A short while ago I posted a review of Jeff Noon’s Falling Out of Cars and remarked upon its similarities to the work of Philip K. Dick. Specifically a view of the future where psychological dysfunction has become a social norm. I have since discovered another book working from a similar perspective. Here the PKD influence is very strong, pointing to a possible sub-genre in dystopian science fiction. Call it Psychopocalypse if you wish.
Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon is an early work much in the style of Dick’s paranoia infused work. Some unexplained event has transformed America into feudal states ruled over by unconscious impulses. The protagonist Chaos, who spends his time drinking unprocessed alcohol in an abandoned movie theatre, is subjected to nightly invasions of his dreams by local tyrant Kellogg. In these dreams he finds himself cast as a scapegoat, a focus for the frustrations of the starving people who also receive these visions every evening. Kellogg in turn controls all the food routes into the area and lectures on his ideas as to what caused the event. Finally Chaos snaps and escapes the town of Little America, with the proudly hirsute teen Melinda in tow, to try and escape the dreams and maybe find a reason for the madness they are drowning in. Soon, however, they discover that Little America is not the only place ruled by dreamers and that Chaos himself may be more than he appears.
Amnesia Moon is an early Lethem book that predates the success he achieved with Motherless Brooklyn. He wears his influences on his sleeve, referencing PKD as he did in Gun, With Occasional Music and perhaps to a lesser degree the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic (Melinda and Monkey might well be the same character). I would also compare it to Peter Milligan’s Shade The Changing Man, a comic book series that also explored the idea of America itself being plagued by localised bursts of madness courtesy of a being known as the American Scream.
While it is less accomplished than his more recent books, such as Fortress of Solitude, or As She Climbed Across The Table, Lethem does create a sweetly romantic narrative that ends on a curious note. I’m sure PKD would approve.
Immediately after finishing Jeff Noon’s Falling Out Of Cars, I started on this novel by the brothers Strugatsky. You may have heard their names mentioned in relation to Avatar lately, as some wags have suggested James Cameron ripped off a sequence of novels titled the Noon Universe by the two Soviet era sf authors.
Leaving aside the surname of the previous book’s other making for a neat piece of synchronicity with the Strugatsky’s work, I was also struck that both books are not so much post-apocalypse as much as transapocalyptic – the catastrophes at the centre of both novels are ongoing and humankind has adapted.
Roadside Picnic introduces us to a group of characters who live and work in the town of Harmont, the site of an inexplicable alien ‘Visitation’. The location itself is subject to many strange phenomena, including possible changes to the laws of physics, freak gravitational pressures and the rumoured existence of mutants. Called by locals and the professionals scientists alike The Zone, it is only one of several such places dotting the surface of the Earth. It is theorised that the various Zones resemble the scaring left by bullets striking the edge of a revolving globe.
‘Red’ Schuhart is a Stalker, an illegal smuggler of people and artifacts to and from the Zone. The novel drops in on him at various points of his life detailing his career as one of a dwindling number of old hands willing to risk their lives entering the strange site of the Visitation. Dogged by regrets as to the risks he has run, the danger he has placed clients who have entrusted their lives to him and the potential effects of exposure to any future offspring, Schuhart is a guilt-wracked figure. He is pushed onwards by the need to make a living from his work as a Stalker despite the risks, and also excited by his undeniable talent at surviving the excesses of the Zone.
A rival Stalker known as Buzzard (named for his habit of exiting the Zone alone, with his companions dead or lost) is rumoured to possess an alien artifact known as the Golden Sphere. This eventual McGuffin serves as the object that takes Schuhart on ‘one last job’, in the finest tradition of novels based around criminal activities. The sphere itself is rumoured to grant the wishes of whomever possesses it, which could easily have led to a cop-out ending (”I wish none of this ever happened…”), but thankfully does not. The Strugatskys are aware of the balance that needs to be maintained between the vagueness required for describing the unknowable (the Zone itself being mundane in appearance, but filled with hidden dangers) and an emotional connection to the lives of those affected by these events.
Falling Out Of Cars had its magick mirror and Roadside Picnic its alien artifact that grants wishes. Both serve to motivate the protagonists to keep moving, despite their world becoming too strange to comprehend. The central mystery of the Visitation remains unclear to the very end, but the Strugatskys hint at a possible cause in the title of the story.
For, as one scientist at the Harmont Research Institute suggests, what if the Zone itself is meaningless? Not the site for an invasion of Earth, or even a staging area for negotiations with a benevolent race that seeks to make humans accustomed to their existence. What if the aliens were merely passing through, like a family on a daytrip on their way to the countryside, who stopped at the side of the road for a picnic and then left plastic wrappers, tin cans, oil leakage and gum in their wake to the confusion of the native animals that eventually came to investigate?
What if life itself is equally unknowable, without meaning or purpose and human civilization has no grand destiny awaiting in the stars, but instead needs to simply look after itself, raise families and strong communities that can withstand the quotidien tragedies and difficulties that make up living?
The Strugatskys’ novel was of course most famously adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, profoundly moving much like his other sf picture Solaris. Tarkovsky largely abandons the text of Roadside Picnic, focusing instead on the nature of the Zone and the relationship of the Stalker to it. He guides two men, each with a hidden agenda, to the heart of the Zone where there is said to be a room that can grant a man’s most deeply held wish. Stripping out most of the novel’s content allows Tarkovsky to concentrate on what he feels is most striking about the novel, using long, unbroken takes to suggest the strangeness of the landscape in the Zone. The three men are unnamed, the Stalker addressing them by their professional roles. They joke, confide and argue just to remind each other why they are risking their lives, or even to hide from what their life to date has amounted to. It’s a strangely beautiful and striking film, that teases with hints of the paranormal, achieving a sense of wonder in a slow, creeping shot of a pool stagnant water.
“Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!”
It’s been some time since Jeff Noon first assaulted the 90’s with a debut that suggested an e’d up Philip K. Dick with a masters degree in English folklore. I haven’t read Vurt or Pollen in a good few years, but I remember the exciting feeling of having discovered something new, a fresh voice in British sf, that hinted at an all-too-soon future bacchanal bearing down on Manchester’s streets.
It’s been a while so since I last wrestled with Noon’s dreamlike prose, but over the weekend I gobbled down Falling Out Of Cars, which I had avoided when it was first published due to severe critical mauling. Now there are certain irritants present in the text. Britain has been afflicted by a horrific disease that causes people to go insane if they view their own reflections. Mirrors are avoided as a matter of course. Watches present a threat to sanity, as the ability to comprehend time has deserted the general populace. The only way to maintain some shreds of sanity is to take daily doses of the commercial drug Lucidity, or Lucys as they are called.
As the story is told from the point of view of someone infected by this disease, descriptions tend to veer off, sentences slow to a stop followed by an infuriating collection of periods and the dialogue reads like a drug-addled student who has just been awoken on the floor of a dance club the morning after the night before.
After a while though I grew to understand that Noon had set himself certain rules and these narrative quirks were symptoms of that discipline. Compare to Blindness by Jose Saramago, critically applauded despite the continuing anonymity of its characters, that facilitated a world drowned in shadow. Removing names allowed Saramago to provide further insight into how bewildering and strange it must be to become suddenly blind. By positing a world with ‘infected’, mirrors and strange spaces, Noon has robbed his characters of that essential building block of the individual’s psyche – Lacan’s mirror stage.
The French psychoanalyst posited the theory of the mirror stage to explain how an infant individuates itself, understanding that it is a seperate person. Under Noon, identity becomes fluid in a world where no one can see themselves. Most freeze in confusion, psychologically stalled. Others find new mantras or exercises to distract from the condition. Even the practice of taking Lucys, keeping sweet as the main protagonists term it, allows for a kind of structure and purpose.
Further direction, and the erstwhile plot of the novel, is provided by a quest to collect magical shards of a broken mirror, that each have some relevance to the overarching affliction suffered by the people in Britain. The shattering of the mirror is compared to the ur-myth of Narcissus drowning after falling in love with his reflection. Apparently the infected mirrors are somehow captured aspects of the natural world, the water that the tragic Greek stared into. This is all very poetic, but no actual reasons are provided and no solutions offered.
Noon has drawn inspiration from Lewis Carroll for his book Automated Alice (which I seem to recall was briefly mentioned in Bryan Talbot’s exhaustive Alice in Sunderland). I also see some hints of Carroll in Falling Out Of Cars though, with its systematic insanity resulting from a set of rules. The mathematic escalation of madness, the lunacy inspired by the number zero, it settles beneath the straining narrative like a horrible marsh, threatening to suck you down.