Spineless Reviews

Man in plain view

The Rediscovery of Man, by Cordwainer Smith

£6.99, Gollancz

Cordwainer Smith is one of those secrets that everyone who’s anyone knows about: in this case, a smibboleth. Made more mysterious by his pseudonym (curiously not yet derided as the expansion of Iain M. Banks’ name has been) and the posthumous destruction of his notebooks by his widow, the Cordwainer myth is in danger of eclipsing his work altogether.

This is unfortunate, as a brief reading of Smith’s stunning SF work shows. The Rediscovery of Man is an anthology of a number of his short stories. Drawing on the style of Chinese legend—learnt during his formative years with his father, legal advisor to Sun Yat-sen—Smith builds into his stories a timelessness and a depth of human emotion and character rare in such stories. His characters, more than his plot devices or technical specifications, leap from the pages and begin to tell you the story themselves.

The shorts are occasionally variable in quality, and where Smith most obviously borrows from Chinese myth (The Dead Lady of Clown Town and The Ballad of Lost C’mell, and the opening paragraphs to other stories) he loses his own voice: the nuts and bolts start to show at these points, and the reader is briefly lost as form and content begin to come apart. This aside, though, Smith’s style is stunning and has a brevity whose loss, in the face of infodumps and pedestrian Gibsonisms, is to be mourned.

Much is made of Smith’s self-consistent universe which spans millennia of history (and the ashes of all those notebooks). Again, this seems to be missing the point: plenty of great authors haven’t seen the need to invent whole other universes, and it’s unclear why relentless comparisons of the size, scope, shape or logic of such plans leads to universe envy among so many practitioners of Smith’s genre. Rather, Smith succeeds because he winds a thread through his imagined history, and ultimately does not ruminate on imagined events, but on the human reaction to these: the commonality of rumination, leading the race of man to its rediscovery.

posted at: 20:55 | path: / s / smith_cordwainer | permanent link to this entry

Silt life

Waterland, by Graham Swift

£6.99, Picador

Tom Crick is in trouble. His wife has committed a miserable and foolish crime: precipitated by events long past; precipitating Crick’s dismissal from his post as a history teacher. The school’s headmaster has finally been given the excuse to downsize humanities in favour of the sciences, and Crick’s backlash is the generation-spanning tapestry of Waterland. Where scientific principles might never have helped him, Crick develops his own view of progress and the advancement of time: civilization, and the existence of each civilized man, is nothing more than the excavation of accumulated silt, the continuous fight against nature to prevent dirt from blocking life, love and intelligent thought.

Supporting this gloomy but inevitable conclusion are the multiple strands of Crick’s family history, the history and development of the fenland where his and his wife’s families have lived for generations, and even the course of English and world histories. Swift, narrating as Crick, develops themes on business big and small, transport and the folly of great schemes into a crescendo that focus history on the single act of Crick’s wife, and the parallel events some twenty years ago involving Crick’s educationally subnormal brother.

A seamless mixture of human endeavour on both the large and small scale, Waterland is occasionally let down by the indeterminacy of one of its major conceits: to whom is Crick preaching his message? To the converted? The unconverted? The eternally apostate? To bring this in line with the ultimate recipients of the speech—children, dear children—Swift has had to execute appropriately quick turnarounds, and it is here that the story hiccups. But this is a minor fault, observed retrospectively, and for most of the novel the reader is drawn inexorably, like mud down the Ouse to the open sea, to a bleak, lonely and watery conclusion.

posted at: 17:50 | path: / s / swift_graham | permanent link to this entry