The Amazon reviewers
are divided. A lot of them dislike the slow pace and the way the
story is grounded in the near now (2012 and the next twenty years)
instead of zooming off into a zany superscience future. Now, I think
the Egan novels that zoom off into a zany superscience future miss as
often as they hit (thinking Schild's Ladder here) and I have always
preferred his work that is grounded in good science instead of flaky
hippy-dippy perversions of Quantum Mechanics (I'm looking
disapprovingly at you, Distress and Teranesia). And while stories
pondering the social implications of impossible technological
advances can be interesting, I reckon they are less worthwhile than
stories pondering the social implications of just vaguely possible
technologicial advances,
So for me, Zendegi
being grounded in the near now, and being concerned with the
nitty-gritty of how we get there (uploading ourselves to the
interwebz) from here (here) are big positives.
One danger of working
in the near now is that it is easy to end up with characters who are
too much like yourself (see
Dr Clam's Rules of Writing, #5). Now, the
story of
Zendegi is told in a tight third-person narrative following two main
characters. One of them is a typical Egan main character, with a
fairly sketchy background and a fractal dimension between 2.5 and
2.7. The other is a male Sydneysider of the latte-sucking variety who
grew up in the eighties and comes with a raft of detailed life
experiences and pop-culture references. Which are of course hugely
entertaining for all Australian readers who grew up in the eighties.
This character (whose name is Martin) is an absolutely convincing
three-dimensional portrait of a dull male latte-sucking Sydneysider
who grew up in the eighties. He has the absolutely uninteresting
conventional unexamined convictions of his tribe. I really hope he is
not Greg Egan. But that's not that important. The problem is more
that he distorts the novel and makes the other characters seem less
real by being so much more grounded in reality than they are.
Spoilers, ahoy!
Martin lives in Iran
for 15 years, but luckily is married to an Iranian woman who spookily
shares all his absolutely uninteresting conventional unexamined
convictions, so they all stay unexamined. His wife dies tragically.
He is diagnosed with something that will be be fatal soon. He has no
relations in Australia, so his 6-year old son will soon be left to
grow up with Iranian friends. Even though Iran in the novel is
rapidly undergoing rapid social change, something like Franco-Spain
to Almodovar-Spain, what freaks Martin out about dying is that he is
going to leave his son to be brought up in the backward culture of
these 'lesser breeds without the law'. Clearly the solution will
involve some sort of being uploaded to the interwebz, and the story
starts to pick up pace. Anyway, stuff happens. If you like Egan at
all, you ought to read it. If you don't you probably haven't gotten
this far into the post.
I told you those plotty
details about Martin having a terminal illness and being obsessed
with how he can influence his son's life after his death in order to
introduce this quote, from when he is selling the bookstore his wife
and he used to run in Teheran before things went bad:
"Then he found an
empty packing box and took it to the English language section. Javeed
would have ten million electronic books to choose from, but Martin
still wanted to pass on something from his own century. From the
novels he picked out The Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm, Catch-22, and
Slaughterhouse-Five; from non-fiction, The Diary of Anne Frank, Down
and Out in Paris and London, and The Gulag Archipelago. He was
tempted to go on and fill the box to its rim, but once he started
fretting over omissions he knew there’d be no end to it."
Okay, I agree they're all good
books. Very worthy. But- if you dear departed father left you a box
of books like that, wouldn't you say he was a bit - emo? Isn't the
overall effect a teensy bit bleak?[1] He's basically telling his kid:
'life sucks, then you die.' Sheesh, Martin...
This got me thinking what seven books I
would put in such a box, keeping to Martin's balance of
fiction/non-fiction and English/translations-into-English, and I came up with
these:
A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain
Marianne, the Magus and
the Manticore - Sheri S. Tepper
The Cyberiad -
Stanislaw Lem
Diaspora - Greg Egan
Selected essays
1934-1943 - Simone Weil
St Thomas Aquinas - G.
K. Chesterton
How to Make our Ideas
Clear - Charles Peirce
Each of those fiction
books has a good mix of comedy and tragedy, profound thinky bits and
purely exhilarating entertaining bits, and breathes something of the
potential of the sentient spirit, despite being written by wildly
different people with wildly different ideas. IMHO.
For the non-fiction,
Weil and Chesterton both write about the battle for the soul of
Languedoc. The worldviews they approach it with are diametrically
opposed. They disagree about absolutely everything in European
history. But, they are both clear, logical, passionate, uplifting,
and convincing in their arguments that there were truths and beauties
in Mediaeval civilisation that modern civilisation has lost to our
detriment. Together they provide a sense of perspective that will do
Javeed a lot better service than a focus at the maggoty horrors of
the 20th century. And to complete the balance, Peirce gives a
razor-sharp exposition of the one thing in our civilisation that
makes it unequivocally better than the old days. He, too, is clear,
logical, passionate and uplifting.
[1]: They are all also
strangely limited in time. They are all productions from humanity's
dark night of the soul, the nightmare decades at the dead heart of
the short shithouse century, 1914-1991.
