Christopher Priest - Fugue For A Darkening Island (1972)

"Everywhere they caused social upheaval; but in Britain, where a neo-racist government had come to power on an economic-reform ticket, they did much more."

   'Fugue For A Darkening Island' is Christopher Priest's damning indictment of Britain's innate conservatism and xenophobia that rings disturbingly true some forty years after it was published. It is also about the dangers of not standing up to evil. In some ways it can be seen as a riposte to the 'cozy catastrophes' of John Wyndham, in which middle class English folk respond to the apocalypse with their typical stiff upper lip and good sense and so maintain order and decency in the face of chaos. Here Priest wields a similarly dry, paternalistic tone to great ironic effect as he undermines the very notion of English decency.
   In 'Fugue For A Darkening Island', the incident that precipitates the catastrophe isn't an alien invasion or a plague. Africa is rendered uninhabitable by nuclear weapons, causing a massive exodus of refugees. Whereas in the rest of the world they simply cause the standard problems one would expect from an influx of a large population in need of food and shelter, in UK, where a racist far right government has come into power, they are met with suspicion, hostility and violence, eventually leading to a civil war with the African immigrants and their supporters on one side and the fascist government and the military on the other. The story centres on Alan Whitman, a British everyman who has never taken a moral or political stance his entire life. He and his wife and daughter are forced to leave their home by the conflict, and join up with a gang of refugees, where he is separated from his family.    
      In addition to its uncompromising subject matter, 'Fugue' is also ambitiously constructed, the structure designed to mimic that of a fugue, with three interweaving plot strands that echo each other as they progress. Episodes from the protagonist's early life are intertwined with the narrative explaining how the political situation collapsed and a third strand follows the protagonist through a socially disrupted England as he tries to find his wife and daughter. What could have been an unnecessary complication turns out to be an effective storytelling device. The disrupted narrative echoes the fractured state of mind of the protagonist, and the contrast of his state of mind and his behaviour throughout different points in the crisis allow us to see just how much he has been damaged by the experience. Additionally it lets us know more about Alan Whitman the person. The frank descriptions of his sexual awakenings may not initially seem to have much to do with the plot at hand, but as the narrative progresses and we get more and more information about his character, it casts some of his later decisions and behaviour in a different light. Whitman is a selfish and self-absorbed man, with that stereotypical British desire to avoid confrontation at all costs. Thus, he finds himself trapped in  a loveless marriage, constantly cheating on his wife and oblivious to the feelings of his young daughter, lacking the courage or conviction to either commit to his marriage or admit it isn't working and move on. This same fear of committing oneself is echoed in Whitman's response to the political situation developing around him. He initially joins a pro-immigrants rights group at his work, but doesn't actually do anything apart from go on a single protest march, and pulls out when the government starts cracking down on dissident activity. He even acknowledges the public's worrying political apathy in the face of political extremism, but fails to notice this characteristic in himself. There is an absolutely cringe-worthy scene in which he finds himself at a pub laughing nervously as an acquaintance makes racist jokes about the immigrants.
   This reluctance to commit haunts Whitman and drives his every action, even as he is forced out of his home by a situation created by his brutal fascist government. It is only as he searches for his wife and child, who have been kidnapped and sent to a makeshift brothel by the militant African forces, that he starts to make the first steps towards action. He shoots down a helicopter with an African pilot out of revenge, but when he goes to investigate the wreckage and finds the pilot still alive but mortally wounded he still cannot make himself either kill the man out of revenge or to put him out of his misery.
   As the story progresses, Whitman becomes more and more of an unreliable narrator. His natural inward focus is intensified by the crisis, and while he still shares his thoughts and experiences in his clipped, detached manner, it becomes clear that his sense of perspective towards outside events is becoming more and more warped as his decisions become less and less rational. The way Priest uses a dry and understated voice to ironically underscore just how twisted his protagonist's perception is brings to mind Anna Kavan's similarly apocalyptic 'Ice'. There is a scene towards the end when the rest of the UK has collapsed into anarchy where Whitman comes across a sleepy middle class village which is blissfully unaware of the situation outside its walls, which is reminiscent of the middle class family in Samuel R. Delany's 'Dhalgren' who still behave exactly the same as always and ignore the complete breakdown of social order going on outside. Priest similarly mines this situation for all the dark humour possible.
   The version of Whitman narrating one of the chronologically earlier narrative strands tells us that the government and military exercised a policy of genocide against the Africans, and he knows that the morally right thing to do is to side with them, however he keeps shying away from actually doing so. By the end of the book he discovers that his wife and daughter have been killed by the African military for not submitting to the brothel clientele's demands, which is finally enough to force his hand in the other direction. He goes on to kill an African boy and runs off into the countryside to seek revenge. By this stage, Whitman is too damaged to see that the Africans themselves are not to blame for the situation; the white nationalistic forces have brothels staffed by female African prisoners of war whom they treat exactly the same, which Whitman himself visits earlier in the story. Both armies have committed horrific atrocities against civilians on both sides, but this is a situation that has come about because the government responded to an influx of immigrants by putting them in concentration camps and trying to exterminate them. If Whitman or the rest of the UK population had the courage to stand up for what was right, rather than deferring to the last moment, this could have been avoided. Towards the end, Whitman's view is so distorted by grief and insanity that he can only see the Africans as enemies, however the only Africans who directly appear in the text, (apart from Lateef, the leader of the refugee group Whitman joins, whose origin remains ambiguous), are all victims rather than villains - the starving refugees arriving on the boats, the prisoners of war in the brothels, the dying helicopter pilot. This is my main gripe with the book, really, that all the Africans and women who appear in the text have no agency. I get that it's a conscious decision on the author's part to emphasise the limited perspective of the viewpoint character, but it's still frustrating.
   'Fugue' is an uncomfortable and uncompromising read. In a world where the UK's government is the farthest to the right it's been in years, and a substantial proportion of British voters are proving that they don't think that government is right wing or xenophobic enough, we would all do well to remember Christopher Priest's warning.  
 

Anna Kavan - Ice (1967)

"Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me. At times this could be disturbing. Now, for instance. I had visited the girl and her husband before, and kept a vivid recollection of the peaceful, prosperous-looking countryside round their home. But this memory was rapidly fading, losing its reality, becoming increasingly unconvincing and indistinct, as I passed no one on the road, never came to a village, saw no lights anywhere. The sky was black, blacker untended hedges towering against it; and when the headlights occasionally showed roadside buildings, these too were always black, apparently uninhabited and more or less in ruins. It was just as if the entire district had been laid waste during my absence."

Above: clearly I should photograph my books before I wreck them by reading them.

Seeing as my normal tactic for reviewing books is to compare them to other books I've read, I've possibly bitten off more than I can chew here. 'Ice' by Anna Kavan isn't much like anything else really. Anna Kavan is the pseudonym of one Helen Ferguson, who emerged from a nervous breakdown and a stint in an asylum naming herself after a character in one of her previous books and writing novels that were starkly different to pretty much everything else going. 'Ice', with its images of a ruined world and vivid sense of encroaching doom, shares some of its imagery and concerns with Post-apocalyptic SF, but with its shifting, dreamlike atmosphere and lack of any kind of explanation or rationalisation, it doesn't comfortably fit in that box. Although he doesn't mention it in the original article, 'Ice' very much fits Bruce Sterling's definition of 'slipstream' as 'an attitude of peculiar aggression against "reality"'. 

'Ice' follows three characters, who are never named. While the world begins to freeze over, the (male) narrator pursues a delicate albino girl, who is also being pursued by her husband. These three characters keep crossing paths and interacting in various ways, sometimes friendly, sometimes antagonistic. That's pretty much it for the plot. Pretty much off the bat, the narrator admits in the quote above that he's got something of a problem with reality. Like Severian in Gene Wolfe's 'Book Of The New Sun', this tips off the reader that everything we perceive here is coloured by the character relating the narrative. From the beginning the sense of encroaching doom is heavy and palpable, yet imbued with a touch of unreality. The disaster overwhelming the world, and the world itself, is presented in a detached, almost dream-like manner. This is heightened by the fact that, as the story continues, events just seem to happen without reason or context, without following the normal rules of cause and effect. Dreams, flashbacks and fantasies all intermesh without warning. The overall effect recalls Christopher Priest's masterpieces 'The Affirmation' and 'The Glamour', in that the impossibility of untangling what actually happens from the protagonist's own delusions leads to myriad possible interpretations. The protagonist's central flaw is so central to the story and their perception of events, which is why it warps the fabric of everything around it. (Appropriately enough, Priest writes the introduction to the current Peter Owen reprint of 'Ice').

Here, our protagonist's obsession with the girl overrides everything else, to the extent that it's only at the end that he realises how much of a monster he's been to her. The book serves as a fascinating and thoroughly disturbing deconstruction of the heroic male desire to save the girl; here it's presented as a co-dependent abusive relationship. The narrator frequently fantasises about the girl's helplessness and has frequent visions of her death. Whenever she shows the slightest bit of self determination he loses interest. He fetishises her victimisation. Yet he feels his life is utterly meaningless without her, and both of them are unable to escape each other. The husband is another dominating male character, strong with an undercurrent of hidden violence. The narrator sees the similarities between them, and even gets confused between his identity and that of the other man at various parts of the book, and at other points there seems to be a strong undercurrent of sexual tension between the two of them. 

The book has nightmare-like ambiance, both in the vivid image of advancing towers of ice and in the way the three central characters are unable to escape from their relationship or themselves. The apocalypse here is not the aftermath of climate change, but something almost fantastical and elemental. It is similar the bizarre dream-like apocalypses in J. G. Ballard's 'The Crystal World' or 'The Drowned Word', as much reflections of inner space as doomsday scenario. The imagery the author uses to describe this shimmering wave of destruction is both beautiful and disturbing. There is something distinctly Kafkaesque about all of the characters' inbuilt sense of paranoia and persecution, and in the way this is reflected back by the people they interact with. Each place they visit is affected by the oncoming ice. While the whole book retains the feeling of a numb, dream-like hinterland, the struggle of everyday people, relegated to the background, is curiously realistic and affecting. Whether people choose to blithely ignore it and go about their daily business, party like there's no tomorrow or simply cause violence and destruction to show the world that they are still there, there's no escaping the pervading sense of doom.