"If you look at a broken camcorder
for long enough, its original purpose begins to seem obscure. Run
your fingers over the mounded black plastic, the exposed lens,
clouded now with dust, like a wide, dead eye. There's a maker's name
on the handle but you've never heard of them, and it's hard to
believe that an object with so little life in it ever did anything.
It's an exhausted artefact, a proof of something maybe, but you don't
know what of. You wonder if what you're holding in your hand has
floated up from the past, or arrived here from the future or from
somewhere else.
"When you look at it lying on a
rubbish dump with other broken things you feel a deep sadness. Almost
as if the world that ever thought to produce such a thing - your own
world - has outlived its usefulness."
There are books that come along and
rearrange your mental furniture. They so comprehensively inhabit the
inside of your head that upon finishing them you worry that you are
no longer the same person. Nina Allan's debut novel 'The Race' is one
such book for me. It is a novel that challenges what science fiction
is and can be. Through a series of stories that echo, reflect and
interlock but never explicitly link, 'The Race' explores the themes
of communication, empathy and identity. The whole thing is tied
together by Allan's luminous prose. The end result is powerful,
moving and profound.
'The Race' is made up of four
consecutive narrative strands. In the near future in the town of
Sapphire, a British seaside town made toxic by fracking, Jenna finds
herself more invested in the genetically engineered smartdog races
than usual when her brother Del's daughter Lumey goes missing and the
only way he has of raising the money to find her is by betting his
dog will win. In modern day Hastings, Christy writes stories about
the town of Sapphire to process the trauma of her collapsing family.
When her brother's girlfriend Linda disappears, she contacts Linda's
ex Alex in the hope of discovering the truth. Alex has left Hastings
and his past behind him, but is brought back to confront the ghosts
of his old life by Christy. And Maree, a gifted child raised in the
Croft, a government programme involved in smartdog control, must
undergo a dangerous journey across the sea, where she must face the
terrifying Atlantic whales before beginning her new life.
At first it might appear like the novel
has two sections set in the real world, bookended by two sections set
in Christy's fictional world. Jenna's concerns - her aggressive,
domineering brother, her absent mother, her dying father, Lumey's
lost innocence - echo Christy's, her fears and traumas transmuted
into fiction so that she can process and deal with them. However 'The
Race' resists such simple interpretations. Allan plays off the
assumption that the section set in our real, recognisable world is
the default, because of course this is all fiction, and all of the
characters are built from Allan's experiences and imagination. This
is highlighted by having the more fantastical sections begin and end
the novel. The ontological games do not stop there, however. At first
it appears as if Jenna's story exists in the recognisable future of
Britain. However as more and more details are hinted at, the
geography and history becomes more and more unfamiliar. By the time
smartdogs are revisited in Maree's section, an entirely new geography
has been introduced, as have the Atlantic whales, mysterious
creatures said by some to be portals to different universes and
possessing a cold alien intelligence.
This is all in aid of the novel's deft
exploration of perspective and identity. Christy and Alex's sections
appear to take place in our world, and overlap in a more
straightforward way. Christy suspects her brother Derek of murdering
Linda, and reaches out to Alex to find the truth. However Linda's
fate remains ambiguous. Christy and Alex both saw different parts of
Linda's story, and because of their different perspectives they come
to completely different conclusions. A simple twist of perspective -
Christy never seeing Linda again, but Alex bumping into her in the
street - is all it takes to change a story from being sinister and
frightening to an uplifting story of two people moving on with their
lives. Similarly, Alex's memories of growing up in Hastings are very
different from Christy's, due to his perspective as a black man
growing up between his London and Nigerian heritage. A perspective
shift is how Christy has created Jenna's unfamiliar world, by putting
a slight twist on her familiar surroundings and life events. At the
end of her story, Maree discovers she is Lumey, kidnapped from her
family for the smartdog programme. Whilst at first this appears to be
a resolution of the original storyline, the names and timings and
geography all subtly don't match up; this is another Lumey from
another Sapphire, turned kaleidoscopically through another ninety
degrees.
Another main theme of the novel is
communication and empathy. This is represented by the smartdogs,
genetically engineered greyhounds communicated with through mental
implants from their human owners. The children in the Croft are able
to communicate with the dogs directly without implants. The real
purpose of the government's experiments with these children is to
translate alien transmissions. The natural empathic communication
between the children and the dogs is contrasted with the novel's
broken characters, all of whom have difficulty communicating with
their families and loved ones. Christy and Jenna wind up isolated
from their families, whilst Alex's relationship with Linda
disintegrates due to lack of communication. All of the characters
find release in their art, the one medium that allows them to
communicate the emotions they are unable to process directly. This
emotional overspill perhaps explains the communications across
strands, the weird moments where the characters appear to make
emotional contact across universes.
It is worth paying attention to the
books that Allan mentions in the course of the novel. Christy becomes
obsessed with 'The Chrysalids' by John Wyndham, another novel about
the race of psychic posthuman children who will replace us. Similarly
she mentions the Narnia books, which involve travel between different
worlds. Alex and Christy bond over a love of John Cheever's short
story 'The Swimmer', which hinges on a perspective change, the mind
of the protagonist shaping the environment he travels through. These
references act as signposts, hints to the savvy reader which give us
insight into the themes and structural games Allan is playing.
I originally read 'The Race' in the
NewCon Press edition. The Titan edition from 2016 adds an extra
section at the end, an appendix entitled 'Brock Island'. This section
follows another Maree, turned through another kaleidoscope turn,
returning to Brock Island for the funeral of her friend Dodie who she
traveled with on her original journey, where she discovers the work
of Laura Christy, a disappeared artist who became convinced she had a
twin from another universe. Once again the narrative strands link up
thematically but not linearly. Maree's character arc here is the
opposite of her decision at the end of her original section. However
the themes of communication resurface again, with the implication
that the untranslated alien transmissions are actually attempts to
communicate from alternate universes. The key to the translation, and
perhaps to the novel's recurring images, are provided by the
sequences of an abacus in one of Christy's paintings, art achieving
here what the intellect cannot.
'The Race' calls to mind some of the
more ambitious explorations of the spaces between fantasy and
reality, in particular 'The Affirmation' by Christopher Priest and M.
John Harrison's Viriconium stories. However what is most striking
about it is its originality. In its exploration of the power of art
to imagine alternate selves, to reveal the shifting and changing
narratives we use to give ourselves the illusion of continuous
selfhood, 'The Race' tells us something profound about reality and
our relationship to it. We are all inhabitants of our own individual
alternate universes which may touch but never truly link up. With any
luck, and with the help of great art, perhaps we can successfully
communicate across them.
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