20 Books of Summer, 4-6: Fools, Out of Istanbul, The Separation

The next 20 Books of Summer batch came from a different one of the categories I made available to myself in the kickoff post: my line of longest-unread Kindle books. The first was an Arthur C. Clarke Award winner from 1995 (but apparently published in ’92? Confusing), the second was the first installation of a three-volume memoir by a bereaved Frenchman who set out to walk the Silk Road in stages between 1999 and 2001 (this covers the path between Istanbul and Erzurum). The third, an alternate-history novel set during WWII, also won the Clarke Award, this time in 2003. So I’m double-stacking reading priorities here, as I’ve also been semi-consciously making my way through the list of Clarke winners.

Fools, by Pat Cadigan (1992/5): Either I’ve gotten better at reading cyberpunk that takes place in layers of virtual realities, or Fools is a little easier to follow than Synners, the other Cadigan I’ve read. Basically, three women walk into a brain. Or maybe it’s one woman, a split-off personality, and two faked-up ones. Or maybe it’s a different woman, two split-off personalities, and one faked-up one. Or maybe it’s one real woman, another real personality from a different body and two fakes. One’s an actress, one’s the same actress but she wants to sell out, one’s a junkie who works as a suicide-enabler to pay her debts, and one’s a cop. Fools is essentially three novellas—although given its theatrical themes, that might also be a nod to the concept of three-act dramatic structure—set in a world of brainsuckers and memory addicts, where Method acting taken to its logical extreme is practiced by actors who create their characters and literally cosplay as them, physically and mentally; where undercover cops are given new personae in the realest sense, and where a personality can be split into, and live in, half a dozen or more different heads. (“He didn’t know who was supposed to meet her—him as the whore, him as Dionysius, him as Sovay as Dionysius, Sovay as him, Sovay as him as Dionysius—he’d even lost all track of whether he or Sovay had been Dionysius.”—p. 215.) Cadigan differentiates each persona by changing font, which more or less works, although four characters is about as far as you can stretch that technique. I liked the noir atmosphere, the seediness and knowingness of the voice(s). One way to read Fools is slowly and microscopically, but actually, the mystery plot was compelling enough to pull me rapidly on. Overthinking might have been detrimental; letting it wash over me was enough to figure most of it out. Cadigan eventually explains enough that the uncertainty at the start doesn’t feel pointless. It would certainly bear re-reading, to see all the connections in the light of the ending. Source: longest-unread Kindle book.

Out of Istanbul: a Journey of Discovery Along the Silk Road, by Bernard Ollivier (2000), transl. Dan Golembeski (2019): At sixty-one, Ollivier—a French retired teacher and journalist whose wife had died of cancer a decade earlier, and whose sons were now grown—decided to walk the length of the Silk Road. He did it in stages, of course, three or four summers running, and this is the story of the first: on foot from Istanbul to Tehran in the dying light of the twentieth century. When you read travelogues like this, it’s all about the narrating voice: do you like this person? Do you want to spend 1,500 miles in their head? Mostly, Ollivier is likeable. Sometimes he’s pigheaded—he acknowledges that he pushes himself physically beyond what’s safe or reasonable, sometimes walking forty kilometres in a day—and sometimes his ’90s-era Eurocentric arrogance shows through (many Turkish men are described with the qualifier “little”, as in “little fellow”, “little tailor”, except for when they’re fat, in which case he’ll let you know; he understands that he can’t speak to many of the women he meets in the more rural areas, but doesn’t trouble to extend much imaginative empathy in considering their lives, other than a complacent pity). But his determination and self-awareness redeems him. Mostly, he receives extraordinarily kind hospitality, and he recounts with a touching humility, gratitude, and sense of true friendship the names of people who fed and sheltered him. As he proceeds East, though, the sentencing of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan makes for a jittery rural populace, aggressive and unsympathetic authorities, and several instances in which he’s very nearly mugged and killed. (A tense night spent in a barn in an unfriendly village, detention by military police, and a day in which three men pursue him between villages, are particularly alarming episodes.) 1999 in Turkey was not a comfortable or risk-free place and time to be a white man alone on foot. But Ollivier can’t seem to help himself: he wants to see it through, so a life-threatening bout of dysentery just before crossing into Iran–which necessitated his temporary repatriation to France–frustrates him on an almost existential level. And I ended up willing him on; volumes two and three appear to be ebook-only now, but I’ll certainly read them. Source: longest-unread Kindle book.

The Separation, by Christopher Priest (2002): As in the only other book I’ve read by him, The Prestige, Priest is fascinated here by twins and doubling, shadow selves, and the road not taken. Set on the eve of, and during, WWII, with a ’90s-set frame story to which we annoyingly never return, The Separation is about twins, Jacob and Joseph Sawyer (both of whose initials are J.L., which causes other characters, and indeed the government, to confuse the two). Competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a cox-less rowing pair, they see Hitler, Hess, and the trappings of Nazism. Jack, with frustrating naivete, is basically unaffected by the visit, but Joe understands that their hosts—and particularly the daughter, Birgit—are in trouble as German Jews, and arranges for Birgit to be smuggled out to England in the van that carries their rowing shells and equipment. From their different responses to Berlin, a more profound separation follows: Joe marries Birgit and becomes a conscientious objector driving ambulances for the Red Cross, while Jack becomes a fighter pilot. The novel starts off slow and very normal-historical. But soon, cracks start to show. Jack witnesses a German plane shot down by other Germans. Moments later, he sees the same thing happen again, but differently. Jack’s plane crashes and he survives along with the navigator, but then we hear from the navigator, who says Jack died. Joe is killed during the Blitz and Jack lives decades without him, but then Joe re-narrates the episode, in which he’s missing for a few days but eventually located, meeting Jack several times afterwards.

Joe experiences what he calls “lucid imaginings”: long intervals during which the circumstances of his life change minutely. He is aware that contact with his twin seems to spark these visions, but what are they? Quantum realities? Hallucinations brought on by fatigue and injury? Doublings and the truth of history are crucial sub-plots: Churchill and Rudolph Hess both appear to have body doubles (Churchill’s does his bomb-site morale tours for him; Hess’s seems to be the one who goes through Nuremberg and imprisonment after the war, so where has the actual Hess gone?) In one of these realities, Joe is deeply involved with the conception and delivery of a peace treaty in 1941, while the USA, Soviets, and Japan never enter the fighting. In the other—the frame story’s, so presumably our reality—the war proceeded as we know it and didn’t end until 1945. There is so much thematically going on in this novel, but regarding pace and writing I had doubts. The writing isn’t bad so much as dull: neither Joe nor Jack are engaging narrators, and while their factual approach may have been designed to make them more reliable in a reader’s mind, it makes the prose unexciting on the sentence level. Pacing is oddly slow, too; this isn’t a timey-wimey statecraft thriller, although it could have been and sometimes looks like it should be, but nor is it a deep, character-driven dive into the emotional fracture occasioned by war. Nothing is ever explained for the reader—not the nature of Joe’s “lucid dreams”, not the specifics of each altered reality—and you don’t have to explain as a writer, but then it would be nice to get more aesthetic pleasure from the prose. It’s brilliant as a thought exercise, but a slightly frustrating experience as a novel. Source: longest-unread Kindle book.