‘it’s good so it can’t be science fiction’ response from the New York Review and The New Yorker, but refreshingly, that was not the case. Ironically (again!) it was the review in the Guardian from Adam Roberts, a science fiction author himself, which was the most critical.

As I said in my review of Arrival, Chiang writes hard science fiction, where the ideas are intrinsic to the story, but he is also a humanist writer, and it was nice to see the mainstream critics saying the same thing.

Science fiction seems to be a little bit more respectable these days; there seems to be a new dystopian novel published every few months (many feminist themed and likely inspired by the success of The Hunger Games and the renewed interest in The Handmaid’s Tale) that gets reviewed as ‘literature’ (‘literature’, really, is just another genre of fiction), and none of them have seemed worth reading to me. They all sounded to me like Ian M. Banks’ ‘dabblers’, using “the trappings of science fiction as fashionable upholstery rather than as an engine” as Nina Allan describes it.

Maybe we can blame Margaret Atwood for some of this, she spent decades insisting that she wasn’t a science fiction writer, before declaring herself an expert in the genre; she disrespected the genre while she was using it.

Science fiction, at its very best, asks questions about self, memory, free will, what it means to be human, and the ultimate fate of the human race. Literary fiction seems to be mostly about old men having affairs with their students, and rich people’s bathrooms.

Borges wrote science fiction, Kafka wrote science fiction, Burroughs wrote science fiction. You can draw a straight line from Borges’ ‘Funes, His Memory’ to Chiang’s ‘Understand’.

I re-watched Arrival when I was in the middle of reading Exhalation; when I reviewed the film back in 2016, I described it as ‘prescient and necessary’, the last time I am ever likely to use that kind of terminology to describe any work of art. Watching Arrival now is heart-breaking, because it is still a beautiful, intelligent, compassionate, and humanistic film, but it has had no effect on the world whatsoever. Even if someone like Trump could somehow be made to watch it, it wouldn’t make any difference, because he wouldn’t be able to understand what it was saying.

Science fiction makes the world and human potential larger, when reality is becoming smaller and meaner.

Little Fires Everywhere

Spoiler alert!

I can’t now remember (or find) the review or interview that made me want to read Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng. The Jody Picoult quote on the front cover should have clued me in to the type of book it is; I didn’t know, when I picked it up, that it was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, but I was expecting something more subversive, more challenging.

The story is of a middle-class white American family living in a planned community in Ohio, whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of an artist single-mother, Mia, and her teenaged daughter, Pearl. The whole book felt very safe, very clean, and despite the plot strands around the custody battle over an abandoned (Asian) baby and a house blaze, it never felt like there was any real risk, any real danger.

According to the quotes printed at the front of the book, Francesca Brown, in Stylist magazine, called it “The Great American Novel we’ve been waiting for”, which is laughable hyperbole and ridiculously far off the mark. It’s closer to a potboiler, a very well written potboiler, and an enjoyable read, but a potboiler nonetheless.

There is no Lynchian underbelly to the planned community of Shaker Heights, no alcoholism, no drug abuse, no domestic violence or incest. When a teenage girl needs an abortion, she has access to a safe legal one at a local clinic untroubled by ‘pro-life’ protestors, and her biggest fear is that her mother will find out and be disappointed with her. We are reassured that the baby abandoned at a fire station in the middle of winter was never in any real risk of harm; when the house is set on fire, everyone is out and the family has insurance and another place to stay; Mia’s itinerant lifestyle makes her poor, but a safety-net means she is never at any risk of real impoverishment.

There are some good things here, especially the account of Mia’s development as an artist, from childhood experimentation to art school, although I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to how successful her art would be in real life.

Everyone in this book does the right thing, and only has the best intentions at heart; Mrs Richardson, the nearest thing the book has to a ‘villain’ is only really guilty of being a busy-body with a lack of imagination; she chose safety over adventure, but she is not trapped in a domestic hell, only dullness.

The plot is precision engineered, tab A always fitting perfectly into slot B, and everything is neatly wrapped up by the end of the book. I felt like I had read it before, and there probably isn’t a single element in it that hasn’t been covered elsewhere, and better – Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs covers the themes of race and adoption, and is far more complicated and ambiguous.

H(A)PPY

Spoiler alert!

H(A)PPY, by Nicola Barker, is a story set in a dystopian future where people’s emotions are regulated and their access to information controlled. The protagonist, Mira A, a musician, stumbles upon the guitar music of Agustin Barrios, a (real) Paraguayan musician from the early 20th Century. His music, and his story, and other fragments of information about Paraguay (all taken by the author from The Paraguay Reader), cause or precipitate or otherwise give a theme to Mira A’s mental disintegration, which ends with her being expelled from her society into exile in the wilderness, where violence and war and disease still exist.

To begin with, this story felt very very familiar. I have, unwittingly, been training myself since childhood to read science fiction and to understand its tropes and themes; it didn’t take long for me to pick up the terminology and to understand what was going on.

All the modern sci-fi trappings are there, smart clothes, 3D-printers, Neuro-Mechanicals (think ‘Electric Sheep’), and Mira A runs on a Power Spot to capture her bio-energy (like the exercise bikes in the Black Mirror episode ‘Fifteen Million Merits’).

H(A)PPY has its own technology, there is the ‘Sensor’, which provides information, but is not, according to Mira A, a ‘censor’, because the users effectively censor themselves in the information they ask for. There is also the ‘Graph’ which seems to be both monitor and interrogator, it keeps a constant record of an individual’s internal monologue, the colours of the words changing to reflect the taboo-ness of the word and the concept it represents (these colour changes are in the text of the book itself), and also interrogates the individual on behalf of society over what they are doing at any given moment. Lastly there is the ‘Stream’, which seems to be the output of the Graph, plus continuous surveillance footage, both of which are available for anyone to view (an obvious metaphor for social media).

There are also ‘clamps’, some kind of brain implant. After Mira A’s Graph becomes too erratic, risking an ‘Excess of Emotion’ event, she has her clamps adjusted, she thinks to fix a fault in her ‘Oracular Devices’ (presumably what connects her to Sensor, Graph, and Stream) that is causing her emotional instability, but, obviously from the outside, to ‘fix’ her, which belies the idea of ‘choice’ in this society.

(I find myself having to use terms like ‘seems to be’ and ‘presumably’ to describe the technology, this is not hard SF by any stretch of the imagination.)

There is, though, some ambiguity over whether it is truly a dystopia or a utopia; violence and disease and hunger have been eliminated, but the cost of this is social conformity. Barker effectively spells this all out on the first page:

This is also familiar from many other dystopias and utopias. Not all dystopias are clearly so from the inside; there are the obvious, grim dystopias like The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984, where the main characters know they are oppressed, but there are also dystopias like Brave New World, were everyone is doped up on soma and believes themselves to be happy.

All dystopias are metaphors in one way or another for the real world, and also cautionary tales, while utopias try to offer the possibility of change; both challenge us about what kind of future we want to create.

Utopias can, potentially, be oppressive, More’s original Utopia demanded social conformity, and, as this academic paper points out, utopias such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time may demand too much of some readers, in terms of living differently to the current status quo, and appear dystopian to them – this is not meant to be flippant; I am not sure that I, being institutionalised to my current life, would cope well in such a utopia, but I would still be able to see that it was a utopia, even if I couldn’t live happily in it.

The idea of constant, perfect, happiness is a chimera, something that can only be achieved by drugging or brainwashing the population. In H(A)PPY, the population is expected to ‘choose’ to regulate itself. Being free and being happy are not the same thing.

In The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman, personality is controlled by viruses, Milena, the protagonist, is immune to the viruses, she cannot fit in. In Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, people have machines with which to dial up their emotions. In Ian McDonald’s Out on Blue Six the ‘Compassionate Society’ decides everyone’s role from birth, and causing anyone any kind of pain is a crime. I have vague recollections of reading, as a teenager, a Star Trek: TNG spin-off novel called Gulliver’s Fugitives, which took-off Fahrenheit 451 by describing a totalitarian society that did not just ban reading, but banned any imaginative thinking at all.

Other aspects of H(A)PPY are also familiar from previous dystopias, there is ‘The Unknown’ also called ‘The Simulation of the Real’, outside of society, where war and disease still exist. In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (a book which pre-dates and influenced 1984), there is the world outside the ‘Green Wall’ that surrounds the ‘One State’; in Brave New World there is a ‘Savage Reservation’.

Also in We, the buildings are all made of glass, echoing the concept of the Panopticon, and 1984 has its ‘Telescreens’. In H(A)PPY anyone can observe anyone else’s Stream; under constant surveillance (real or imagined) nobody dares to non-conform.

Mira A can escape observation by staring into the light to disable the technology that monitors her; in 1984, Winston Smith has the chance fact that his Telescreen is placed in his home in such a way that he believes he can be unobserved.

It is, perhaps, impossible now to do anything truly original in either utopian or dystopian fiction.

H(A)PPY does differ from all the above-mentioned books, in that Mira A is a very unreliable narrator; it is impossible to work out exactly what is going on, because most of it is happening inside Mira A’s head, rather than the ‘real’ world she inhabits. Is any of it real? Are any of the other characters, or their actions real? Does she imagine/hallucinate the whole thing?

Perhaps, despite its conformation to dystopian sci-fi tropes, it is best understood not as social commentary at all, but as metaphor for creative rapture, and the social isolation and internal disintegration that can follow; or as mental illness following social isolation.

This interpretation is supported by the accusation levelled against Mira A that she wants a narrative, and the refrain ‘terrible discipline’ that appears throughout the text, with reference to her and Agustin Barrios’ practices as musicians.

On the other hand, this is something science fiction can do (see this paper on the science fiction and critical writing of Samuel R. Delany); science fiction can make literal what literary fiction does metaphorically: time slips, reality distortions, encounters with alien others. But comparing Barker to Delany does Barker no favours.

The Paraguayan texts interspersed throughout the narrative, while interesting in their own right, seem arbitrary, they are connected to the story only because they inspired the author in real life; any artist, any ‘exotic’ culture, could fill that role.

H(A)PPY lacks any real sense of threat or menace, there is no equivalent to O’Brien or ‘Room 101’ from 1984. Mira A does get her fingers broken, right at the end of the book, before she is cast out into The Unknown, but we don’t know how it happens because we only see her hallucinations of that time.

H(A)PPY won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize which is awarded to fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the form.”

The text is very colourful – we are effectively reading Mira A’s Stream throughout, but it doesn’t seem all that inventive to me. Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus (2001) plays with text in a similar way, illuminated texts go all the way back to the Middle Ages, and many children’s picture books will do more exciting things with illustrations and text.

If I’m being completely honest, the mathematical illustrations:

Just made me think of this meme:

But the real question is, was it a good book? Was it a gripping, compelling story, did I feel emotionally invested in the fate of Mira A? In all honesty, no, not really. It felt very thin and shallow, if I wasn’t thinking about it now to write a review I probably wouldn’t be thinking about it at all (and as you can see, from the above, I was thinking just as much about every other dystopian/utopian book I’ve ever read).

The Handmaid’s Tale

Spoiler alert!

I watched The Handmaid’s Tale on Channel 4, and saw the final episode last weekend.

While it is good TV, I find it interesting that The Handmaid’s Tale, a drama about an invented dystopia full of sexual violence, is seen as ‘important’ TV, while something like Three Girls, a dramatisation of real-world sexual violence that tells us how and why the sexual violence was able to happen and was allowed to happen, while critically acclaimed, has not received the ‘important’ label.

You can write about, or make a TV show about, any subject you like, as long as you do it well and treat it with respect. The Handmaid’s Tale is certainly well made in terms of production values, acting etc., and it does not treat it’s subject as trivial. But I cannot convince myself that it is ‘important’.

Watching TV is not, and never will be, ‘activism’, and when what you are watching is fiction, you are not ‘waking yourself up’ to anything.

Is The Handmaid’s Tale’s popularity due to the fact that we, the audience, can get a vicarious thrill when we know that it isn’t real? But that explanation suggests that it is only entertainment after all.

Or, to be cynical, The Handmaid’s Tale is a little too slick and glossy, the locations, the interiors, the colour palates, the aging down of the Commander and Serena Joy – real life Rochdale will never be as glamourous as this particular rendering of Gilead. Also, the protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale, a middle-class professional woman ‘just like us’ is easier to empathise with than troubled working-class girls whose lives are so removed from our own.

So what did I think of it as an adaptation? I wrote my GCSE English Literature project on The Handmaid’s Tale, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and John Wyndham’s short story ‘Consider Her Ways’, but that was over 20 years ago, and I’m not sure I have read it since then; at one point I knew the book inside out, but I can’t claim that now.

The show became more interesting from episode 6 onwards, with the arrival of the (female) Mexican Ambassador, when the story deviates from the original, and the world-building is expanded.

There are lots of good small details, like the second Ofglen saying how she is better off now than before the coup, when she was a homeless drug-addicted prostitute, and wasn’t going to mess it up.

We are also told about an Aunt defecting to Canada, and Marthas’ plotting sabotage. In the book Offred is completely passive, and we only see the world from her point of view, so these changes are welcome. We see the human toll, not just on the Handmaids, but on the Wives forced into this situation as well. There are lots of these humanising moments, like Serena Joy saying “what did you think would happen” after the previous Offred hanged herself.

The environmental details are an interesting addition; the Gilead officials boast of their carbon-reduction and solar power. Do Gilead’s ‘green credentials’ make it a more ambiguous dystopia, or is this a commentary on ‘green washing’? There are, and have been, many conflicts between human rights and environmental justice in the real word, but there is no direct causal link between the human right’s abuses in Gilead and its environmental improvements – this isn’t the same as the toxic clean-up in the colonies (mentioned once or twice in the show but not shown).

I like that they showed some of the background of the coup, how vulnerable, purposeless young men could be drawn in, and also the self-serving hypocrisy of the Commanders, horse-trading over the status of the Handmaids in order to get their wives on board.

One of the most interesting details is, in my opinion, the characterisation of Aunt Lydia; she is shown genuinely caring about her ‘girls’, even when, on other occasions, she is cutting their eyes out. A ‘bad guy’ who genuinely believes in the righteousness of what they are doing is far more interesting (and informative) than one who is acting out of sadism or cynical self-interest.

Making Gilead multiracial is odd, as if there is no link between religious fundamentalism and white supremacism (which was there in the book) in the US in real life – is an ‘inclusive dystopia’ really something we need as viewers? As this article points out, making it multiracial is a way of bypassing racism without tackling it head-on.

There are changes that don’t really work; using industrial farm equipment to ‘tag’ the Handmaid’s ears is over the top; we microchip pets these days, it feels inserted for shock value only, as if the cattle-prods, amputations, and savage beatings aren’t socking enough.

There are small things like June saying she is allowed to shave her legs once a month. Why, except to give an explanation for the actress’ hairless less? Hairy legs would not fit in with the show’s aesthetics; neither would a scene of her moisturising herself with butter, so those were taken out, as were the ‘Econowives’ in their cheap stripy dresses, that wouldn’t have looked good either.

I found some of the soundtrack choices jarring and inappropriate; it’s a lazy short-cut, to get the soundtrack to do the work of the narrative, to force an emotional reaction, or an association with another work of fiction.

It makes no sense to have fertile women in Jezebel’s, when they are a rare enough commodity to be tradeable on the world market – they could cut off both hands and feet to make them biddable first (I think this threat is in the book), and there would be plenty of young, infertile women to fill the ranks at Jezebel’s – which brings us to another problem (with the book as well) why not just lobotomise them all to begin with? It has historical precedence, but then there would be no story in the first place (there is no story without some contrivance)!

It’s good that they didn’t sanitise Jezebel’s (I was going to write ‘didn’t glamourize’ but I think it was as ‘aestheticised’ as the rest of the series), didn’t play into a ‘happy hooker’ narrative (which would have been easy to do – the Commander says the women prefer it there, but the women don’t actually look happy). The fetishisation of the stump of a woman’s severed hand, and June catching a glimpse of two women dressed up as a Handmaid and a Wife, showed the contempt the men really felt for all women, even the ‘good’ ones. Jezebel’s also has the one and only appearance of an obese character, a woman doubly objectified, first by being dressed in fetish gear, second by only being shown from behind.

Some things have been updated since the 1985 publication of the book. Luke is picked up by ex-army women on the run to Canada; this is another good addition, and another example of showing women not being passive victims. (But I found Luke’s ability to hike through winter forests after being shot in the stomach and surviving his ambulance plunging off a bridge to be ridiculously macho.)

Shutting down all the women’s bank accounts, in our globalised age, would, I imagine, be very difficult, but it is a vital plot component.

While it’s good that the TV show includes more acts of women’s rebellion, I think they overdo it with the Handmaids, with the ‘don’t let the bastards grind you down’ voice-over, and calling them an army in uniform, and showing them marching in formation. It doesn’t fit with the totalitarianism shown elsewhere.

The big act of rebellion in the final episode is moving; in the book, June is completely passive, and at the end of the series, she is still rescued by men, the same as in the book.

Landing beard-first

The third Fleet Foxes album arrives after a six-year hiatus and lands beard-first into the debate on the role of the artist in 2017: to reflect the complex real-world landscape or to make an oblique and beautiful piece of art?

Kitty Empire

The Red Turtle

Spoiler alert!

This film was such a disappointment! I had high hopes for it, the trailer was gorgeous, and it had Studio Ghibli attached – so what could go wrong?

I should say, first, that the art work is lovely throughout; the detail and realism of the island backgrounds and wildlife are worthy of Studio Ghibli, or other Japanese animation like the films of Mamoru Hosoda. The human characters bear no resemblance to saucer-eyed anime characters, and did seem more ‘French’ to me, reminding me of artists like Moebius (I may simply have been pre-biased by knowing it was a French co-production, or this may just be due to the fact that it does not look like anime or Disney). The sound effects of the natural world, as well as the soundtrack, are also superb.

The story is of a shipwrecked man stranded on a deserted island. After exploring the island, he builds a raft from bamboo and attempts an escape. Some invisible force destroys the raft a short distance from the island, and the same thing happens when he builds a second, bigger raft. A third, still bigger raft is also destroyed, but this time the giant red turtle of the title is there, and the man assumes it is her attacking him and his raft, although she leaves him alone when he is in the water.

After the third attempt, the man sees the red turtle coming up onto the beach. In a fit of rage, he smashes her over the head with a bamboo pole, turns her onto her back, jumps on her, then leaves her to die in the sun.

Later, feeling guilty, he tries to revive her by pouring seawater over her head, and also tries and fails to right her. It doesn’t work and she appears to die, her shell splitting open.

Then, she turns into a woman, unconscious, and still lying inside the split shell. The man feeds her fresh water, and builds a shelter over her. After a brief rain storm she becomes conscious, and runs into the shallow water near the beach.

The man leaves her his shirt and walks away into the bamboo forest, when he returns to the beach, he sees the woman in the water, walking away from the beach, pushing the floating turtle shell in front of her. When she reaches deeper water, she pushes the shell off out to sea and returns to the beach.

The man responds by doing the same with the forth raft he had started to build. Then they sit on a sand bank, and the woman starts breaking open mussel shells, feeding them both. The man has a flashback to smashing her over the head and shudders, the women now appears unafraid of the man.

Then they walk from the beach into a meadow on the island, and both float up into the air together – a PG metaphor for sex, as we then skip to years later, when they have a toddler son.

The rest of the story covers the boy’s growth into manhood; he swims out to sea with other giant turtles (they are all green, but he has red hair like his mother), and eventually swims off with them for good. There is also a tsunami that devastates the island before he leaves.

After the son leaves, the man and women stay on the island together until they are old and grey, then the man dies in his sleep, and the woman turns back into a turtle and heads back out to sea.

The problem I had with the film while watching it, is that it looks like the man is rewarded for his act of cruel violence by being given a compliant, silent, wife. I kept giving it the benefit of the doubt while watching, hoping there would be something later in the story to mitigate it, but I don’t think there was.

There is no talking in the film, and we never see the story from the woman’s perspective (we see the man’s dreams and hallucinations while he is alone on the island, as well as his flashback). There are lots of fairy tales where people are released from an enchantment trapping them in animal form, or stories like The Little Mermaid, where a magical/mythical creature chooses to be transformed into human form (and these transformations are often violent, or come at a cost), but it is never clear which is the case for The Red Turtle, and there is no way the man knew in advance that this is what would happen, it is obviously a complete surprise to him.

It is not clear what force is keeping the man on the island – is the red turtle supposed to represent the spirit of the island itself? But the island, when it is devastated by the tsunami, is shown to be a normal island, at the mercy of the elements. Was she in love with him from the start? But we only see them ‘meet’ right before he attacks her, they build no relationship with her as the turtle – the brief moment when they first see each other is actually quite moving, it feels like two sentient creatures making first contact, but that is then spoilt by the later violence.

I can see what the story is trying to do, it is aiming for mythic resonance, but I don’t think it achieves it. As a whole, the story itself is best at the beginning, when the man is first washed up on the island, as he explores his new environment (and as an aside, ‘mild peril’ my arse! The moment when he is trapped in a deep-sided pool and forced to swim underwater through a very narrow tunnel to escape terrified me!). The details of this first half build the character of the man, he dreams of a bamboo bridge out to sea that he flies along, and hallucinates a chamber orchestra. There is humour to his Sisyphean raft building, and there are cute crabs for comic relief.

The rest of the story, covering decades, feels sparse by comparison, and the woman never really has a character at all. We only see her swimming once as a human, she doesn’t even go into the sea when her toddler son falls into the same pool that his father fell into before. There is one moment, when the man draws pictures in the sand to show the son that there is a whole world beyond the island, and she adds a drawing of a turtle, but it is not clear if this means she misses her people, or if she is just telling her son that there is that option for him as well.

So, I was disappointed, because the need for the violence of the transformation is never explained, and there is not enough character development to see why the woman wants to stay with him anyway. I worry about the message it portrays, that (male) violence (against a woman) is an acceptable prelude to romantic love and devotion.

“Popular culture is popular for a reason”

Popular culture is popular for a reason; even the most forgettable and disposable works touch on matters of authentic psychological urgency, despite distorting and falsifying and debasing them. That’s why the good ones – the ones that pull more than a few threads from the underlying tangle and let them show through the shiny surface of simplification – take hold of the imagination in ways that defy their modest artistic merits.

Richard Brody, reviewing Fifty Shades Darker in the New Yorker

Manchester by the Sea and Was

Last month I went to see Manchester by the Sea, and re-read Geoff Ryman’s Was.

Manchester by the Sea was funnier, and not as unrelentingly grim, as I had been expecting (and fearing) from the reviews I read beforehand. It tells the story of Lee, a man to whom something terrible happens (I won’t spoil what exactly), something that changes his life, and his family’s lives completely, that affects his entire community. Years later, he has to go back home after his brother dies, and his now teenaged nephew needs a guardian.

The thing that makes this such a good film is that there is no clear-cut redemption, there is no feel-good happy ending; Lee’s life changes, but he isn’t ‘fixed’, he’s never going to be ok, ever, but his life still goes on, still damaged. It’s a good film because it handle’s this with respect, it never feels voyeuristic (even though we have to wait to see exactly what happened that caused Lee to leave town), it never feels like the character is being tortured to death by the story for the sake of it (or for the sake of ‘proving’ some bizarre ideological point); it shows that life doesn’t have any larger purpose, or higher meaning, terrible things happen, but people still carry on, scraping something together for themselves.

Was, published in 1992, combines the stories of Judy Garland, the filming of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, an actor dying of AIDS in the 1980’s, Frank Baum, and the ‘real’ Dorothy Gael who inspired him.

Geoff Ryman is one of the most compassionate and humanist writers I have read (ages ago, I found a description of literary humanism I really like, in this review of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker: “authentic humanism, meaning a consideration (both celebratory and cautionary) of human doings and undoings”); he is an author whose works I return to again and again – I have lost count of how many times I have read Was, and I would also particularly recommend his books Lust and Air, and his short-story collection Paradise Tales (if the story in that collection about the Angel of the North doesn’t move you, nothing will).

Was also covers difficult subjects, death and loneliness and the abuse (emotional and physical and sexual) of children, and describes people continually striving to live meaningful lives; but, as with Manchester by the Sea, it is never there to shock or titillate. Ryman shows compassion for all his characters, even the bad ones, without ever making excuses for them.

Ryman also does his research! He travelled and read and researched what Kansas was like in the late 19th Century, and the real-life accounts he discovered expanded and enriched his own story telling.

In his afterword, Ryman says: “I am a fantasy writer who fell in love with realism. Because I am a fantasy writer, I am particularly aware that every work of fiction, however realistic, is a fantasy. It happens in a world that is an alternative to this one.” He later adds:

I fell in love with realism because it deflated the myths, the unexamined ideas of fantasy. It confronts them with forgotten facts. It uses past truth – history.

I love fantasy because it reminds us how far short our lives fall from their full potential. Fantasy reminds us how wonderful the world is. In fantasy, we can imagine a better life, a better future. In fantasy, we can free ourselves from history and outworn realism.

Oz is, after all, only a place with flowers and birds and rivers and hills. Everything is alive there, as it is here if we care to see it. Tomorrow, we could all decide to live in a place not much different from Oz. We don’t. We continue to make the world an ugly, even murderous place, for reasons we do not understand.

Those reasons lie in both fantasy and history. Where we are gripped by history – our own personal history, our country’s history. Where we are deluded by fantasy – our own fantasy, our country’s fantasy. It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible.

And use them against each other.

Barracuda (TV series and book)

SPOILER ALERT!

For my previous review, I started with the original short story, and then watched the adaptation; with Barracuda, I first watched the adaptation, then decided to read the book it was based on.

Barracuda is available as a box set on the BBC iPlayer, and it seems odd to me that a program with such high production values has been ghettoised to an online audience only, under the banner of the BBC’s ‘youth’ channel. The book is certainly not ‘young adult’, and I can’t work out how much the series would actually appeal to that demographic.

I’ve seen the film Head On, and read Christos Tsiolkas’ short story collection Merciless Gods, I kept waiting for something terrible to happen in the TV series, and it does, but not the level of violence I was expecting.

As with the adaptation of ‘Story of Your Life’, it is interesting to see what is included, what is left out, what is simplified, what is added, what is changed, and how much or how little these alterations change the spirit of the story.

The TV series only covers Danny’s teenaged years and a few years after he leaves school, the book covers a lot longer; elements of the book are changed to simplify and compress; the disabled cousin becomes the disabled patient, the Glaswegian boyfriend Danny leaves Australia to follow becomes a physiotherapist he works with as part of his community service, Danny’s relationship with Luke is not fleshed out. The most obvious change is probably downgrading the prison sentence to community service (but try filming that for a general audience!).

The two most significant changes, to me, are in the portrayal of Danny’s relationship with his family, and in the portrayal of Danny’s sexuality. Danny’s family life is sanitised and idealised in the series, he loves his parents and siblings, and only argues with his father once, in the book he despises his father the whole time (except for one short section that goes back to his very early childhood), and his mother a lot of the time. In the series his parents are unequivocally supportive, in the book, only his mother is.

The class analysis is played down a lot in the TV series as well, the scene at Martin’s grandmother’s birthday meal is still there, but it is much much uglier in the book.

In the book, Danny’s homosexuality is almost incidental, there are no big ‘coming out’ scenes, it’s just a given fact of his adult life. Danny’s desire for Martin is a major plot thread of the series, but in the book, he doesn’t make a pass at him (or have sex with his sister), and his attraction is only acknowledged with hindsight – and then only subtly, Danny can remember exactly what Martin’s face looks like.

There is no explicit homophobia in the book; ‘f*ggot’ is thrown around as an insult as much as ‘w*g’, but there is never any sense of Danny hiding his sexuality from other people, instead his sexuality is sublimated entirely into his swimming, to the point where he avoids masturbation as a waste of energy. He only ‘comes out’ to himself when he starts having sex with another man in prison (given that, the complete lack of mention of HIV, or any other STIs in the book seems odd).

The changes make the TV series as much a story about (homo)sexuality as about sport, but in the book it is the sport, the macho competitiveness, and Danny’s shame at his failure, that is the main theme.

This is interesting, as the author of a certain garbage book (a garbage book that I hope very soon to have forgotten that I read at all), has claimed that men are incapable of expressing emotions such as fear, vulnerability and shame.

Barracuda the book is saturated with shame and fear and self-loathing; shame is the main emotion Danny feels after his swimming career is over, it is the driving force of the rest of his life (during one scene, in a restaurant, he is so afraid to leave his table and risk running into an old classmate that he pisses himself). It is being called a looser that causes him to smash a glass into Martin’s face, not thwarted desire. Toxic masculinity, the ideology of winners and losers, is examined in the TV series, but it is much more explicit in the book.

“Basically it should be illegal for men to direct movies”

My review of Nocturnal Animals: if Tom Ford had made that dress for Melania Trump instead of this movie, I would have actually hated him less.

Okay but really that was the most vilely misogynistic bunch of malarkey I have seen since Von Trier’s Antichrist? Basically it should be illegal for men to direct movies

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