Occupy Me - Tricia Sullivan

   I tried to write this with ambition. I didn't manage to get what I wanted but it was fun trying and it feels like a worthwhile beginning. I guess now that Occupy Me is on the Clarke shortlist it will come under more scrutiny. One of the great things about the Shadow Clarke is being able to appreciate the different styles of review as well as finding different things to value and new ways of seeing. Looking forward to all the thoughts and ideas in the next couple of months. And big thanks to Nina Allan for encouraging me to try.

“and the sound of the maple trees across the fence became sharper and full of the words that trees speak to the air” (Occupy Me 63)

Trees and a suitcase

   I hate all that plot description that comes with a review – read the blurb I say – but if you need some clues Tricia Sullivan’s Occupy Me has an angel, dinosaurs, a suitcase – think Pulp Fiction, think Wile E Coyote, think The Rockford Files (!) – plus a vet and a doctor. It has higher dimensions and quantum foam, trees of all kinds though especially trees of knowledge that might just be libraries spanning time and space AND it has bird gods, though actually our avian overlords may just be artistic scavengers or better, refuse ‘artistes’. It’s a novel that is helter-skelter and overabundant; in some ways it’s like (a very glorious) extended episode of Doctor Who…and I’m sure that some readers may even think, a little on the twee side. Though of course, they would be wrong. Those same readers may wonder if the parts add up to an organic whole. And to be fair I wonder myself but it really doesn’t matter. There are many, many riches here - this is a marvellous novel – full of love, kindness, empathy and extraordinary ambition - the only one that can give Central Station a run for its money in 2016’s SF best of. But that is to get ahead of myself.

A detour

   Somehow along the way I stopped reading theory and essays. I’m not sure how, I loved reading Winterson and Kundera, Eagleton and Jameson, Freud and Phillips. It’s so nourishing, trying to parse all that intelligence and creativity, watching how people make links and connections and test out ideas. It’s the joy of intellectualism and the pleasure of eclecticism. And actually it’s kind of a turn on trying to harness some of that suppleness and openness. So 2017 has marked a return to all this as I try to make sense of the terror and despair, fear, anxiety and melancholia that characterise a personal and political crisis. I suspect that many of you are trying to figure it all out too. For now at least I’ve recognised two main strands to my thinking that, although seemingly inconsistent, actually complement each other. First there is this from Sebald:

   “Melancholy, the rethinking of the disaster we are in, shares nothing with the desire for death. It is a form of resistance. And this is emphatically so on the level of art, where its function is far from merely reactive or reactionary. When, with a fixed gaze, melancholy again reconsiders just how things could have gone this far, it becomes clear that the dynamics of inconsolability and of knowledge are identical in function. In the description of the disaster lies the possibility of overcoming it.”

This fits in with a conversation between China Mieville and Jordy Rosenburg and with Richard Seymour’s recent championing of Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia.

And then there is this sentiment, here summed up by Sarah Waters in her Introduction to Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus:

“the narrative ultimately celebrates liberation, the casting off of myth and mind-forg'd manacles, the discovery of voice, empathy, conscience, the making of a ‘new kind of music’…Carter’s writing, not just in this novel but throughout her work, is a celebration of words – a celebration of language and all the marvellous things that language can be made to do.”

Neither are about the emptiness of false hope or dogma but about doing work: of mourning and grieving, and of creating space for the imagination.

Intertextuallity

When I first read Occupy Me, over a month ago, I loved it and really heard, in its generous spirit, that new kind of music. My thoughts went straight to larger than life women like Nicola Barker’s Medve in Five Miles to Outer Hope and Angela Carter’s Fevvers; then they went sideways a little to the humour of Sue Townsend and Douglas Adams. I also thought of Bertha and Pearl in Katherine Mansfield's Bliss and of H D's Trilogy and her Tribute to Freud. All of this might seem bizarre to a SF reader – I’m not sure. But none of it felt forced - Sullivan actually mentions Doolittle in the text and, in a book of fantastically suggestive chapter titles, names a chapter after her: Occupy Me is undoubtedly an open and discursive text and dares to venture in all kinds of directions. Ali Smith discusses the "revelation that art itself is a broken thing if it’s anything, and that the act of remaking, or imagining, or imaginative involvement, is what makes the difference" (Artful 23). Occupy Me is a text that demands your imaginative involvement. Some might wonder if I am pushing the boundaries of a reading too far? Actually I think not, getting lost in the dense intertextuality of H.D.'s Trilogy is a bit like getting lost in Pearl's higher dimensions and it's a text that is, similarly, about the search for knowledge and freedom, justice and new possibilities. It is deeply interested in testing boundaries and exploring ‘other realms’ (60) – sexual, imaginative, political and in exploring the connections between past, present and future.

   Finally, because I was trying to make a SF connection and find a way of orientating SF readers, I settled on Adam Roberts, the only other modern SF writer I know that can mix bathos and irreverence, high and low culture, comedy and political (and moral) seriousness with such dexterity and such command of tone. Moreover and more importantly, it felt like an overtly feminist text full of wonder and joy – something driven and original. A work that demands to be thought of in a tradition that celebrates women and the subversive potential of pleasure and play.  This led me, as usual, to try to discover a little more about the author. What I found filled me with admiration for Sullivan and full of anger at the ridiculous gender essentialism that, in part, led her to stop writing and go back to university to study physics. To be honest it scared me a little that the Suck Fairy would visit on the second reading and I wouldn’t like Occupy Me as much. I needn’t have worried.

Plot

Okay, if you haven’t read the book - here is what you need to know. At the beginning of the novel Dr Sorle – a man who has been literally split into two by the greed and violence of modern capitalism and colonialism - forces the dying Austen Stevens - the billionaire baddie, into a magic, multi-dimensional briefcase. Actually Stevens wants to go, he believes it is a gateway to eternal life. He has promised the doctor a huge amount of money to be saved. With the money Sorle plans to build an organisation called the Resistance – a network committed to small acts of kindness and empathy in the hope of changing history for the better. However the briefcase is also a part of Pearl, an angel - maybe: a part that Sorle has stolen so that he can blackmail her into showing herself to Stevens, to show him that miracles exist. What follows is a kind of thriller as Pearl tries to discover who or what she is, as Sorle tries to make the deal go ahead despite all manner of complications and as the larger forces of fossil capital try to thwart them both as they try to recoup the billions that Stevens embezzled. Along the way they meet the novel’s third main character Alison, an aging vet who likes a wee drink. I should say too that though the plot does carry you through it is hardly a plot driven novel. Indeed it is an incredibly illusive novel, trying to pin down its overall meaning is like trying to capture a willow the wisp. At one point Pearl wonders if she’ll need “a metaphysical bomb defusion kit” to open the briefcase: the reader may feel a similar desire as they try to decipher the text. SF readers should be happy with its discussions of entropy, chaos and the butterfly effect but the joy of it is in the writing, a numinous sentence by sentence beauty that I probably won’t be able to capture, and in the characters and in Pearl’s search for justice and selfhood.

You should know too that I’m always criticising books for their simplistic politics but the main bad guy in Occupy Me has made his money from oil, exploiting the resources and land of a developing country, fermenting war, skimming profits and finding ways to avoid paying tax. He and the forces he represents are all out bad: “evasive, cunning, self-righteous, blind.” (176) Pearl, like the reader, is sick of the simplicity of their cruelty: “this is how these guys operate. I’ll never be able to understand it. Here I am giving it away, my energy, my compassion, my strength. And dude wants to sell my own love back to me at a price. Everything’s a fucking commodity.” (179). Finally she sees in Stevens “the decay of age and the algorithms of selfhood that were starting to harden up into parody.” (180) and in that image its hard not to find an echo of this “disaster we are in” – the obviousness of it – its unique grotesque – history forgotten; hatred and stupidity transcendent. Is it too easy to hate a character like that? Of course it depends on the purpose of the novel. And this is a book with a bold palette.

Pleasure

Indeed Occupy Me is often a bit daft, not just bold but a little broad perhaps, a little flirty, but that is part of it's appeal - its lusty joie de vivre and egalitarianism. Pearl is larger than life; she has the sassy swagger, and the hint of vulnerability, of a Hollywood dame – Mae West perhaps. But then she is also one part Hulk, one part Clarence Odbody, one part Fevvers, one part sensuous lesbian role model:

“My body: not much shy of two metres tall, wide-hipped, umber in colour and packed with lively muscle and enough fat to last a long winter. My grey-streaked twists bounced around my shoulders when I moved. I was fond of myself already.” (31)

“I stood looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw what Marquita saw: a fifty-something woman of indeterminate not-European ancestry, her denuded head wrapped in an orange cloth, her weighty breasts moving as slow pendula even in the tightest exercise bra. Shoulders like a linebacker. Traps so steep they looked like one of those road signs that warn trucks to use a low gear. Legs bowed and springy, feet large and high-arched. A nice thick layer of subcutaneous fat: no chance of this one passing as a ripped-up bodybuilder. She was packing power. Marquita looked at me with open adoration, but I always look at myself with surprise. There’s so much I haven’t figured out yet, and most of it is myself” (68)

She is endlessly open to life’s possibilities but also has a problem: ‘I don’t know which parts are me and which parts are my environment and which parts are … other beings.’ (62). And later she addresses her missing part: “You are mine but you’ve been made into something else. I am yours but you don’t know me anymore. How do we put ourselves back together? Where to begin?” (116) This is a text about ontology, identity and alienation just as much it is a book about higher dimensions and the desire for a better world. This is where, even in its playfulness, Sullivan’s text also nudges us toward those big questions that I alluded to earlier: “We begin by not being crushed to death and progress from there.” (146)

The dinosaur and the briefcase (again)

I think I could convince most discerning readers to try this book simply by quoting passages from it. Here is the Pterosaur:

“Over the railway bridge the ancient animal glided black and lunar, like a cracked piece of sky... The creature looked like forged emptiness. It breathed smoke and the vast unlit places between stars. On the ground it seemed amplified. Its wings made a hard wind with even the most casual movement, and its breath rebuffed the waves. A pheromone fume seeped from its fur. There was a disturbing hum in my occipital bone, a sensation of drag on my consciousness. Like magnetism. The sensation was out of all proportion to my physical body. I felt I could be reeled, wings and all, into a single one of the quetzlcoatlus’ black-hole pupils and never be found again” (140-1)
But Sullivan’s dinosaurs are much more. They are a BIG metaphor for linking the past with the present; in thinking about irony, change and permanence. So too with the suitcase. Sullivan excels in using her genre tropes to expand and deepen the philosophical, scientific, speculative and moral parameters of the text. She can be completely literal in questioning SF tropes:

“This is for everyone who thinks ships are made of metal and petrochemicals and that they travel through space like sailboats travelled the high seas, propelled by mysterious engines that grant them impossible speed. That space sailors have space battles with space pirates and electrical cables and explosions and space bars with space booze.”

But then there is this:

“I feel the substance of the briefcase slither between the clacking grip of my claws. The substance of the briefcase itself is deep, and its intermolecular spaces are suspect: they look back at me like eyes. But these clever engineered depths are as nothing compared to the skirling void of that frank maw. Eater of dead men, mother of questions, it is before me and presents itself without sound, without smell, without sight. Without touch. My claws hold the edges of its containment, a mystery field that shows me my own blindness without mockery and without pity. I try to breathe. I need something to anchor me to the visceral but claws and breath and blood are not enough.” (166)

There is existential dread in that skirling void and in the pitiless need to see and understand ‘without mockery and without pity'. The text's celebration of language and imagination goes hand in hand with its sense of the battle between self and ego.

Love

There is a point when Pearl is questioning her need for deep connections and the way she falls for people. Her lover Marquita suggests ‘Love is attachment. That’s essential for the survival of the species. Women who love too much? What the fuck is that? The whole idea implies that love is a pathology. So now women are devalued because we can attach deeply.’ ‘I still wonder if I’m violating boundaries by letting myself reach into people like I do.’ ‘Maybe it’s not love at all,’ Marquita said. ‘Maybe you’re training your mirror neurons. Learning the species by empathy.’ Pearl notices people’s “humanity even when they couldn’t see it anymore themselves.” (98) The little episodes where she sees into the pain and contradictions of the humans she encounters are moments of delicate grace.

   This is a book about training your mirror neurons and to (re)turn to Katherine Mansfield, Occupy Me “is the leaf, is the tree, firmly planted, deep thrusting, outspread, growing grandly, alive in every twig. All the time I read this book I felt it was feeding me.’" (quoted in Artful 84). It’s a text that transforms H. D.’s mystical feminism into feminist SF. To be known by Pearl, one imagines, would be a wonderful thing. To occupy is to fill, to keep busy and active, to hold. Occupy Me is a text that wants us to hold each other and fill each other up; it asks us to occupy the spaces that Stevens and his ilk don’t understand and cannot comprehend.

And I didn’t even get to Akele, kindness, environmental reclamation and of a luminous, deeply political dénouement: 

“Something wants to burst out of the ruination. Out of futility, out of crushed hope, out of that broken place where nothing can ever help. No superglue to repair this tear in the universe. Loss is just the way it is.” (263)

And it does

Reading again and The Thing Itself

Oh truth is mutable, saith the sage. Truth is power, not science; or rather, it is science but science is power too. The strong legislate what is true, and after a while we forget that this is whence it came. Our habits of thought are stronger than strait-waistcoats. We walk about with habit-coloured spectacles before our eyes, and see everything as we are accustomed to see it’ [The Thing Itself Adam Roberts]

Reading and watching films are often the main way of navigating my way through life and trying to dislodge those habit-coloured spectacles suffused with ideology and the stories I tell about myself. I mean, sure, people ARE important but sorry, not many of them have the wisdom or the imagination of good art. That doesn't mean I'm a nasty old misanthrope, honest!

Yet, really….how does one navigate through life at all? IS it just like a river? You jump onto a passing log and see where it takes you. Sometimes you stay on for ages; sometimes you hurl yourself on to another one as soon as you can. You have some agency but not half as much as you think? It’s a cliché of course but I do imagine myself like that – generally, scarily, with a hint of Aguirre, Wrath of God in the back of my mind or else on that Mississippi steamboat with Melville’s The Confidence Man. (Or just occasionally I’m on that Houseboat with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren: so many good rivers and boats to conjure up….)

Anyway, I feel like I’ve just hurled myself off my lonely one-person raft and I’m paddling upstream in a canoe, determinedly, trying not to go with the flow, still getting stuck of course, still going back sometimes, but trying. I’m on the lookout for more canoes, villages, towns….people, for fuck’s sake. I’m 44 and feeling, often quite urgently, all the difficult contradictions of mid-life. You could have details but that would be far too uncomfortable for all of us wouldn’t it? Know for now that the autumn was a blur, frantic paddling, lovely relaxed naps whilst tied to the bank – yes we’re still in the metaphor people (!!) – and the odd episode of howling, desperately at the moon after losing my oar.

Good then that I’ve fought to read these last weeks. Good that I’ve launched into such good novels by Adam Roberts, Jeff Vandermeer and various novels on the Costa shortlists though it’s a little hard for me to judge their quality precisely. Good that I'm able to refocus and see a little differently. Reading the first novels after months of not reading is always a particular challenge - about learning to concentrate properly again, thinking critically and attending to form. First up was Adam Roberts’The Thing Itself. I admire his novels a lot and loved his last one Bête. The Thing Itself made me recall the complex, slipstream shenanigans in Christopher Priest’s The Adjacent – and the haunted scientist, Michael Kearny strand of M John Harrison’s Light. But if Priest is smooth and precise and Harrison mordant and challenging then Roberts’ novel is solidly down to earth and enjoyably easy to read even when bursting with pop culture references and high falutin philosophical ideas: comedy and bathos mix with Close Encounters of Third Kind and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

The novel begins in the 1986 in Antarctica. Two scientists are processing data in an isolated research station: they are on the lookout for alien life. One is the brilliant Roy Curtius, obsessed with Kant and the Fermi Paradox, and as the reader will discover, all kinds of crazy. The other, saner character is Charles Gardner who will narrate this strand of the novel throughout.  Gardner is a familiar voice in a Roberts novel – smart, grumpy, funny, sardonic, embattled. Tonally this first chapter begins like a clever, irreverent comedy written by Steven Moffat but ends up something altogether more hallucinatory and horrific. In subsequent chapters Gardner, his life ruined by his experiences in Antarctica, is compelled to revisit those horrific, life-changing events and face up to the truth. These chapters are full of humour, adventure and it should be said, debates both philosophical and scientific. BUT don’t be put off because Roberts has the ability to make complex ideas understandable AND interesting. Alternating with Gardner’s narrative come a number of strands that focus on seemingly unrelated characters in different times, past and future - the first sees two gay men touring Germany in 1900 for instance and is infused with Nietzsche and HG Wells. At first the links seen tenuous and insubstantial but as the novel progresses you begin to pick up on the deeper thematic and symbolic patterns and the plot elements that connect everything together. It should be said too that these alternate strands are ingenious and deeply satisfying. Here Roberts gives us a variety of voices, evocative of time and place. The effect of these layers is to proffer tension, mystery and revelation. Furthermore they underscore the interrogative nature of the novel and all the debates about the nature of reality between Charles and his interlocutors.

There is much pleasure to be had as always – a Roberts novel is so brilliantly discursive, full of ideas, irony and great prose. And funny – always funny. I also feel ridiculously pleased with myself when I catch a reference – this time quotes from Boorman’s Excalibur and Fowles’ Daniel Martin gave me particular pleasure, perhaps because they are so close to my heart. I’m not sure The Thing Itself is quite as good as Bête, mainly, harshly perhaps, because the central voice of Charles Gardner, is too reminiscent of the central voice in Bête, Graham Penhaligon. 

But the reason Roberts’ novels are getting better, and I can’t quite decide if he’ll like me saying this, is twofold. First, for me they live increasingly on the edge of genre in all the best ways – in the gaps and boundaries between sci-fi, fantasy and ‘literary’ fiction – synthesizing, questioning, reaching, blurring and demanding. Secondly, whilst the intellectual challenge is just as fierce, these last two novels feel more human, empathetic, grounded somehow – not sure of the best word (as usual) to use. But I care more, and it feels like he’s not ‘only’ (sorry Adam!) asking me to think about how I deal with philosophy or fiction or science or a million other things but reaching in and with ‘infinite tenderness’ touching my heart as well as my mind. 

The Thing Itself is another great novel and will hopefully challenge for prizes, just as Bête should have been on multiple shortlists last year.

New Year catch up with a teeny, weeny rant.

All is Lost

One (old) man on a boat.

A small boat.

And he doesn’t talk.

And [Spoiler] he loses the boat.

For one hour and forty minutes.

And he’s probably gonna die…

 

…from boredom.

   At least that’s what I thought, but I was wrong. All is Lost was a wonderful surprise: exciting, compelling and as deep as the ocean. Not Mariana Trench deep admittedly – but deep enough. The film begins with Our Man (Robert Redford) waking up to find that his boat has hit a shipping container and is taking on water fast. By the time he has a grip on things much of his equipment is waterlogged. He is phlegmatic, practical and assured as he goes about repairing the boat and considering his options. Then thing get really bad! On one level it’s a paean to seafarers and, possibly, a type of rugged, unemotional American as it delves into the psychology of a survivor trying calmly, and desperately, to survive. But it transcends that basic narrative too, firstly because it’s such an exciting, beautiful film and also because it becomes a celebration of human beings’ indomitable will to grasp and struggle for life.

   Redford has never been the greatest actor but he’s been a great and beautiful movie star. I wanted to be him more than anyone else growing up – or the characters he played - because of that run of movies starting in the 60s: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Way We Were (1972 – not so great admittedly, but I fell for it anyway), The Sting (1973), Three Days of the Condor (1975), All the President’s Men, (1976) and Out of Africa (1985). There are days, alas, when I wish I’d grown up watching Tarkovsky but it was the great American films of the 70s that made me and I know it. In All is Lost Redford is 77 and not quite so beautiful any more but all the gestures and movements are the same and he gives a fantastic performance. Throughout the film though I couldn’t help but think of that serious, glamorous, younger man who helped millions of men and women to yearn, dream and idealise. It’s not just that you are forced to think about the passing of time and age – your own and Redford’s - but you can’t help but think of all those complex interconnections between stardom, fame, cinema, fantasy and meaning.

   If you’re anything like me you’ll be trying to remember how much of the world’s surface is ocean too. I’ll save you looking it up – it’s 71%. That’s A LOT.

 

 

American Hustle

   Some of my fondest film memories are of comedies – probably, I think, because good comedies are so rare. I remember laughing out loud at Crimes and Misdemeanours and Rushmore (when hardly anyone else in the cinema was), at The Other Guys (when most were) and at 21 Jump Street, Youth in Revolt or (long, long ago) Some Like It Hot, Manhattan and The Pink Panther alone at home. Best of all I can remember watching Young Frankenstein, Airplane, and all the old Steve Martin films with Helen and giggling uncontrollably.  To that list I happily now add David O Russell’s American Hustle. Not that it’s perfect – it’s long, big and baggy. Sometimes you long for a little more showing and a little less telling too – not that it EVER feels lifeless, but you suspect that the whole project was a little rushed: the themes get laid out a little too much in the dialogue rather than living and breathing through the structure of the film. On one level that’s probably a little unfair – the script in Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter was a huge part of the magic and it crackles in Hustle too, but it definitely lacks cohesion. What you get though is a bravura display of acting magic and directorial fireworks and more than anything Hustle makes you understand the power and attraction of stars. We already know about Jennifer Lawrence – the whole world has been wowed and she is utterly brilliant again – if she hadn’t won the Oscar for Best Actress last year she be nailed on for Supporting Actress this time. But who would have thought Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper could be THIS funny.  Amy Adams, literally at the centre of the film and Jeremy Renner get less chance for laughs but are, nonetheless, astonishingly good. If structure and subtlety are somewhat lacking, Russell’s camerawork and the editing enable you to inhabit the world and see things from the viewpoints of the (largely) unsympathetic characters. The soundtrack of 70s tracks is electric too and used beautifully to reinforce the comedy and the irony. LOVED it!

Upstream Colour (and a little rant and slight spoilers)

   I read the Guardian every day but sometimes it really does wind me up. I refer you to this moronic bit of filler. If Cloud Atlas, Elysium, Iron Man 3 and Star Trek: Into Darkness are four of the best sci-fi and comic book movies of 2013 then I need a brain and personality transplant ASAP. Ben Child starts the article by worrying about the opportunities for Arthouse projects but argues that if there is a “silver lining, it is that studios are getting better at making these preposterously expensive, spectacle-heavy movies”. Really? REALLY! I realise that my geek pretensions are crumbling but three of these films (Cloud Atlas tried – I’ll give it that) wasted interesting ideas and turned everything in to brainless drivel. Incidentally, Blomkamp also managed to inspire THE MOST DIRE performance from Jodie Foster (and Sharlto Copley wasn’t much better). 

   Luckily, 2013 will be measured as a landmark year because we got Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity and Shane Carruth’s Upstream Colour. Carruth’s film might not be considered sci-fi (definitions are so difficult) but think about the first twenty minutes. A man has discovered that maggots living on a particular plant have various mind-altering properties. He tests it first by straining the maggots through fluids and giving the drink to local youths. Next thing we see, he abducts a young woman and forces her to swallow one of the maggots: she becomes little more than a childlike automaton and what follows is one part Alien, one part Philip K Dick, one part 2001 and one part David Cronenberg.  Admittedly that last line is there just to tempt all you geeks to watch this amazing film because Carruth’s vision is unique, obtuse and not a little difficult. Anyone that saw his only other film, Primer, will know what I mean. Critical opinion is mixed –some love Upstream Colour (it came sixth on the Sight and Sound best of 2013 poll), some think it monstrously pretentious and some think it derivative of late Malick. I’d watch it first without knowing too much about it but if you need convincing I’ll refer you to these two thoughtful reviews. I loved it on first viewing but second time round it blew me away. It’s about how we invent and reinvent ourselves; how we invest our lives with meaning (or fail to); about coming to terms with the meaningless of existence and much more – all with parasitic worms! Better than that, it’s made with degrees of vitality, creativity and oomph missing in most American film. In short it’s fucking brilliant and I’m gonna have to rejig my ‘Best of 2013’ to somehow get it in my top 5.