Beautifully Structured Work tells a Moving and Deeply Affecting Tale

Another recent review from the Irish Examiner…

This Magnificent Desolation

This Magnificent Desolation
Thomas O’Malley
Bloomsbury; £16.99
Review: Val Nolan

On July 20 1969, the United States landed two men, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, on the moon while a third, Michael Collins, remained in orbit. In doing so they met the challenge issued a mere eight years earlier by then President John F Kennedy, an accomplishment of such technical and logistical scope that it exceeded even that of the Manhattan Project or the construction of the Panama Canal. Yet Apollo, as Kennedy promised, was not just “one man going to the Moon”, it was the journey of “an entire nation”. The only question being what would happen to that nation when it fell to Earth?

In This Magnificent Desolation, which takes its title from Aldrin’s description of the lunar surface, Thomas O’Malley articulates the crisis in American society stemming from the future’s failure to live up to its promise. The novel opens with a boy born deep in the winter of 1972 as the final moonwalkers lope across the Taurus-Littrow Valley. However the America which Duncan Bright inherits is defined more by the ignominies of Vietnam than by its victories in the Space Race. It is a country in which Apollo, a superpower’s consuming material and imaginative passion for a decade, has vanished almost overnight.

Raised in a Capuchin orphanage in frigid Minnesota, Duncan grows up believing his parents to be dead. At age 10, he sees a television special about the space programme and transforms what he learns into a compulsive fantasy that the astronauts never made it home. Through this, O’Malley merges the Catholic spirituality of the Brothers who raised Duncan with the greatest of 20th century technological achievements and the worst of the boy’s own parental anxieties. The astronauts become “angels” for the young Duncan, beings “lost like his father and unable to come home”. He hears them calling in the night, his ancient transistor relaying “the distinct beeps and clicks of the Apollo radio transmissions, and then the urgent voices of the astronauts, but he cannot make out what they are saying”.

Despite such fancy, O’Malley plays his otherworldly communiqués entirely straight. This Magnificent Desolation is neither a work of magical-realism nor of alternate history. The voices on Duncan’s radio are part of a coping mechanism. The novel’s unrelenting air of misery persists even when Duncan’s mother Maggie unexpectedly reappears to take him back to San Francisco. It is a change of scene which, after 100 pages in the orphanage, is as jarring for the reader as it is for Duncan. Which is of course exactly as it should be. In California, Duncan sits on a barstool while his alcoholic mother, a failed soprano, sings in a local bar; he rides pillion, literally in the back seat of his own story, while her on-again, off-again boyfriend Joshua “quotes Dante’s Purgatorio aloud to himself in the dark”.

The touching and achingly real bonds which form within this surrogate family provide many of the novel’s best scenes. The emotional sturm und drang of Maggie and Joshua’s lives become, in O’Malley’s second great creative conflation, as darkly fascinating for Duncan as the distant vistas of selenian maria visible from his rooftop perch. To the boy’s eyes it is as though the pair are playing out “a romance from when they were both teenagers and lived in the same neighborhood”, a remnant of a time when anything seemed possible.

While the lives of the characters may be imperfect, This Magnificent Desolation itself is the opposite, a beautifully structured work pivoting around a re-showing of Frank Borman’s famous Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast from lunar orbit — “God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth” — which occurs exactly halfway through. More than even Armstrong and Aldrin’s landing, Apollo 8’s initial circumlunar flight is a moment in which America seems poised on the cusp of something glorious. Nevertheless, Apollo’s focus on national prestige over scientific endeavor is what inadvertently creates the America which Duncan inhabits. It is a country where everyone is a Space Age Alexander for whom there are no new worlds to conquer.

O’Malley’s 20th century is one where the possibilities have failed to materialize  There is a moratorium here on Duncan’s dreams of a better tomorrow, and in place of, say, Clarke and Kubrick’s freewheeling space stations or Roddenberry’s “new life and new civilizations  — both contemporaneous with the early stages of Apollo — the America of this novel is perversely Earthbound, its science and technology stuck at an infuriating level and its dramatis personæ mired in memories of a pointless foreign conflict. The truth of this threatens to break characters such as Joshua, an ex-Green Beret who once believed “in JFK, believed in doing for my country, never mind what my country did for me”.

Joshua’s reward for loyal service is to be “cast into darkness”. Indeed he is left so damaged by his Vietnam experience that he may be incapable of being saved and, in contrast to Duncan’s sad heroes of the sky, he works now on a dangerous tunneling project beneath San Francisco Bay. Deep below the ground, he and his crew unearth pieces of the past, billboards and bones and the clipped wings of aircraft from World War II, all sunk through the seabed or folded into underlying strata by repeated earthquakes. Though what he is really digging for is a “chance to die”.

O’Malley, who holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, favors a dense, lyrical prose which affords primacy to the image over everything else. He expertly contrasts Duncan, Joshua, and Maggie’s tortured interiority with descriptions of the snowy Minnesotan hills and San Francisco’s “humpback city”, with his evident love of landscape making this a powerful realized American novel despite its author having been raised in Ireland and England. Judicious quotation from the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal adds further verisimilitude through the signals received by Duncan’s radio.

Not plot heavy, This Magnificent Desolation gathers together its strands and vignettes in an almost impressionistic fashion towards the end. The result is a moving and deeply affecting fiction which calls for engaged, even obsessive reading. It is a work of great artistic merit but also one of great sadness, and if it has a drawback it is to be found in the self-consciousness by which it tackles its despairs and disappointments. O’Malley’s relentlessness in this regard threatens to overwhelm the reader, let alone the moonstruck characters, yet it does so by design.

After all, how can there be a better tomorrow when one cannot stop thinking about yesterday?

Dr Val Nolan lectures at NUI Galway. His short story ‘The Irish Astronaut’ is published in the current issue of Electric Velocipede.

This article originally appeared in the Irish Examiner, Saturday 13 April 2013 (p.16).

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Other posts you may enjoy:

• ‘Subversive Critique of the Established Order’: My Irish Examiner review of Hugh Howey’s novel Wool.
  
• ‘Long time No See Indeed’: My Irish Examiner review of Dermot Healy’s Long Time, No See. 

A Voice of Distinction

A recent review of mine from the Irish Examiner…

This is the Way

Gavin Corbett

Fourth Estate; £14.99

Review: Val Nolan

Myth and language define this, the second novel from Irishman turned New Yorker Gavin Corbett. It is the story of Anthony Sonaghan, a Traveller lying low during a blood feud with his family’s legendary rivals, the Gillaroos. Complicating matters is his shared descent from both factions, for Anthony is one of a brood of “childer made of both the Gillaroo and the Sonaghan”. He belongs to each and yet, in his own eyes, he is “part of no breed”.

This is the Way is Anthony’s attempt to take control of his story. “I was thirteen fourteen month in a room in Dublin,” he begins, describing in his distinctive voice the warren of bedsits where he disappears among the nation’s other stateless refugees: an Egyptian, a group of Africans, Polish labourers and undocumented Chinese. Joining him in exile is Arthur, his story-filled but illiterate uncle, and eventually the pair take up with a folklore scholar named Judith Neill.

Judith – herself hailing from the shadow cultures of academia and Protestantism – embodies the central question of the novel: do stories lose their elusive, mercurial power when granted solidity by being written down? As way of an answer, Corbett uses the metaphor of the changing Traveller lifestyle. Anthony, now more or less “settled”, struggles against the monotony of his existence while Arthur, whose adventures in Europe have grown through each telling, is prone to mischievous flights of fancy.

Such a demarcation could easily have rendered the novel quite schematic, yet Corbett’s prose, at first alienating, quickly draws the reader in. It is a poetic affectation on the author’s part rather than the harsh argot of the Cant which might be expected; it is literary language which at times is mesmerizingly effective. Through it Anthony recounts the story of his people, “the stories that went on today and the ones went on before,” as he puts it, robbing them of their power over him and so opening up a personal future which is yet unwritten.

Though the threat of violence which motivates Anthony’s Dublin sojourn never really manifests, what This is the Way lacks in plot it more than makes up for in atmosphere. An air of physical decay hangs over everything, from Arthur’s festering hand – where surgeons have attached a toe to replace a lost thumb – to Anthony’s own wretched state of mind.

The near-mythological origin of the Gillaroos and Sonaghans as warring fish in a farmer’s pond also stands in stark contrast to the violence and sins-of-the-father mentality which characterizes Anthony’s experience of contemporary Traveller life. The result of this collision is an accomplished and claustrophobic novel through which storytelling echoes like the promise of freedom.

This article originally appeared in the Irish Examiner, Saturday 16 March 2013 (p.16).

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Other posts you may enjoy:

• ‘A Tomb for the Celtic Tiger’: Thoughts on the Achill Circle.
• ‘Study of the Irish Novel Falls Between Two Stools’: My Irish Examiner review of The Irish Novel: 1960-2010

Kind of Hard Not to See a Pattern Here…

Lineage?

So, I was reading some articles on space exploration yesterday (as you do when you’re researching/writing a novel about asteroids) and I began to see an interesting pattern as regards space agency insignia. The logos of all the more prominent agencies seem to revolve (or orbit, if you will) around a predictable group of symbols – planets, stars, aspirational arrowheads – but, more than that, they all seemed to be leading inexorably towards Star Trek‘s fictional Starfleet emblem.

While I’d long be familiar with the NASA and Roscosmos logos and have noticed the slight resemblance before, the emblem of the Chinese National Space Agency has a real “Missing Link” quality to it given how closely it resembles the Next Generation era combadge/Starfleet insignia.

A little more Googling has turned up the following about the symbolism of the various logos:

NASA Insignia:

Wikipedia informs me (so it must be true, right?) that the NASA insignia displays a sphere to represents a planet, stars to represent space, a red chevron – in the alternate shape of the constellation Andromeda – as a wing representing aeronautics (as it resembled the latest design in hypersonic wings at the time the logo was developed), and, finally, an orbiting spacecraft going around the wing. NASA’s round logo has long been nicknamed the “meatball”. Bonus fun fact: The meatball adorns the mug I’m drinking out of right now!

Russian Federal Space Agency Logo:

This one is tougher. I’ve been able to find out nothing about the Roscosmos logo (Jeez, Russia, paranoid much) but I know that it is relatively recent, the agency being established in 1992 to take the place of the old Soviet Space Program (who, of course, had a very Soviet logo). It’s tempting to assume that the Roscosmos insignia has a similar symbolism to that of the NASA meatball; a planet (or an orbit) and a wing (or possibly a star). Maybe it even takes its inspiration from it, though that’s just supposition on my part. After all, there were other things going on in the early 90s (let me get back to that).

Chinese National Space Administration Logo:

This is a good one. Wikipedia says the CNSA’s logo displays an “arrow in the middle with a similar shape as the Chinese character 人 which means ‘human’ or ‘people’, to state that human is the center of all space explorations. The three concentric ellipses stand for three types of Escape Velocity (minimum speed needed to reach sustainable orbits, to escape the earth system, and to escape the solar system) which are milestones of space exploration. The second ring is drawn with a bold line, to state that China has passed the first stage of exploration (earth system) and is undergoing the second stage exploration (within the solar system). The 人 character stands above the three rings to emphasize humanity’s capability to escape and explore. Olive branches were added to state that China’s space exploration is peaceful in nature” or, as one of my friends remarked on Facebook,  to indicate that the CNSA “might endorse a movie or something”.

Starfleet Emblem:

The only fictional insignia here, the well-known Starfleet delta shield was created in 1964 by William Ware Theiss when he designed the uniforms for the original Star Trek series (thank you, Memory Alpha). At first this was the insignia of the Enterprise alone but it was later adopted by the entire organisation in honor of the achievements of that ship and crew. Mike Okuda, one of the franchise’s leading graphic designers (and who may have a character named after him in the novel I’m working on, shush!), described it as follows: ”A dramatic free-form arrowhead pointing symbolically upward to the heavens.”

So…

Any sense of evolution from one logo to the next is presumably a case of apophenia on my part, however it’s worth nothing that the NASA meatball was designed by James Modarelli in 1959 and presumably would have been familiar to Theiss, Gene Roddenberry, and others involved in the original Star Trek series. That original arrowhead was revised in 1987 for Star Trek: The Next Generation, a series at the height of its fame in the early 1990s when Roscosmos and the Chinese National Space Agency came into being (1992 and 1993 respectively) and, while it might be possible to claim an independent development for the Roscosmos logo (or at least one influenced by the symbolism of the NASA logo), I think both it and especially the Chinese logo bear a remarkable similarity to the 90s Starfleet delta shield…

There’s probably something really interesting to be written about the interplay between real-life and fictional space program/military iconography, especially in terms of feedback between the two (or even feedback between real life insignia and popular culture in general; I’m thinking of the licensed appearance of Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian on the mission patches for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers).  More than a blog post in that, mind, so for now I’ll just add it to the ever-growing Things-to-Think-About list.

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Other posts you may enjoy:

• ‘Subversive Critique of the Established Order’: My Irish Examiner review of Wool by Hugh Howey.
• A Guide to Humanity’s Next 100,000 Years: Thoughts on New Scientist’s ‘Deep Future’ Issue.

Religious Discourse in Lost and Battlestar Galactica

Yesterday I received my contributor’s copy of a new volume edited by Oklahoma City University’s Marc DiPaolo, Godly Heretics: Essays on Alternative Christianity in Literature and Popular Culture (published by McFarland). The book examines how storytellers, filmmakers, and philosophers have reinvented Christianity again and again, how they have explored new interpretations of the bible, and how they have struggled with questions such as free will and the existence of evil.

While this might strike some of you as an unexpected project for me to be involved with (I’m not what you might call a religious person), Godly Heretics provided the perfect opportunity to discuss something very much in my ballpark: Lost and Battlestar Galactica, two hugely popular science-fiction television series which both leaned on the interrogation of religious certainties as an integral, arguably essential element of their overall stories. While the theological inquiry proffered by these shows was often received and rejected without consideration for what the writers were trying to articulate, both Lost and BSG had profound messages to communicate about life, belief, community, and the dangerous tendency of organised religions to divide humanity into ideological factions rather than unite people into truly accepting societies.

My chapter tackles the divisive (to put it mildly!) reception of both series head on, exploring the dialogues about religion which they attempted to open with pop cultural audiences. I consider the purpose behind Lost and BSG’s use of heretical notions such as apathetic deities, resurrections that are not, and the deliberate collision of contemporary belief systems with archaic or esoteric forms of worship (and, along the way, I call out patently incorrect pronouncements about the shows by the likes of George RR Martin). While my chapter doesn’t shy away from the fact that a great many people were dissatisfied with the endings of these shows, it is an effort to demonstrate how the theological underpinnings of Lost and BSG are more coherent, and indeed more important, than generally accepted.

A fine volume, I intend sitting down with Godly Heretics over the next few weeks and spending time with the essays from the other contributors. In particular I’m looking forward to Grace Moore’s chapter on A Christmas Carol, Scrooged, and Groundhog Day, and Eric Michael Mazur’s chapter on Peanuts and The Far Side. There’s also work here on Kieslowski’s Decalogue, Kubrick’s The Shining (by another Irish contributor, Trinity’s Dara Downey), as well as chapters on Tolstoy and Nietzsche, Shelly, Whitman, Thomas Jefferson, and the varying representations of Jesus in literature. It’s a book which I think will interest a wide range of people, both academics and those with a more general interest in how Christianity has been portrayed over time, so please do order a copy for your local or university library.

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Other posts which may be of interest:

• Some Notes of Fringe‘s Scientists, ‘Mad’ and ‘Bad’ alike.
• ‘Prometheus has landed’: a Defense of Damon Lindelof.

Outside Context Problem: Reflections on Iain Banks

“All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in.”
– Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory 

Iain Banks

I don’t want to talk about Iain Banks as if he’s dead. As he says in Look to Windward (2000), “life is salty enough without adding tears to it”. Nevertheless, in light of today’s terrible news of his terminal cancer, I do want to say something about him.

Banks, who I was once lucky enough to meet, is a great writer regardless of genre. He has always struck me as a man with a genuine, mischievous love of literature and of his audience. He is a novelist of such extraordinary productivity that he has, for almost thirty years, maintained two separate and equally successful literary careers, both his much loved science fiction work – novels produced “under the M”, as I like to think of them – and also his much garlanded mainstream fiction which, if we’re to be fair about it, is often a damn sight weirder than his spec-fic material. He is a political writer, unafraid to court controversy in a way many others are not (“Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying”) and he is also one of my favorite writers, though I admit I came to his work late.

Apart from must-reads such as The Bridge (1986) or Use of Weapons (1990) about which others will no doubt write much, there are a handful of Banks works which stand out to me right now. These include:

• The State of the Art (1991): The first Banks book I ever read was this story collection which my father brought me back from a trip to England sometime in the mid-1990s. I have to say that I didn’t “get it” at the time; my teenage sensibilities just weren’t ready. It didn’t come into focus for me until much later (indeed, in a whole other century) when I returned to it with a much stronger grasp of who I was and what I liked. I also came back to it with a much wider knowledge of The Culture, the anarchic, galaxy-spanning utopian civilization (“hippies with weapons of mass destruction”) which occupies such a central place in Banks’s work. I think we would all live in the Culture if we could.

• The Algebraist (2004): There is a section about halfway through this novel which depicts a “sailing race” inside a gas giant. Reading that for the first time was the equivalent of sticking a fork in a socket; the electrifying feeling that anything was possible in prose (something I have only felt one or two times before; Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, for instance, or Peter David’s Vendetta). I think I can say that, after an ill-advised dalliance with poetry (my version of “I experimented a bit in college”), it was Banks’s work which rekindled my desire to write fiction.

• Matter (20008): This, along with every Banks since, was a novel I picked up on the day it was published. Yes the “Shellworld” at the heart of this book is rightly praised as a triumph of Banks’s world-building, but what I feel gets overlooked is the excitement, inventiveness, and attention to detail of Banks’s action sequences. This novel is a perfect example of what he is capable of, and I always tell people that the last forty or fifty pages of Matter are some of the finest combat writing I have ever read.

• The Wasp Factory (1984): I find it impossible to forget the grotesque glee of Banks’s debut (which of course I read almost twenty years after it was published). It is a novel which lives and breathes (and kills!) from the perspective of its twisted, ritualistic protagonist Frank; the kind of book you come away from saying to yourself, “Wow, that was messed up”. Horror and hilarity intertwine within the pages here, aspects of The Wasp Factory which do not end when one finishes the novel. I still derive untold amusement from how the disparaging review of the book in the Irish Times – the paper called it “a work of unparalleled depravity” – is still quoted inside the cover among other “praise” for Banks.

• Excession (1996), or “the one which is mostly spaceships talking to each other”: I first read Excession during a Christmas break, oh, six or seven years ago, and it immediately became one of my favorite novels. The scope of the thing is the very definition of awesome: an object from beyond our universe suddenly appears and the heretofore unmatched (though not for lack of trying) Culture struggles to understand it, let alone exert any control over it. This is a book about how some things in life are inexplicable to even the smartest and most capable of us. The mystery object is “an Outside Context Problem,” which is both a lovely piece of jargon and a chillingly prosaic description of the “sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop”. Excession is Banks at the height of his powers and I, as humble reader, at the height of my enjoyment of his work.

Of course, Banks faces his own Outside Context Problem now and, while I’m obviously not directly affected by the troubles of this man who won’t even remember me, I was deeply moved by the news when I heard it this morning. His work is something I find myself thinking about a lot, both as a would-be writer who finds in it an energy and inventiveness worth emulating, as well as an academic who aspires, on and off, to write some kind of criticism worthy of his fiction and so share the excitement I find in it with others. Somewhere on my hard drive right now is half a transcription of a British Library event Banks participated in last year with another of my favorite writers, Kim Stanley Robinson. I’ve been meaning to finish typing that up for many months but, after today’s news, the project has taken on a greater, more documentary aspect. It feels more than ever like an important thing to record and make known.

Banks’s new novel, The Quarry, is due out later this year. I’m sure the title will end up referring to a quarry as in a “pit” or a “mine”, yet the other meaning of the word is a grim fit for what will come to be seen as a final work. Banks himself is the quarry of the ultimate hunter now, stalked by something all of us will face someday but which few of us will need to tackle so publicly  I would hope that there is time for a celebration of Iain Banks and his work, a show of gratitude from readers while he is still alive, though one which respects his wish to spend his final months with his family and friends. We need not crowd him in order to acknowledge the great gifts he has bestowed on us. We can keep reading his work. We can recommend it to others. We can leave good wishes for him on the website set up for just that purpose. We must cherish the books he is leaving us with but we must also remember that, as he says in The Crow Road (1992), ”to want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constipatory, too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.”

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Other posts which may be of interest:

• ‘Culture Club – What it Knew about the Gzilt’s Holy book’: My Irish Examiner review of Banks’s 2012 novel The Hydrogen Sonata.
• Muakami and Me: Some thoughts on the Japanese novelist.

Subversive critique of the established order

Here’s a recent review of mine from the Irish Examiner…

‘Wool’

Wool

Hugh Howey

Century; £9.99

Review: Val Nolan

Once the last resort of narcissistic cranks and mediocre poets, self-publishing has lately been transformed from a curse into a blessing by the digital revolution. These days any scribbler with a Smashwords account can be a published author while any customer with a Kindle and a credit card can read their work without the need for traditional gum’n’pulp presses. Nevertheless, a self-published e-book successfully jumping from intangible virtuality to the physical embodiment of print and paper is still a rare event. It seems that publishers, who exhibit the same resistance to change as any major industry, will only take the risk on an e-title when real world sales are all but guaranteed.

American writer Hugh Howey is a case in point. Wool, his dystopian tale of the last community on an environmentally ravaged Earth, makes its hard-copy debut as a bone-fide online bestseller, one already optioned by Ridley Scott for possible film adaptation. Set in the enclosed world of a gigantic underground silo, Wool began as a 60 page novella offered through Amazon’s Kindle Direct for just $1. Selling 140,000 copies in its first six months alone, the story quickly spawned sequels, each longer than the next, and the Wool sequence collected here – more of an omnibus of five volumes than it is a novel proper – now runs to over 500 pages.

Of course buzz means nothing if the work itself cannot support it. Lucky for Howey, and for the reader, the former yacht captain can really write. Wool presents a world which echoes and exaggerates the failings of our own. The Silo, a society with unspoken “rules against dreaming of a better place”, is a microcosm of our modern-day existence, one peopled by compelling characters just awkward and broken enough to be real.

Though pitched as the story of Juliette, a no-nonsense mechanic who gains and loses a Sheriff’s badge, Wool is more about the community itself than it is any single protagonist. Constructed hundreds of years earlier, the Silo is a richly imagined vertical community where “the descent was like the uncoiling of a steel spring”. Sealed away from the corrosive pollution outside, the inhabitants observe “the rotting skyline” of a distant city through real-time video feeds. Criminals here are “sent to cleaning”, Howey’s ingenious form of capital punishment whereby offenders are banished from the Silo, their last task being to polish the exterior lenses. Every felon is adamant that they will not do it, and yet, in Wool’s inciting mystery, everybody always does.

The Silo so is a claustrophobic, often contradictory place. Though Juliette’s eyes, as well as those of Holston, her predecessor as Sheriff, the reader experiences its byzantine rules and obsession with continuance. There is a strictly controlled “birth lottery” to maintain population equilibrium. There is a system of apprenticeships to ensure vital knowledge is passed on. There is trade and travel up and down the Silo, with porters bouncing along the grand staircase with letters and parcels, but this is merely an illusion of connectivity in a highly stratified society where political and economic divisions manifest themselves through the architecture itself.

In the Silo, the Mayor, Sheriff, and other administrators occupy the upper floors. The rest of this self-contained world is subdivided between domestic apartments and a variety of factitious service sectors such as garment makers, hydroponic farmers, bazaar merchants, and the mysterious, powerful IT department, seemingly the last example of high-technology in a world of pipes and grease and wrenches maintained, a hundred and forty stories down, by the so-called “Mechanicals”.

While it may seem far-fetched, anyone who has ever had kids run past them in an apartment building stairwell will recognise the kind of life lived in the Silo. It is one mediated by screens, one where physical interiority has replaced intellectual curiosity as regards “the size and scope of the world”. There is a feeling of being trapped in one’s life and a sickening atmosphere of complicity in how one allows the powers-that-be-to mould and control their reality.

An unconventional choice for Sheriff in that she hails from the “Down Deep”, Juliette nonetheless discovers that the job is in many ways analogous to her previous role as a mechanic. People break down, she observes, people rattle, people “could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful”. Political upheaval to her is as though “a great set of gears had been thrown out of alignment”, metaphorical machinery “lumbering off its mounts and leaving bodies in its wake”. She is a genre heroine who, in a breath of fresh air from the vampires and werewolves who have dominated speculative writing of late, derives her power not from supernatural sources but from her knowledge and her technical ability.

Through murders, coups, and civil war, Juliette discovers that the Silo is a more complicated and more dangerous place than she had ever imagined. Like Holston before her she becomes obsessed with determining the pattern of twisted things, the Silo’s spiral staircase a metaphor for the corruption which runs through the society, the hard steel of an original deceit worn down to sharp, cutting truth by “centuries of bare palms and shuffling feet”. Each part of Wool asks another question: Why do people always clean the lenses? What is the true function of the IT department and their power-hungry servers? How is all of this related to the state of the “uninhabitable wasteland” outside?

Howey so convinces in his depiction of Wool’s world that when Juliette queries, say, the cost of sending a simple email, or even the spacing of the Silo’s levels, it never feels like a mere plot-point but instead a subversive critique of the established order. Partly this is a result of the author capturing Juliette’s plainspokenness so ably, but it is likewise a consequence of how the book’s contiguous components originally appeared. Just as 19^th century technological advances in printing and distribution saw the rise of serialized novels by the likes of Charles Dickens and Henry James, so the Internet today is engendering a new kind of structure which we might call the Howey model: serial texts which, though part of a greater physical whole, must first stand alone as complete units on initial e-publication and thus continually reintroduce and re-examine their settings and protagonists from a variety of perspectives.

It is tempting therefore to conflate the Silo’s conflict between low-tech and high-tech parties with the clash of traditional and electronic publishing, however to do so would be a mistake. Wool’s simultaneous real-world and online existences (Howey retains the electronic rights) in fact make the case for peaceful coexistence between the Kindle and the codex. Both forms and audiences influence each other, it says, and both have their places, something militant e-lit evangelists – apparently unaware that television never vanquished radio – continue to deny.

That a book which makes this point is also highly compelling and entertaining is a bonus. It is too easy to produce a poorly written or derivative dystopia, but in Wool Howey cleverly builds upon rather than imitates his precursors in the field. Like the best of science fiction, this book tells us something about our world today. It interrogates the structure of our society and the place of the individual in it going forward; it warns about the dangers of homogeneity and the concentration of power in an elite. With the Silo like a family of thousands, Wool further provides a metaphor for the difficulties of nurturing relationships in our career and screen fixated age. It is a multifaceted work, by turns exuberant and quietly horrifying, and one which more than justifies the hype surrounding it.

Dr. Val Nolan lectures on contemporary literature, creative writing, and digital media at NUI Galway.

This article originally appeared in the Irish Examiner, Saturday 2 March 2013 (pp.16-17).

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Other posts you may enjoy:

• ‘A Tomb for the Celtic Tiger’: Thoughts on the Achill Circle.
• ‘Novel of the Future Says Much About the Present’: My Irish Examiner review of Alastair Reynolds’s Blue Remembered Earth.

‘Experiment or Die’: an Interview with Mike McCormack

Just a quick update to say that ‘Experiment or Die’, my interview with Irish novelist Mike McCormack has just been published in Canada’s ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

Mike McCormack is the author of Getting it in the Head (1996), a book of stories awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and voted a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has also published two novels, Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes From a Coma (2005). The latter was short-listed for The Sunday Independent/Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year award, hailed by The Irish Times as “the greatest Irish novel of the decade just ended”, and deemed by this author in the Irish Examiner to be “the only interesting Irish novel of the 21st Century”. His new collection of stories, Forensic Songs, has recently been published.

In this interview, McCormack discusses the influences and experiences which led him to writing, the ubiquity of technology and the fragility of identity in 21st century Ireland (particularly with regard to its depiction in Notes From a Coma), along with the vital, experimental ethos which he believes contemporary Irish fiction must reclaim if it is to maintain relevance in this globalized age.

As ever, anyone with institutional access to a decent university library ought to be able to access the article online via their electronic resources, though if you’re having trouble with that or are beyond the paywalls, just let me know and I’ll send you on the PDF. Knowledge should be free, of course, but society and economics aren’t exactly there yet.

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Other posts you may find of interest:

• ‘Plugging into the Future’: My Irish Examiner review of Mike Mccormack’s Forensic Songs
• ‘Flann, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: O’Brien’s Surprising Synthesis’, my recent Flann O’Brien article in Review of Contemporary Literature