Xeno Fiction by Damien Broderick & Van Ikin

Author:Damien Broderick & Van Ikin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: literary criticism, essays on fantastic literature, criticism of science fiction, criticism of fantasy fiction
ISBN: 9781434443298
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

CAREY GOES CYBERSURFING

BY MARIE MACLEAN

Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is a dazzling book. A sprawling, sensual, rambunctious marvel of a novel, it drives its readers out of their everyday world and every comfortable preconception. It takes enormous risks, not at least that of demanding our understanding for the monstrous.

The first striking achievement of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith is in creating two wholly imaginary countries on some alternative Earth, countries with their customs, their governments, their literatures, their languages, their entangled histories. It is a feat I have rarely seen equaled, except perhaps in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Yet these lands, like hers, are based at the same time on a study of actual human history. In the case of Tristan Smith this history is particularly that of colonization. These living pages say more about the colonial, the post-colonial and the way they shape minds for generations than many an academic text.

As with so many stories of virtual worlds, there is a strong ideological climate constructed. But Carey’s brilliant way of avoiding the didacticism which always threatens books of this sort is that the ideological warfare takes place not so much between two political systems, though they are adumbrated, as between the theatrical life of two countries. This permits ideologies to speak through the body. In one country, the island state of Efrica, these are sexual bodies, acrobatic bodies, contorting bodies. In the other, the master state of Voorstand, falling bodies dicing with death contend with pseudo-physical images in the shimmering world of simulacra.

The relationship between the two countries is similar to that between South Africa (the Boer experience is explicitly acknowledged by Peter Carey as a model) and a neighboring area of influence - the suggestion conveyed by language and customs is somewhere like Mauritius. But there is no direct correlation: indeed, every time one is tempted to establish an allegory or even a coherent virtuality, the text neatly sidesteps in a move rather akin to cybersurfing.

One could say that the closest equivalent to the dominant culture, that of Voorstand and its capital, Saarlim, is the grotesquely dichotomized world of the future conjured up by Philip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the novel which became Blade Runner, or by William Gibson in stories like Virtual Light. One finds the same contrast of the wealthy technological masters in their marble towers, and the groveling, mutant, kill-you-for-a-buck, horde of illegal immigrants and beggars who populate the streets. In Tristan Smith, however, one culture and one architectural icon dominate: the Sirkus and its ubiquitous domes.

The Sirkus, once established as a theater to enshrine the strongly moral folk tales of the original Voortrekkers, has become what the Games were in Rome. The thrill for the elite, the pabulum of the masses, it combines the vast screens and acoustic and visual magic of the latest technology with primitive blood lust, as ever more death defying human acts combine with real blood and brains in your front row seat.

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