booklit

Joyce Carol Oates is one of those authors who seem to have a book out every year and, with forty years’ worth of output spanning novels, short stories, plays, essays, poetry, and more, it feels strange never to have read anything by her. And then there’s the writing under pseudonyms, too - she’s practically monopolising literature; and she’s picked up a number of awards along the way.

So why haven’t I read her? Well, it may be something to do with the titles of those novels: Man Crazy, Middle Age: A Romance, and Missing Mom, for example. But it turns out, as her Bram Stoker award suggests, that Oates is perhaps more protean than I first thought.

So, then, to Black Water (1992), which is out of print in the UK, but still cheaply available, although I picked it up from my local library. The poor thing hadn’t been checked out for quite some time. Was it that bad? Actually, no, as it happens.

Kelly Kelleher, a twenty-six year old woman, is out for a drive with a tipsy political figure referred to only as the Senator. They’ve just left a Fourth of July party and are headed somewhere a little more secluded. But, as fate has it, they speed off down a closed road and, before the Senator can react, they have skidded off the road and find themselves in black rushing water, the car listing on the passenger side. It’s okay for the Senator - he escapes. But for poor Kelly, it’s time for her young life to flash before her eyes. And so it does, the narrative flowing between a series of flashbacks and those final panicked moments of knowing you are about to die:

She was drowning, but she was not going to drown. She was strong, she meant to put up a damned good fight.

If the premise sounds familiar, then it’s because Oates has lifted it almost wholly from the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, where Ted Kennedy escaped his car when he drove off a bridge, leaving twenty-eight year old, Mary Jo Kopechne, to drown. Personally, I was unaware of the incident until doing a bit of extracurricular research on Black Water, and being ignorant of the historical basis, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t an issue. For one, Oates has changed the name, so it’s a story. Right? Secondly, it’s setting is after the Gulf War. And finally, what matter are facts when what’s on offer here is Oates’ imagination, as she invents her own version and supposes what it must be like to be that young woman in the final moments of her life as:

…the water splashed and churned about her mouth, foul-tasting water not water, like no water she knew.

Black Water’s style varies throughout, the flashbacks being detailed assessments of the burgeoning relationship between Kelly and the Senator; the manic passages in the sinking car, for want of a better phrase, being prose poetry, producing a sense of the ramblings, assurances, and fears within Kelly’s mind.

Since the drowing can only occupy so many pages, the rest are taken up by Kelly’s life. We learn about her parents, her schooling, her job - all this in order to give us someone to care about. Not so that we care about her, but so that we have a figure to jeer in the Senator. The sheer arrogance of the man as he abuses Kelly’s confidence in him (her thesis was on him; he’s single, she’s obviously interested in him, so why not?), and, in the aftermath of the incident, is concerned only with this career highlights the arrogance of power and the versions of truth that we are fed:

…so there was an instant’s shocked silence and then Ray said, “Dead–!” more an inhalation of breath than an expletive and then he said, quickly, “Don’t tell me over the phone! Just tell me where you are and I’ll come get you,” and the Senator was sobbing now, furious and incredulous and aggrieved, “The girl was drunk, and she got emotional, she grabbed at the wheel and the car swerved off the road…”

Black Water, as a novella, is certainly an interesting piece although I don’t think I overly enjoyed it. Sure, its prose was frenzied and fun - even if I was reading about a woman drowning - and its repetitive nature understandable, give that it reflected the wandering thoughts of Kelly as it came to new subjects, washed off, returned. But there was just something that didn’t catch my interest, probably the American politics aspect. It was worth going off-road for, but didn’t make the splash I wanted.

I’m not one for fantasy, the thought of the genre immediately brings to mind hordes of orcs, objects with magical properties, and characters who are either good or evil with no middle ground; of course, for this, Tolkien has to shoulder some of the blame. So, with this concern, I took on board the recommendation of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, a fantasy novel that breaks with the stereotypes and thrusts us into a bleak world where science and magic work inharmoniously together, mutants go about their daily lives, and cities are powerful autarchies where even the slightest whisper against the government may lead to you joining the desaparecidos.

It begins with Isaac and Lin, a mixed species couple (he’s human and she’s khepri, an insect hybrid) whose lives change when both receive contracts of work. Isaac is asked by a mysterious visitor to restore his power of flight, while Lin is employed by the local mafia boss to craft his sculpture, an artform in which insect sputum is her medium. As they work at their respective jobs Isaac unwittingly unleashes his research specimens upon the city of New Crobuzon, an event that affects him in a number of ways, and with his friends he sets out to right his wrong.

At almost 900 pages Perdido Street Station is no breeze, but one can’t help feel that it is drawn out, stuffed with adjectives, and as tedious a read as life in New Crobuzon. It would certainly have benefited from large quantities of editing, but there are some who would argue that it’s a homage to the style of Mervyn Peake. The story, for the first two hundred pages, was nicely taking form, but, when the slake-moths Isaac was researching escape, the novel slides downhill into a depressing chase, which, despite the implied timeframe and urgency, seemed leisurely and unexciting.

It was incredibly drawn out so that small spaces of time were dragged over pages which added nothing to the tension. The story, at the beginning, was shaping up nicely and when the slake-moths escaped the book just went downhill into a really depressing chase which, despite the implied timeframe and the importance, seemed leisurely as the narrative failed to excite.

Miéville shows us that New Crobuzon, a city in the world of Bas-Lag, is a dirty place; grimy windows, littered streets, and scores of nefarious characters. It’s a well realised setting, and not difficult to imagine its soaring towers, its crumbling buildings, the rusted train network, but, by the final two hundred pages, the author still takes many opportunities from the pressing narrative to remind us of the extreme filth and depressive air surrounding the place.

The prose is mediocre, although, having never read Peake, I can’t say whether the tribute is fitting. The author, at times, seems more interested in displaying his extensive vocabulary, but, in an attempt to do so, he finds himself repeating a number of words that actually limits his lexis; ‘extraordinary’, ‘oneiric’, and all possibilities of ‘thaumaturgy’ making considerable appearances. And when Miéville wants to describe something as brown then, rather than say it’s brown, he uses the word dun. Repeatedly.

The citizens of New Crobuzon are well-crafted and, like the city, utterly loathable. They are also, due to different species, mutations, and immigrants, extremely varied. Aside from the aforementioned humans and khepri, there are winged creatures called garuda, evolved cacti, which I could never visualise without reverting to caricature, and the Remade, those whose bodies have been reconfigured in imaginative ways by the use of controlled magic, are just a few of the types to be found wandering the streets, or, like any society, living ghettoised.

While Perdido Street Station starts well, it devolves into little more than a moth hunt, punctuated with Miéville’s own socialist politics. The climax takes place in the station of the title, the main thoroughfare of New Crobuzon, but it is hard to tell why the book is named after this construction as it only appears in the denouement for approximately fifty pages. All in all, Miéville isn’t a bad writer per se but he is by no means great. Should I wish to read another fantasy novel then I may approach his fiction again, but I will wait until he has a substantial body of work behind him and hope, that with each book, he improves on his craft.