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Light
by M John Harrison
(Gollancz, 335 pages, published 31 October 2002; hardback, £17.99,
ISBN 0575070250; trade paperback, £10.99, ISBN 057507026.)
Who writes better than M John Harrison? Of the, let's say, four hundred
writers of  English
prose alive today worthy of serious and sustained critical attention,
the answer is: very few. Perhaps Updike, or Toni Morrison, or Jim Crace
have written better passages of descriptive prose, but none of those
writers have the range of reference, the grounded yet estranging vividness,
the plotting and world-building imaginative muscle that Harrison possesses.
Perhaps DeLillo does better dialogue, and is on a par at capturing the
strange mixture of beauty, banality and menace in everyday life, but
he doesn't expand the mind the way Harrison does. Perhaps later Roth
captures the wrenching and violent undercurrents of the quotidian better,
but Harrison does it without limiting himself to Roth's monomaniacal
single-mindedness of aesthetic vision. Light is the real thing.
It is not a comfortable read, it is sometimes ugly and it is often startling,
but throughout it declares itself a golden novel in an age, and a genre,
of many imitative and reductive exercises in silver fiction.
The book divides itself between two narratives. One is set in contemporary
London and North America: Michael Kearney, a brilliant computer theorist
and a serial killer, moves randomly about our world. Kearney is trying
to escape his personal demon, a haunting presence called the Shrander,
a nightmare creature with a head like the skull of a horse. Kearney
throws a strange pair of dice that have come into his possession, and
interprets the symbols that result as instructions to travel here or
there. He is also a brilliant computer scientist, working with a colleague
to invent a quantum computer.
The second of the novel's two environments is a far future, deep-space
one. Near the Galactic core is a dazzling and mysterious array of stars
called the Kefahuchi tract. Two characters' storylines work themselves
out in this place: Seria Mau, a human girl who exists in symbiosis with
her K-ship White Cat, skimming through deep space; and the likeable,
slightly feckless Chinese Ed (or Ed Chianese), who is dragged from his
sex-game Virtual Reality to become entangled in a cyberpunkish series
of escapades on a planet near the tract. There is a link between Ed
and Seria Mau although we don't know it at the beginning of the book,
and their mutual secrets are expertly and unobtrusively worked into
the story. The connection between the Kefahuchi tract, and turn-of-our-millennium
Michael Kearney is weirder, but is also worked out effectively by the
novel's ending. The whole mix makes for a simply extraordinary SF novel.
I'll stick my neck out: if this book doesn't win next year's Clarke
then I'll be a Dutchman, and I'll have to change my name to Adam Van
Hoogenroberts.
Passage after passage in this novel astonishes the reader; beautiful,
striking, imaginative by turns. There are also certain flaws, I think,
but it is hard to talk about these without appearing to diminish the
novel. Even labelling such reservations 'flaws' gives, perhaps, the
wrong impression, because it is possible and even likely that they are
all deliberately intended components in the whole. For instance, the
huge yellow duck that intrudes into Ed Chianese's VR-fantasy to tell
him his time's up seemed to me a faux-pas. I never believed in the character
of Kearney's partner, his fellow computing-researcher Brian Tate, who
seems sketched-in, two-dimensional in the otherwise 3D environment.
I assumed that the shadow operators (holographic projections of the
K-ship's mind that undertook various jobs on Seria Mau's ship) were
supposed to be unheimlich, weird, faerie, but I found them mostly
ordinary and indeed irritating. But in each case, this was perhaps what
Harrison wanted me to feel; undercutting my expectations at every turn.
Light, as a novel, is expert at not doing the expected thing.
If there is a bigger problem with the novel, it might be put in this
rather reductive manner: Light is not a likeable book. The throwaway
treatment of much of the violence in it, and especially blasé
representation of Kearney's career as a serial killer, is very unsettling,
or at least this reviewer found it so. The fact that Kearney kills only
women seems to pick out a larger misogynistic aspect of the novel, expressed
chiefly in scenes in which violence is directed towards women. This
is an unappealing theme unfortunately reinforced by the number of violent,
dangerous female characters in the book. This is, I think, more than
just a politically correct hand-wringing objection to the gender politics
of the whole. When it is made plain that life is so grotesquely cheap
in this world, it becomes harder to make anything but token empathetic
gestures towards any of the characters, even the three main characters
-- especially when all of them (even Ed Chianese) kill women, and two
of them kill a great many people.
What I am saying, I think, is that Light is a cruel book. That
cruelty is an aspect of life, and that an artist is as justified in
exploring it in his or her art hardly needs saying; but including so
much cruelty makes Harrison's novel rather ugly. I don't mean this word
in a pejorative sense. Light is ugly in the sense that some of
Picasso's most striking pictures are ugly, and to similar aesthetic
effect. The psychologically deformed characters, the often grim environments,
the casual brutality of much of the action, all contribute to this.
The many masturbations references in the novel, for instance, are unlikely
to endear it to many middle-of-the-road readers (although as long as
the core fandom of SF remains adolescent boys, it's going to be something
with particular relevance to the readership). Presumably the publishers
had good commercial reasons for preferring the title Light to,
say, Nasty People and Spooky Aliens Wanking.
To a certain extent I found the cruelty, the ugliness, rather wearing
-- even exhausting -- howsoever brilliantly rendered. There is in the
whole novel really only one expression of genuine tenderness, when Ed
hooks up with the giantess Annie Glyph who works as a rickshaw runner.
Apart from this, and with an almost wilful single-mindedness, Harrison
exposes every one of his characters to the most unflattering and penetrating
illumination. All the characters' petty, venal, revolting private habits
are all exposed. Characters who think they are acting in a grand, heroic
or significant way are all shown that their acts are small and irrelevant.
It bears saying, perhaps, that there is a place, even in so humanist
and (often) sentimental a mode as the Novel for works that are anti-humanist,
unsentimental, even distressing and unpleasant. It just doesn't make
for particularly likeable fiction.
On the other hand, Harrison provides many consolations for his reader,
many reasons to pick the book up and not put it down again. The plot
is constructed superbly, details falling into place with increasing
but never clunking regularity as we move towards the arresting conclusion.
And throughout, passage after passage is so wonderfully written, so
precise in its depiction of certain sorts of damaged and controlling
personalities, so evocative of certain atmospheres and certain possibilities,
that you forgive the writer everything else.
One thing Harrison does that very few contemporary writers have the
skill, or courage, to do is to deploy cliché. Martin Amis's insistence
that every writer must wage 'the war against cliché' has, of
course, much to recommend it in a world where too much popular fiction
simply rehashes plot, character, stock-situation and stock-turns-of-phrase.
But a writer who entirely purges his novel of cliché may produce
a text with little relevance to the actual lives of his or her readership.
We all of us, to one degree of another, inhabit the little clichés
of living and speaking in our day-to-day lives. Harrison's writing is
so luminous that he is able to stitch-in a quantity of ordinary phrase
to the superbly worked fabric of his writing. Here's an example: Michael
Kearney revisits the house in Kilburn in which lives the alarming, possibly
magical Sprake.
Inside nothing had changed. Nothing had changed since the
1970s, and nothing ever would. The walls were papered a yellowish colour
like the soles of feet. Low wattage bulbs on timers allowed you twenty
seconds of light before they plunged the stairs back into darkness.
There was a smell of gas outside the bathroom, stale boiled food from
the second floor rooms. Then aniseed everywhere, coating the membranes
of the nose. Near the top of the stairwell a skylight let in the angry
orange glare of the London night. [193]
This is nicely run-down-atmospheric, but it also manages a prosaic
balancing act that only the best writers could pull off. So, for instance,
it is on the edge of cliché to say that a lightbulb going out
'plunged the stairs into darkness'; we don't, as readers, feel the force
of 'plunged' because it's the conventionalised phrase. But the walls
with their yellow paper 'like the soles of feet' is a beautifully vivid
image, in a horrible sort of way. Similarly, to walk into a seedy house
and remark the smell of old boiled vegetables is to invoke the cliché
of seedy houses from a thousand noir novels, but to follow it up with
the ubiquitous scent of aniseed ('coating the membranes of the nose'
is also marvellously, unpleasantly, vivid) nicely twists the conventions.
This strategy works especially well throughout the space-opera, Kefahuchi
tract half of the book. Seria Mau Genlicher, melded with her K-ship
and scooting through the unimaginable complexities of FTL dimensions,
is a cliché figure from many pulp space operas. But the unobtrusive
stress that Harrison is able to place on her withered and revolting
body, on her dissociated psychopathia, on the unavoidable anchor of
physical reality that nags, splinter-like, in her yearning, star-spanning
mind is rendered with exquisite and -- ultimately -- moving skill. Like
John Clute's wonderful Appleseed (2001) we read these hard-SF
sections always oriented by our knowledge of the conventions of the
genre, and always startled and delighted by the sparks Harrison's imagination
strikes off that particular generic anvil. I especially liked the way
that, rather than plump for one of the usual SF conventions regarding
faster-than-light travel, he creates a universe in which every single
one of them works.
Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star
drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when
they ruled out one another's basic assumptions. You could travel between
the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything. [144].
This is a special case of a more general state of affairs for Harrison's
imagined cosmos:
You could see every strange thing out there on the Beach,
ideas washed up a million years ago, modified to trick out tubby little
ships like these. In the end the bottom line was this: everything
worked. Wherever you looked, you found. That was everyone's worst
nightmare. That was the excitement of it all. [10]
This is a brilliant notion. It is how a writer of Harrison's talent
deals with the potentially constipating backlog of forty million ideas
accumulated over the last century-and-a-half by the many thousands of
often brilliantly inventive, speculative writers inventing, and speculating,
and assembling the formal logics of thousands of possible future histories.
This is our heritage, of course, as readers and fans; the wonderful
and colossal backlist of SF. But it is, in many ways, a monstrously
oppressive weight to SF authors. How to deal with it? If you ignore
it then your intriguing new twist, your hyper-drive, your alien race
will almost certainly turn out to be an inadvertent retread of some
other SF's author's twist, drive or alien. But if you plunge in, trying
to eliminate those ideas that have been worked through already, you
could lose yourself for a lifetime. Harrison's attitude to it is gloriously
inclusive; bung it all in. It all has a place (sometimes a small,
obliquely referenced place, but a place nonetheless). Everything works.
It's only at the end of the novel that we realise how many ironies
Harrison has packed into his title. His prose throughout the book is
especially alert to the poetic, descriptive possibilities of light in
our everyday 2002 London lives. In his imagined future it relates to
the way light carries spiritual freight (Seria Mau likes the 'thousand
lights out of the galactic core' that stream across the sky of the Kefahuchi
Tract, we are told: 'she liked the halo'); to the way light is a necessary
correlative of darkness (and there is a great deal of darkness, literal
and metaphorical, in the book). But we also close the book understanding
a more basic irony than this. M John's Harrison's novel, always challenging,
often ugly, usually brilliant, rarely comfortable, is a serious work.
Light, we might say, is heavy.
Review by Adam Roberts.
Light is also reviewed in Adam Roberts'
feature on the 2003 Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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