Moxyland rush
Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland is completely nuts. I don’t think I’ve ever both fought with and raced through a book like this before.
Moxyland is the dystopian-future story of four young South Africans who live, breathe and (occasionally) try to escape their tech-saturated, corporate-ruled world. Their lives become entwined through a series of coincidences and chance meetings, and each character affects the others directly or covertly. It’s hard to say anything more than that, because the plot starts at word one. One thing that can be said, though, is that this book is really difficult to track down! None of the brick-and-mortars I visited had a copy, and it had to be shipped over to me from some other branch. And I haven’t seen it on shelves since. Puzzling.
First things first: it’s absolutely awesome to read a work of fiction set in your home town. There’s something incredibly special about being able to look out of the window and see the street corner you’ve just read about. At the same time, the Cape Town of the book feels like a foreign, ultra-cosmopolitan place, which makes for a good contrast and prevents the reader from being too bogged down by the setting (not to mention, it’s more accessible to out-of-towners). Beukes puts her journalistic experience to great use in populating the world with the weird and wacky, local-is-lekker types who fill her novel’s streets.
The most challenging things about Moxyland are the pace and density. The book starts off at a steady tick and only increases in pace as the narrative evolves – chapters get shorter, action gets tighter, characters become more focussed and determined. But simultaneously, reading speed seems to pick up and pages start to turn more quickly, trying to keep pace with the page-by-page action. And the novel is filled – absolutely jam-packed – with crazy concepts and tech and future-world jargon. Some of it is so strange that it takes a while to cotton on to exactly what it is. It’s all so well integrated in the world and text that none of it feels out of place, but it takes a while to get used to the constant flood of weird words and futuristic stuff. I’ve never had so many ‘I wish I’d thought of that!’ moments in such quick succession before. Eventually, by the end, it’s hard to imagine that all the cool tech doesn’t exist (yet). For someone who loves to be on the cutting edge, it’s thrilling.
It’s hard to choose a favourite character, because whichever one you’re reading is probably your favourite of the moment (though I had fairly little patience for Tendeka’s naive aggression). Each perspective is distinct and each character has their own slang and way of thinking. Each of them demonstrates a differing familiarity with the ubiquitous technology, which in turn affects their position in the world. Lerato the programmer and Toby the vidcaster, the tech supremos, are successful in their own ways. Kendra, who shuns new tech in her art, and Tendeka, who relies on others to figure it out for him, do less well. That being said, it’s refreshing to see the technology depicted neutrally – as a tool for success, a battleground for meaning and control, perhaps, but benign in its own right. The real evil is the corporate superstructure that regulates society, and the people who put the miraculous inventions to their own nefarious uses.
This book represents, to me, the epitome of what South African fiction should be – a story that is intrinsically local, written by a South African with contemporary themes in mind, but one that avoids the tired and expected cliches of race struggles, crime and apartheid*. Essentially, it’s fiction that looks past its own nose and just does its own thing. Publishing a sci-fi story in South Africa is practically unheard of. Good to see the trend is changing.
I’d built up this book for myself for a while. Reading the extract in Something Wicked**, checking to book out for free online, knowing it’s a setting and genre that I love. Expectations were high, and they were met. It’s a hugely challenging and fun adventure through places both familiar and strange, encapsulated in a rich, coherent world. Highly recommended, especially to the SAfricans.
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*Not to say that these aren’t valid themes to explore, but they shouldn’t define what we expect from local fiction.
**I think. Memory fails.
Musings on Cloud Atlas
I can’t remember the last time a work of fiction had such a profound effect on me as David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas has. It’s hard to put into words exactly why this is, but here’s my attempt.
I was completely oblivious to the existence of Mr Mitchell until I got a recommendation by proxy from someone who knows I enjoy contemporary Japanese fiction. Now, there’s nothing actually Japanese about Cloud Atlas; the connection is that Mitchell himself spent many years in the country and was influenced by the local culture. I picked this book at random from the available copies on the shelf.
The blurb on the back of my edition states that the book’s central theme is humanity’s ‘will to power’, but I’m not convinced. I think a better thematic thread is freedom, and its concomitant risks and perils. At the risk of providing some small spoilers, I’m going to elaborate why I think this is more appropriate, especially for a book whose titular reference to clouds immediately conjured thoughts of openness and liberty.
Each of the six narratives involves either a quest for freedom, an exploration of freedom attained or an elegy for freedom lost. Adam Ewing ruminates on the enslavement of Pacific ‘natives’ and the triumph of one powerful culture over a weaker one (not to mention his own inescapable, oppressive freedom of ship life). Robert Frobisher seeks the financial and social freedom to create music. Luisa Rey, investigating dodgy corporate dealings, battles for her freedoms of speech and security. Timothy Cavendish is imprisoned against his will. Sonmi~451 is freed from her clone-induced slavery and mental dampening, only to struggle with the new knowledge she is privy to. Zachry’s people, living an idyllic, post-apocalyptic pastoral existence, are under constant threat of enslavement. All of these are vastly different, but I think the theme is readily apparent.
The ‘will to power’ comes in as a more general, overarching link that explains the cyclical nature of human civilisation. There is little that distinguishes Zachry and his people, the Valleysmen, from the Moriori that are many centuries (and 300 pages) their antecedents. Power corrupts society slowly from the first narrative until the fifth, whereupon a supposed human-induced cataclysm destroys everything, allowing the cycle to start from scratch in narrative six. Curiously, this reading supposes the very opposite of freedom, that humanity is trapped in an inevitable and ever-repeating process of renewal and degradation.
Mitchell achieves entirely remarkable feat of convincingly writing in six different genres. The separate moods, tones, uses of language and tempos are faultless. But an inevitable side-effect of mixing six completely different genres and narratives is that there’s bound to be one that simply doesn’t agree with you. My ‘missing link’ was the aptly named Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish – while not ghastly by any stretch, and definitely enjoyable in parts, I just didn’t really get it. Where some reviewers saw a hilarious romp, I saw a sad, slightly disconcerting descent into tragic inevitability. On the other hand, i was absolutely riveted by all five other narratives, so I’m counting this as a resounding victory overall.
I found it curious and slightly disappointing to read Mitchell’s explanation that all of the protagonists are incarnations of the same soul. This (admittedly metatextual) point is my only criticism. It adds an unnecessary and frankly quite cheesy metaphysical layer of meaning and mystical significance. The story is so much more beautiful as a chain of coincidental but interrelated threads than as some preordained mystical journey. The protagonists share a common feature – a birthmark shaped like a comet – which is a neat little touch when you notice it. But its meaning should have been left ambiguous. Artists should never feel the need to explain their works or steer interpretations. I find it takes away from the openness of the work and undermines its role as a vessel for the reader’s preferred meaning (fellow media students, forgive me). It also gives the impression that there’s only one true, correct interpretation, which I think is just plain wrong; there are as many correct readings as there are readers.
Cloud Atlas is highly, highly recommended. I’ve picked up number9dream simply because of how amazing Cloud Atlas was. I feel just that much smarter and more accomplished having read it.
First editions
I have a long-standing grudge against first-edition print runs. I refuse to buy them. There are three (related) reasons for this.
First, they’re very expensive, sometimes stupidly so. Now, I have no problem with publishers trying to make lots of money on the initial wave of interest. R200 for a first edition versus R140 for paperback is fair. But some take this to an absolutely ridiculous extent. Harry Potter 7 was R240 at its lowest, and Dan Brown’s latest drivel a whopping R300. I refuse to support this sort of extortion any longer (I’m guilty of getting HP7). Ironically, first editions are also sometimes referred to as hardcover editions, despite very few actually having a hard cover. Actual hardcovers are very nice and durable and usually have beautiful binding, which makes them worth the added cost. But the label, used on large-format first editions, is just another excuse to boost the price. The cost creates a sense of quasi-elitism and exclusivity which is frankly quite ridiculous.
Second, publishers take ages – usually a year – to bring out the paperback version. A whole year. Who even remembers their books for so long? I’m pretty sure the first wave of buyers has been exhausted after a few months and those sort-of-interested folks aren’t going to shell out the full cover price on a whim. So why not capture the market sooner, while people are still talking about the book? Get the paperback out four or six months later, and I bet it’ll sell better than its year-old cousins. Seems pretty obvious to me.
Third, it’s hard to build a nice matching set of books. If you’re pedantic like me, you want all your collections to have matching covers and formats. Which is an absolute pain when you jump into a series mid-way, and have to wait an extra year to buy and read the next installment because the publisher insists on first-edition format.* Don’t get me wrong – most first editions have beautiful covers, crisp layout and clean fonts. But that doesn’t make up for the difference.Also, they’re generally quite a bit bigger than they necessarily have to be (big margins, double spacing and such), and I don’t have the space.
So I grit my teeth and suffer through an extra year just so that I can get the product I want. Some few publishers are nice enough to come out with a paperback first time round, but you can forget it if the author’s even reasonably famous. I continue my one-woman quest in the naive belief that my boycott will make publishers sit up and realise they’re not selling me the stuff I want when I want it. Maybe one day this trend will change. Or maybe I’ll eventually be able to get an ebook reader and have access to a local store – in which case I can have exactly what I want, and for a fraction of the price too.
The genius of Cloud Atlas
I’m just over half way through David Mitchell’s indescribable Cloud Atlas, and I’m going to try to describe it (or, at least, how I feel about it).
Cloud Atlas comprises six completely separate narratives. Each narrative takes place in a different space and time, has a unique tone, register and mood, and has a different format (for example, one is a series of journal entries, another an interview and a third a short-chapter novel). Each narrative except one is divided into two parts. The overall structure is as follows: n1 n2 n3 n4 n5 n6 n5 n4 n3 n2 n1, which means that the story progresses in time until the middle, then regresses again. The progress made sense to me, so I’m keen to read how he’ll handle stepping back through time.
The strangest thing is that, while you could read each individual story by itself (they’re all coherent narratives), they would all be lacking something important – namely, context. In most cases, the preceding story has at best a tenuous connection with the current one (for example, one story is a fictional novel in the next), but the overall theme and concept are so strong that the connection seems obvious. And, in fact, the reader makes every effort to find the links.
In small but significant ways, the stories support and explain each other. One might mention a place name that refers to another, or give the historical context of its predecessor. There is even interplay between narratives two or more steps away – even if the preceding worlds are fictional in the current one.
Thematically, the narratives are linked by questions of power, freedom and discovery, but each one deals with these in starkly different ways. As one character seeks to be freed from impromptu captivity, another struggles with the negative implication of attaining liberation from a strict ideology. The theme of discovery is rooted at once in the exploration of Australasian tribes by an educated 19th century British traveller and in the reportage of a tough journalist trying to uncover a government plot. The mood, while always overshadowed by a sense of surveillance and anticipation (not least because we know there will be an ‘after’), shifts subtly. I expect the endings will vary, too. Other than that, I can expect nothing.
Cloud Atlas is less a coherent, progressing story as a complex tapestry woven from snippets of lucid understanding and shared context. It’s just so strange that everything works seamlessly together, unexpectedly. I’ve never experienced a narrative structured quite like this, and with so much finesse. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Very highly recommended. Let’s see how I feel when I finish reading it, but I doubt it will disappoint.
Book sale madness
It’s a bad day for my bank balance when Exclusive Books has their twice-yearly book sale. I always get more books than I can possibly read, and my bookshelf is filled with unread tomes from many sales ago, but the compulsion remains. This time around, I managed to limit myself to four books, including the second book by the brilliant Marina Lewycka , all of which I know I will read in short order. But the sale’s still on for a while, and it’s guaranteed that I’ll pop in and pick up some more papery flotsam.
I’ve discovered that I get a weird compulsion at book sales. If I see a book that I know and love (and already own) at a discounted price, I feel the silly urge to buy it anyway (Night Watch for R32, what a bargain!). I have no idea why. And it’s not that I want to buy for someone else, or because my copy’s damaged. It seems that it’s purely the drive to (re)own something amazing, maybe to recapture the magic of discovering the book in the first place – and extra points if it has a better cover than my copy. This is especially a problem because I never get rid of any books, even ones I know I’ll never read (well, you know, just in case).
Books: 1, Bookshelf space: 0
Similie-crum
Similes are wonderful tools for expressing nuances of meaning and for evoking a particular image or response. They’re also extremely vulnerable to abuse. In the hands of Laurell K Hamilton, this mistreatment takes on a whole new dimension. Her similes are so ridiculous and opaque that it’s impossible to keep the meaning straight.
She doesn’t do well with colours, for a start. For example, mental alarm bells start to ring when a woman’s bare thighs are described as “incredibly white, like beached whales”. Now, for me personally, there’s nothing about a beached whale that evokes any idea of whiteness (incredible or not). The mental image of the poor woman writhing around with two upturned humpback whales stuck below her waist is hardly pleasant. It leaps out at you from the page, going for the mental jugular, just as you’re lulled into a false sense of apathy by the rest of the writing.
The fact that I’m now thinking of poor gasping whales lolling on the beach isn’t helping set the mood for the raunchy party that protagonist Anita is attending. Of course, how could I focus while Anita is being watched by a character who’s “like a blond shadow”? Because, of course, shadows come in all manner of shades other than dark.
Ms Hamilton must really not like small animals, or else she’s never actually interacted with one. These are the only reasons that I can think of to explain such gaffes as “like a cheerful little puppy in heat”. A puppy, in heat? Really? And cheerful? Last I recalled, there was a general consensus that ‘the time of the month’ is far from pleasant. Of course, the “in heat” part is trying to imply promiscuity and rapaciousness, but it’s miles away from anything I’d associate with a “cheerful little puppy”. Maybe I’m a prude, but I prefer my baby animals innocent and cuddly.
But then, Hamilton’s puppies come in a variety of flavours. For example, there is also character who follows others around “like an obedient puppy on steroids”. Huh? The mental gymnastics needed to harmonise the disparate parts of this simile are considerable. Try to visualise a puppy (fun, playful) being obedient (calm, deferent) whilst exhibiting signs of steroid use (aggression, power). Can you? I sure can’t. And don’t even get me started on the kittens, or rather the grey eyes that are “soft like kitten fur” – talk about a hairy eyeball!
