Review: Great North Road (2013)

Peter F. Hamilton, Great North Road (Pan Macmillan, 2013, 1104 pp.) 

This review first appeared in Foundation Vol. 43, No. 118 (Autumn 2014), pp. 135-140. It's been very slightly amended. Thank you to Andy Sawyer, Maureen Kincaid-Speller, Paul March-Russell, and Tony Keen.

There is a body in the Tyne, and its autopsy suggests extraterrestrial incursion. When the case lands on Detective Sidney Hurst’s desk, so do the nebulous agendas of innumerable civil, political, military and corporate elites. Meanwhile, through the shimmer of Newcastle’s stargate, a military expedition strikes out into the vast unexplored jungles of St Libra, Sirius – oblivious to a mustering ecological cataclysm – in search of sentient life. Among them is civilian advisor Angela Tramelo, fresh from serving twenty years for a brutal massacre which she has always maintained was the work of an alien life form; her team is headed by Colonel Vance Elston, the same spook who twenty years earlier tortured her and suppressed key evidence at her trial. We can expect that people on this trip will get crabby. 

The relationship between crime fiction and science fiction is an extremely intricate one. Any work which is serious about synthesizing the two tends to discover its own distinctive pattern of complements, affi nities, tradeoffs and contradictions. Ronald Knox’s fourth ‘fair play’ commandment for Golden Age crime writers (‘No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end’) suggests one way in which friction may emerge. To hide its solutions in plain sight, the clue-puzzle relies heavily on implication, on a shared social consensus. As often as not, it is not really until the last page of an sf novel that the reader knows enough about its world to start making clue-puzzle-style guesses about its secrets.

Great North Road is not particularly concerned with fair play. Data is supplied in whatever order is presumed to be most exciting. For much of the time, the novel solicitously stokes the possibility that Angela Tramelo really is responsible for the brutal massacre for which she’s been imprisoned. Eventually the backstory becomes interspersed through the main storyline, gradually rolling towards this alarming incident. The pattern of interleaved linear timelines is well established: but when we expect to find Tramelo either exonerated or recast as antihero, instead we confront … an ambiguous aftermath. We have skipped the massacre. Tramelo is scrabbling in panic, slicked with blood, her contribution still indeterminate.

It is especially awkward that Great North Road sustains such indeterminacy whilst we pay frequent visits to Tramelo’s consciousness. Of course, many crime authors invite us to peer into characters’ heads without letting us glimpse their guilt or innocence. Guilty people are often experts at having innocent thoughts. But there must be a difference between allowing leeway for sleights-of-hand and excusing authors for withholding whatever they feel is convenient. So how might we formulate that difference? You could say authors should not artificially keep things from their readers. But that’s only a mildly satisfying way of capturing it. Literature is artifice through-and-through: why does only some of it strike us as illegitimate?

Another approach holds that crime fiction should offer a consistent epistemology. That is, good crime fiction takes a stance on what knowledge is and how it can be achieved. As we read, we learn what happened, but we also learn something about learning itself. The electrifying story tacitly establishes parameters within which many other stories are feasible. Disclosures in Great North Road, by contrast, often seem artefacts of its formal idiosyncrasies. They give us very little that is portable or expandable. Sitting and waiting for it to be your turn to know is not a convincing model of how knowledge is produced. Readers work patiently and attentively through a towering stack of pages. Just like the police investigators they depict, we may be tempted to skim, but risk missing something important if we do. The meticulousness and staying power which the novel requires of us are the same virtues it valorises in Detective Sidney Hurst and his team.

It is interesting that the novel’s dazzling socio-technological premises – interstellar wormhole tech, shapeshifter implants, an elite dynasty of clones, longevity treatments, drugs you take by banging them on your neck – don’t radically reorganize its police procedural dimension. The novel does explore how detection is transformed by a regime of sophisticated forensics and ubiquitous surveillance and archiving. With all this advanced kit, must we basically watch our protagonist click ‘solve’, our only source of narrative tension the progress bar moving to 100%, with its cryptic contour of humps and downhill stretches?

But that is familiar territory for police procedurals with a contemporary or near-future setting. In C.S.I., as in Great North Road, the detection function is distributed across a network of experts and technologies. The middleranking officer occupies the hero slot, though not in quite the same way as the classic sleuth. In integrating a variety of specialist perspectives, the managerial perspective is only primus inter pares, not a transcendental arbiter of salience. There is no subject who experiences every stage of the solution, nor could such calculations in principle be fully performed within human experience. This partial decentring of the detective is mirrored by a partial decentring of criminality; there is a heightened interest in its systemic context, and a decoupling of the execution of social justice from the determination of legal culpability.

Great North Road does not, thankfully, trouble us with the professional fetishism or the glossy state triumphalism of C.S.I. The atmosphere is perhaps more closely matched by The Wire (2002-8). Hurst must bargain, cajole, orate, gain leverage, bend rules, cash in favours. There are no faces, no heels, only tweeners. The priorities of individuals seldom harmonize with those of their job description. Bureaucratic and technological systems don’t function as they should. Great North Road is uninterested in fair play conventions; nor does it seem fully committed to exposing the systematic context of its criminality. The politicking, loopholes, glitches and mercurial surges of social complexity tend to be dictated by storytelling imperatives, rather than providing storytelling with its scope and materials.

John Doe sloshing downstream, for instance, may be a reputable way of opening a contemporary police procedural yet it is unclear why anyone in 2142 should take such pains to put John Clone in the Tyne. The gangland body disposal team can anonymize cyborg corpses and hack into municipal surveillance systems. With relatively comprehensive surveillance of public space, shouldn’t we expect such well-resourced criminality to shift to private space? Is melting a bit of meat and bone in a private apartment really beyond them? But the body is not put in the river by gangsters, to sink without a trace; it is put there by Hamilton, to be found.

The way of life shown in Great North Road is not always minutely reflective of its social, economic and technological infrastructure. There are exceptions, but to sloganize somewhat: Far Future Tech, Near Future Customs, Manners, Mores. This incongruously contemporary cultural atmosphere is not necessarily uncomfortable. A proudly Geordie stargate is, in and of itself, a very fine thing to contemplate. Moreover, it’s possible that this atmosphere has not accumulated by unexamined failures of the imagination, but rather been deliberately wrought, as a self-styled clear-eyed provocation that some things never change.

Exhibitions of extrapolative rigor are one widely acknowledged tactic by which science fiction negotiates its mandate. An awkwardness can cling to tacit claims of rigor when the axioms rigorously worked upon are conspicuously a legacy. New space opera is often spotted proving its seriousness by how responsibly it sponges off a trust fund established by cyberpunk. Less well attested but equally important is the tactic of exclusionary rigor. Here what is necessary is that nothing break the spell. The grizzled capsule pilot who, engrossed in the archipelago of an approaching asteroid field, so much as carelessly sparks up a Camel is in peril of losing his legitimacy as an image of our future. Superfluous innovations are as risky as superfluous relics. Just as nothing must improperly last, so nothing must improperly change.

In Great North Road not much seems to have changed about the aesthetics, habitus and culture of corporations, the military, and the police and prisons. No doubt such choices are mixed up with extrapolative worldbuilding to some extent. But I suspect that how plausible they are is fundamentally a wager about their aesthetic intelligibility. In other words, their plausibility solicits preferences and associations formed independently of the novel’s future history. If men in green fatigues with machine guns don’t look out-of-place milling around in front of a stargate, then that has little to do with how probable that scene really is. It has everything to do with the saturation of the contemporary imagination by images of prevailing military institutions.

There is another front, also closely connected with taste, on which Great North Road doesn’t play it quite so safe. One effect of the central mystery is to pose the question: is ‘the alien’ – in the sense of a monstrous, sentient extraterrestrial organism, perhaps the hegemonic trope of science fiction – still a legitimate sf figure? Or is the alien now a spell-breaker, rather like a rocket or a UFO? Eight hundred pages in, we still do not know for certain if we are reading a story with aliens in it. Instead, we are treated to a pageant of proxies. It is as though we are asked, will clones do instead? Or, genetically modified humans; won’t they do? Cybernetically enhanced people; will they do? Extraterrestrial plant life, surely it will do? Then there is the Zanth. The Zanth is a sort of kaleidoscopic reality glitch, akin to an ecological catastrophe. But it receives the kind of treatment typically reserved for Heinlein’s ‘Bugs’ or Wells’ Martians. It even gets called an alien threat. So, will it do? What, exactly, do we need an alien for? And how badly do we need it?

In its collusion with the spectacle of multinational corporations and standing armies that just keep on standing, Great North Road invites a critique of ideology, but it does make fairly safe wagers vis-à-vis evoking a convincing and immersive future history. The ‘ET or not ET?’ business is a bolder bet, but one which pays off. The alien that might be in this story could even be read as knowingly retro-futuristic, a nod to the far-fetched hominids of an earlier era, some horror confined to the shadows because budget is too low to show it in the light. We may realize we do miss this alien and are prepared, after all, to make some allowances.

But Great North Road makes another wager which is neither bold nor really pays off. Just as corporate life has proved robust, and standing armies are standing in pretty much the same pose we left them in back in 2013, so too gender institutions have changed very little. The drip-fed revelations of Tramelo’s past, for instance, ooze sleazy glamour and gratuitous fan service. As we try to conceive of a credible 2140s, we may want to ask – as a rough benchmark – how have gender and sexual politics changed from the 1880s to the present day? Yet Great North Road gives us a deeply binary and subtly hierarchical world, peppered with hokey truisms about boys and girls, men and women, husbands and wives. 

Complexity is added, however, in the form of Hurst’s sidekick, Detective Ian Lanagin. We first meet Lanagin on duty, flirting with a pair of scantily clad lassies: ‘I’m in there, man. Did you see those lassies? Up for it they were, both of them’ (9). Lanagin is a manifesto for cyborg misogyny, who abuses police data systems to stalk his targets and devise his pickup strategies. As an institutionally fostered social type, and a case study in police sexuality at the intersection of voyeurism, chivalry and clout, Lanagin is one of the novel’s subtler achievements. But the resolution of his plot arc is unacceptable. When Lanagin meets his match – gorgeous, rich and, discomfitingly, class-inflected – revisionist implications ripple back across his previous frightening behaviour. Boys will be boys, seems to be the official line, but some day they all grow up and settle down. Lanagin’s emasculation is apparently being played for laughs. Are we soon to meet the predictable evolution of this comic character; grumbling, doting Lanagin under-the-thumb? Luckily, a monster slashes his throat out before we have to discover.

Great North Road is tricky to place ideologically. On balance, my impression was one of discreet Middle Englishness. Granted, the capitalism it portrays is one of corporate misdeeds, cronyism, corruption, decadence and precarity. Teamwork, even to the point of sacrificing oneself for a collective, rises and disports itself rather elegantly above this mire. But for all that the novel’s capitalism resembles our own, it is an embroidered version of the current regime. There's a kind of literary centrism at play here. What a left-wing reader could just about celebrate as a prophetic satire, a right-wing reader can still regard as a boundary flag – as a pathological and dysfunctional extreme implying, the relative moderation of our contemporary status quo. Perhaps Sid Hurst was a bit of an Ian Lanagin himself in his day! But now he is a decent, family man, doing what he has to do: possessive individualism and civil, vocational and familial privatism. We are supposed to like him, his long-suffering wife Jacinta, and their two impertinent kids. So if Hamilton is trying to please everyone, I think he catches the right-wing reader’s eye oftener.

That said, thoroughgoing Middle Englishness could never really survive an act of imaginative expression of such scale and ambition. There is ultimately a great deal to like about this novel. There is merit in the bare fact of being able to turn out 1,000-plus pages of proficient prose. Certain economies of scale kick in: a plot thread simply left hanging long enough then seized up again can feel satisfying in the same way as a plot twist can; and though Hamilton does not achieve the stylistic variety of, for instance, Iain M. Banks’ space opera, by the end of the novel a diverse grandeur has gradually accumulated.

There is some excellent interplay between passages of deliberately arduous information and often bloody action sequences. The St Libra narrative strand is dominated not so much by military science fiction as military logistics science fiction. The fine grain elaboration of its material culture is another of its admirable features, albeit at times a bit Top Gear. Hamilton is particularly proficient at contriving tense scenarios by layering together mundane and extraordinary mishaps. Sometimes the slow, detailed mode is also deployed as a crucible of tension in its own right. The plodding early phases of the expedition employs that mode, gradually establishing a potent sense of remoteness. There is a real sense that small decisions or acts of neglect can have tremendous consequences. The Zanth in particular is used sparingly but thrillingly; the novel’s closing sentences are excellent. Part of me was left wondering, however, whether Hamilton could have cast his exacting eye a little oftener in the direction of the human (posthuman) heart? Or indeed, what might he have written had he permitted himself complete absorption by his unfolding material, bringing to bear his considerable talents – his comprehensiveness, his copia, his evident interest in pacing and his skill at convergence – in a manner less attentive to his presumed readers, and to their presumed appetites for worlds and thrills?

Ronald Knox's Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction

Since these are so often reproduced in abridged form, I thought I'd put these here.

It seems a pity that somebody cannot invent a kind of crook film in which the crime will be enacted in front of the camera exactly as it took place, but will be turned into a mystery by the simple expedient of releasing the film backwards. So highly specialized a form of art will need, clearly, specialized rules. And the detective author, alone among authors, cannot even in this libertine age afford to break the rules. The moderns will attempt to write poetry without rhyme or metre, novels without plot, prose without sense; they may be right or wrong, but such liberties must not be taken in the field of which we are speaking. You cannot write a Gertrude Stein detective story. For the detective story is a game between two players, the author of the one part and the reader of the other part. The reader has scored if, say, half - way through the book he has laid his hand on the right person as the criminal, or has inferred the exact method by which the crime was perpetrated, in defiance of the author's mystifications. The author on his side counts the victory, if he succeeds in keeping the reader in a state of suspended judgment over the criminal, or complete mystification over the method, right up to the last chapter; and yet can show the reader how he ought to have solved the mystery with the light given him.

As with the acrostic, as with the cross - word competition, honourable victory can be achieved only if the clues were 'fair'. Thus, when we say that the detective story has rules, we do not mean rules in the sense in which poetry has rules, but rules in the sense in which cricket has rules - a far more impressive consideration to the ordinary Englishman. The man who writes a detective story which is 'unfair' is not simply pronounced guilty of an error in taste. He has played foul, and the referee orders him off the field. I laid down long ago certain main rules, which I reproduce here with a certain amount of commentary; not all critics will be agreed as to their universality or as to their general importance, but I think most detective 'fans' will recognize that these principles, or something like them, are necessary to the full enjoyment of a detective story. I say 'the full enjoyment'; we cannot expect complete conformity from all writers, and indeed some of the stories selected in this very volume transgress the rules noticeably. Let them stand for what they are worth.

I. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow. The mysterious stranger who turns up from nowhere in particular, from a ship as often as not, whose existence the reader had no means of suspecting from the outset, spoils the play altogether. The second half of the rule is more difficult to state precisely, especially in view of some remarkable performances by Mrs. Christie. It would be more exact to say that the author must not imply an attitude of mystification in the character who turns out to be the criminal.

II. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course. To solve a detective problem by such means would be like winning a race on the river by the use of a concealed motor - engine. And here I venture to think there is a limitation about Mr. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. He nearly always tries to put us off the scent by suggesting that the crime must have been done by magic; and we know that he is too good a sportsman to fall back upon such a solution. Consequently, although we seldom guess the answer to his riddles, we usually miss the thrill of having suspected the wrong person.

III. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. I would add that a secret passage should not be brought in at all unless the action takes place in the kind of house where such devices might be expected. When I introduced one into a book myself, I was careful to point out beforehand that the house had belonged to Catholics in penal times. Mr. Milne's secret passage in the Red House Mystery is hardly fair; if a modern house were so equipped - and it would be villainously expensive - all the countryside would be quite certain to know about it.

IV. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end. There may be undiscovered poisons with quite unexpected reactions on the human system, but they have not been discovered yet, and until they are they must not be utilized in fiction; it is not cricket. Nearly all the cases of Dr. Thorndyke, as recorded by Mr. Austin Freeman, have the minor medical blemish; you have to go through a long science lecture at the end of the story in order to understand how clever the mystery was.

V. No Chinaman must figure in the story. Why this should be so I do not know, unless we can find a reason for it in our western habit of assuming that the Celestial is over - equipped in the matter of brains, and under - equipped in the matter of morals. I only offer it as a fact of observation that, if you are turning over the pages of a book and come across some mention of 'the slit - like eyes of Chin Loo', you had best put it down at once; it is bad. The only exception which occurs to my mind - there are probably others - is Lord Ernest Hamilton's Four Tragedies of Memworth.

VI. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right. That is perhaps too strongly stated; it is legitimate for the detective to have inspirations which he afterwards verifies, before he acts on them, by genuine investigation. And again, he will naturally have moments of clear vision, in which the bearings of the observations hitherto made will become suddenly evident to him. But he must not be allowed, for example, to look for the lost will in the works of the grandfather clock because an unaccountable instinct tells him that that is the right place to search. He must look there because he realizes that that is where he would have hidden it himself if he had been in the criminal's place. And in general it should be observed that every detail of his thought - process, not merely the main outline of it, should be conscientiously audited when the explanation comes along at the end.

VII. The detective must not himself commit the crime. This applies only where the author personally vouches for the statement that the detective is a detective; a criminal may legitimately dress up as a detective, as in the Secret of Chimneys, and delude the other actors in the story with forged references.

VIII. The detective must not light on any clues are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader. Any writer can make a mystery by telling us that at this point the great Picklock Holes suddenly bent down and picked up from the ground an object which he refused to let his friend see. He whispers 'Ha!' and his face grows grave - all that is illegitimate mystery - making. The skill of the detective author consists in being able to produce his clues and flourish them defiantly in our faces: 'There!' he says, 'what do you make of that?' and we make nothing.

IX. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader. This is a rule of perfection; it is not of the esse of the detective story to have a Watson at all. But if he does exist, he exists for the purpose of letting the reader have a sparring partner, as it were, against whom he can pit his brains. 'I may have been a fool,' he says to himself as he puts the book down, 'but at least I wasn't such a doddering fool as poor old Watson.'

X. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them. The dodge is too easy, and the supposition too improbable. I would add as a rider, that no criminal should be credited with exceptional powers of disguise unless we have had fair warning that he or she was accustomed to making up for the stage. How admirably is this indicated, for example, in Trent's Last Case!

This Decalogue is, I suspect, far from exhaustive; no doubt but my reader is all agog to add a few more prohibitions to the list. Rules so numerous and so stringent cannot fail to cramp the style of the author, and make the practice of the art not difficult only, but progressively more difficult. Nobody can have failed to notice that while the public demand for mystery stories remains unshaken, the faculty for writing a good mystery story is rare, and the means of writing one with any symptom of originality about it becomes rarer with each succeeding year. The game is getting played out; before long, it is to be feared, all the possible combinations will have been used up.

The Blushing Face of Day: Catherynne Valente's Radiance

This review first appeared in Interzone #263. Apparently I have a longer version of it somewhere. So it might one day without warning expand its territory.

Radiance By Catherynne M. Valente
Corsair, pb, 432pp. £7.99

Radiance is an extravagant, plush, campy, melancholy, witty, sprawling, indefatigable work of great literaturepunk. Ingenues, aviator jackets, coconuts. It’s one those neo-epistolary novels, supposedly cobbled together out of diary entries, interview transcripts, radio scripts, commercials, showbiz gossip columns, even a ship’s manifest. Actually, at first it threatens never to repeat any of these forms, yikes! But eventually the pattern emerges, phew. The novel skips about in time too, though always driving towards a definite dénouement.

Radiance is also both alternate history sf – inasmuch as it mentions historical figures, like Robert Frost, doing totally non-historical stuff, like moving to Pluto – and it is sf set in an alternate reality. The solar system it depicts is a mostly nourishing and hospitable place. Pluto has lilies, and perhaps even a path in a yellow wood for Robert to write a poem about. Explorers of Radiance will probably likewise diverge two ways. Some, nurtured and entranced by Valente’s orchard orrery, will be able to metabolise their sustenance directly from her rambunctious prose. Others will need to stay inside their space-suits and – whether or not they admire the novel through their plexiglass – will reach the final page with a sense of relief that their air supply hasn’t run out.

Although the novel can be a bit blindingly dazzling, at its radiant heart is actually a fairly simple story. Indeed, it’s pretty much Valente’s 2009 short story, ‘The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew’. One main character, Severin Unck, grows up every bit as besotted with movie-making as her old man, celebrated director and all-round big shot Percival Unck. But whereas Percival is a pioneer and purveyor of melodramas – especially Gothic romances and hardboiled noir – from a very young age Severin shrinks from such shlock. “Papa. This is silly! I want only to be myself!” (p.53).

So Severin becomes a documentary-maker. With a hint of YouTube vlogger – not that there’s YouTube in Valente’s vision exactly, nor even that many talkies. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to see Severin’s studied and strategic approach to being ‘herself’ – like her dad’s imperious take(s) on ‘candid’ home video – as a metaphor for social media self-fashioning. During Severin’s childhood, Christmas present might require “three or four takes of Yuletide ecstasy” (p.23), rewrapping and unwrapping till daddy yells “wrap!” They may be decopunk icons, but Percival and Severin also act like proto millennials who’d sooner let their their sundaes melt and their sodas fizz flat before they’d upload sub-par Insta pics of them. But relegating such behaviour to scientific romance allows it to be de-normalized, so it carries an aura of majestic sorrow. Turns out it’s possible to yearn for a Golden Age of a somehow more authentic and broadminded narcissistic artifice. Shallow modern living ain’t what it used to be, hashtag majestic sorrow.

Severin’s ground-breaking ouevre earns critical accolades and popular adoration, and it moves in an increasingly investigative, politicised direction. Tragically, while visiting the site of an inexplicably obliterated Venusian settlement, Severin vanishes, while several of her crew come to grisly, somewhat body horror-ish ends. Severin’s depleted expeditionary force does get a top-up. The obliterated settlement’s lone survivor is a peculiar little boy called Anchises. Many years later, with Severin MIA and Anchises is all grown up. Percival Unck, still of course grief-stricken, seeks closure by making a film about both Severin and Anchises. Does Anchises perhaps hold the key to the whole catastrophe?

It’s the chapters of Unck’s film that gives Radiance most of its forward momentum. Unck and his screenwriter Vincenza Mako keep re-imagining the project, so the film mutates from genre to genre. Valente tends to signal genre shifts by piling stuff in rather than by keeping stuff out. Her prose is chameleon-like, but the chameleon is not really a chameleon. Whenever there’s an opportunity for something cool that would give away game – “hey! That chameleon is Chameleon M. Valente!” – she goes ahead and does it anyway. Unck’s film is not, à la Queneau’s Exercises in Style, the same thing told over and over, corkscrewtinized from many angles. It’s more like that improv theatre game where a single story unfolds, but switching genre, and therefore switching direction – without ever switching its director – as it goes.

Being so interested in rewrites, Radiance poses the question, could it have done with one more edit? It is touched with radiant brilliance throughout: the frames on a cinematic reel as multiverses, the wrap party where everyone is still a little in character, the buffalo that says ‘home’ at just the right moment. Splendid bits of worldbuilding – such as the film sets where everything and everyone has to be actually black-and-white – get rushed through the frame, before they can be milked too much. (Milking, by the way, is another major Radiance theme). But perhaps the novel could have been a little leaner, especially in the first fifth and the fourth fifth? No big cuts, just a final twirl of the wrench on all those linguistic cornucopias, tightening them into witty little spliffs?

It’s also terribly unfair of a reviewer to ask for more of something, especially of such a layered, multichannel work. You can’t just add new features to novels, free from opportunity cost and knock-on consequences. But I do feel like something that’s so grandly polyvocal misses a trick by not being a tidge more satirical, even a tidge more didadic. Maybe I’m alone there? The way to this reviewer’s heart is shoving something down his throat. But when you’ve gone to all the trouble of creating such a splendid echo chamber, it seems a shame not to yell something really loudly in it.

There is the obligatory reflection on storytelling. There’s a certain kind of story (maybe called postmodern, or metafictional) which, it’s often said, loves to draw attention to its status as artifice. This is the main gossip about metafiction: as per one classic The Streets track: “you’re fic but my gosh don’t you know it.” Like a lot of gossip, this is partly true and it can be useful. In some university classrooms, yell enough about breaking the fourth wall, maybe you’ll at least break the ice. But if any reader comes away from Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, or Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler – or Valente’s Radiance – with nothing more than the conviction that it was a story, then they’ve only learned something they already knew. Even if they gussy it up, as the insight that stories are important, or that stories are dangerous, or that we give form to the world by telling stories, I suspect it’s still something they really knew all along.

Radiance does find a few reasonable reasons to talk about its own construction, reasons that go beyond self-congratulatory bibliophilia. For instance, Valente plays around with aggressive forms of storytelling – advertising, propaganda, and official gossip – all a bit vintage, so their tricks can be exposed by time’s passage.

Also, the collision between metafiction and sff in itself is pretty intriguing. I think that when Radiance does its sff, it tends to tone the metafiction down. Chipper behemoths whose japes just might be stitching the whole cosmos together are a sort of sf literary trope. So is an offworld camp beset by horrific reality glitches. So is an exotic voyage culminating in ambiguous entanglement with the Divine. But although Radiance does these tropes very well, it doesn’t really celebrate them, subvert them, or waggle its zealously-tweezed 1930s brows in a way that suggests, ‘These tropes know these are tropes.’ Apart from the really pulpy sf, most of these elements are played sort of straight – aren’t they?

And then there’s the question of visual vs. verbal storytelling. How does this manage to be decopunk rather than dieselpunk? Is there perhaps a theme here of seeing something with your own eyes, but only because you’re told to see it? “Or like a whale,” says Hamlet, and Polonius answers, “Very like a whale.” The central role of cinema also complicates the book’s claim to be a bunch of found texts. If a chapter ‘is’ a piece of film, even though it’s words on the page, is it . . . a shooting script? A treatment? A description of the film Unck actually made? Something else?

And finally: Does Anchises Count As A ‘Character,’ Discuss.

But if I were a literary theory gossip hound, I might spread the opposite rumour about metafiction. Metafiction is fiction that has all but forgotten that it is fiction. It cares so little about its status as artifice, it doesn’t even bother trying to conceal it. Why bother, when it’s so busy with actually important things? Metafiction doesn’t ‘draw your attention’ to the way it’s constructed. It just leaves its constructed-ness lying out in the open, and trusts that you won’t be tempted to gawp too much, since there’s other great stuff to experience instead. It’s busy making you feel the presence of people who don’t exist, people like Severin, Anchises, Percival, and Mary. It’s busy raising your smiles, furrowing your brows, and jerking your tears. A voiceover in Christoffer Boe’s 2003 film Reconstruction puts it this way: “Remember, it is all film. It is all a construction. But even so, it hurts.”

If Severin creates realism about a fantasy world, Valence is also creating fantasy about the real world. Radiance is chockablock with allusions – a lot of Greek myth and Shakespeare especially, with plenty of Prospero the colonist, but barely a glimpse of Caliban – and there is rather crucial octopus-in-a-top-hat who must, I reckon, be a reference to the anonymous political cartoon of 1882, “The Devilfish in Egyptian Waters,” depicting a top-hatted and many-tentacled England grabbing for Boersland, Australia, Gibraltar, Cape Colony, Malta, Jamaica, Cyprus, and so on. Radiance reaches for innumerable influences. In a spirit of generosity, inclusivity and hybridity, it weaves them together. The godforsaken floweriness of the Gothic overlaps with the seen-it-all wisecracking of the hardboiled gumshoe, and so on. But perhaps what Radiance starts to suspect is that these links are not altogether serendipitous. They may be evidence that – somehow, in some sneaky, sidelong, unseelie fashion – cultural traditions that seem diverse are all complicit in one-and-the-same project of marginalisation, silencing, and erasure.

Which is why, by the end of the novel, the thing that’s more important than ‘how stories give form to worlds’ is ‘how empires destroy the form of worlds.’

Who is it that really destroys whole villages?

The word radiance refers to the light that spills into the camera lens, and it also implies vivacity, sparkle, joy, perhaps the sun’s plenitude. But the word has another connotation, expansion. The alternate universe of Radiance is all about a territory so vast, fruitful and unpeopled, that it can simply absorb all the imperial and commercial impulses of the late nineteenth century. Instead of going to war, the empires went to space. In other words, it’s just the kind of fantasy used by colonial powers to mask and excuse colonial atrocities. For instance, it’s is the Apartheid myth of the ‘empty interior’ that the Voortrekkers entered, magnified all the way to Pluto.

Radiance doesn’t really get round to breaking the silence of empire, it does at least witness its existence, and begin to try to understand the violence and cunning which sustains it.

So what more could you ask for? The giddiness, glamour, anxiety, optimism and nihilistic tinge of Old Hollywood? The Ars Gratia Artis, ‘art for art’s sake,’ that gives the growling MGM lion his kitty collar? Cowboys, Christmas, some puke, a whodunnit, space whales? If so, I have good news for you.

Jonesing

Jonathan Jones's Guardian clickbait reminded me of Jupiter Jones's early precursor to clickbait, cluebait.

People cannot help but ask Jupiter Jones what the three question marks stand for, even when they've got a lot of important stuff to be doing today.

“It's a very impressive card, young man. But may I ask what the question marks stand for?”  

The three had been waiting for that question. Hardly anyone failed to ask it when they saw the card. 

“The question mark, otherwise known as the interrogation mark,” Jupiter said, “stands for things unknown, questions unanswered, mysteries unsolved, riddles of any sort.” 

(The Mystery of the Fiery Eye)

Earlier:

On Terry Pratchett