Woolworths

I just finished Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City over the weekend. I’ll be writing it up shortly. While reading it though I was amused by this description of British chain store Woolworth’s which explains both why it survived so long and why it was no surprise when it finally went bust at the end of 2008. This was written in 1938, but still held pretty much true seventy years later:

But next door to the stationer’s there was a Woolworth’s store. She went in – not to buy anything, but only to look around. Nobody goes into Woolworth’s shops to buy anything: one visits Woolworth’s as a kind of museum, merely to look. And one comes out with a pot of paint, a hacksaw, a kettle, a pound of sweets, three egg-cups, a writing-pad, a lampshade, an electric-light bulb, a typewriter-rubber, an ice-cream cone, a rubber belt, two apostle spoons, a Swiss roll, a toilet roll and a packet of seeds.

I don’t even know what an apostle spoon is, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn they’d still sold them right up to the end.

There is no chronology inside my head

Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively

Synopses are dangerous things. Any synopsis of Moon Tiger would make it sound like an utterly conventional piece of middlebrow fiction. An elderly woman looks back upon her life and remembers the men she loved and the tragedies and triumphs of her life.

That’s accurate as far as it goes. It’s also utterly misleading. Moon Tiger is a novel of fractured narratives, perspectives and tenses. It’s an unsparing look at memory, the construction of narrative, and death. It’s bloody good.

It also won the 1987 Booker Prize. Apparently it was a controversial winner and was derided by critics as “the housewife’s choice” and as “suitable for the Harrods and Hatchard’s market” (the condescension in both those quotes is staggering). My only remark on that is that clearly the housewives of 1987 were a discerning lot. A shame the critics weren’t so perspicacious.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

‘I’m writing a history of the world,’ she says. And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment; she looks down at this old woman, this old ill woman. ‘Well, my goodness,’ the nurse says. ‘That’s quite a thing to be doing, isn’t it?’ And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and tucks and smooths – ‘Upsy a bit, dear, that’s a good girl – then we’ll get you a cup of tea.’

The old woman in question is Claudia. She has cancer and she is dying. She knows this. Her history of the world is a personal one and will not be written down. It will not follow chronology. As she later reflects: “Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.” The nurses find her odd, but ultimately just another body to be cared for:

‘Was she someone?’ enquires the nurse. Her shoes squeak on the shiny floor; the doctor’s shoes crunch. ‘I mean, the things she comes out with…’ And the doctor glances at his notes and says that yes, she does seem to have been someone, evidently she’s written books and newspaper articles and… um… been in the Middle East at one time… typhoid, malaria… unmarried (one miscarriage, one child he sees but does not say)… yes, the records do suggest she was someone, probably.

Claudia was someone. She was a war correspondent and a published popular historian. She was beautiful and opinionated and argumentative. She was too close to her brother and not close enough to her daughter. She was glamorous and impossible and arguably not actually a terribly pleasant person.

The narrative moves to her childhood and a memory of competing with her brother to find fossils. It goes forward to her marriage to an urbane half-Russian named Jasper and then back again to her years in Egypt during the second world war. Her history is a kaleidoscope of impressions. Her mind follows connections but not neatly.

All that sounds confusing. It isn’t because it’s well written and because it feels true. True for me anyway. I have no real timeline in my head; just a collage of scenes from my life many of which may not even be accurate. Claudia is not an unreliable narrator, but her memories too may not be wholly accurate.

Claudia knows this and early on vows to show all perspectives. Hers will not be just a history told in her voice, others’ will also be heard. What this means quickly becomes apparent as she remembers that childhood search for fossils I mentioned. The scene is recounted as she recalls it, but then shifts into her brother’s slightly different perception of the same incident:

She must pass Gordon to reach that alluring upper shelf. ‘Mind…’ she says. Move your leg…’
‘Don’t shove,’ he grumbles. ‘Anyway you can’t come here. I said this is my bit, you find your own.’
‘Don’t shove yourself. I don’t want your stupid bit…’
His leg is in her way – it thrashes, she thrusts, and a piece of cliff, of the solid world which evidently is not so solid after all, shifts under her clutching hands… crumbles… and she is falling thwack backwards on her shoulders, her head, her outflung arm, she is skidding rolling thumping downwards. And comes to rest gasping in a thorn bush, hammered by pain, too affronted even to yell.

He can feel her getting closer, encroaching, she is coming here on to his bit, she will take all the best fossils. He protests. He sticks out a foot to impede. Her hot infuriating limbs are mixed up with his.
‘You’re pushing me,’ she shrieks.
‘I’m not,’ he snarls. ‘It’s you that’s shoving. Anyway this is my place so go somewhere else.’
‘It’s not your stupid place,’ she says. ‘It’s anyone’s place. Anyway I don’t…’
And suddenly there are awful tearing noises and thumps and she is gone, sliding and hurtling down, and in horror and satisfaction he stares.

At the time this fracturing of perspective first arose I took that as Claudia’s recollection and her imagining of how her brother might recollect the same incident. Later though this becomes less certain and it appears that Lively may simply be showing how different people remember (or experience) the same event. Memory and history are both untrustworthy. Time and again key moments are shattered in this way. Lively shows two, sometimes three, accounts of the same conversation but each slightly different. The essence is the same, but precisely what was said isn’t.

What makes all this more than a dry exercise in style is partly Claudia herself who is never less than entertaining to be with and partly the scope of the book. Claudia is brilliant and is quite well aware of the fact. She knows that she fascinates and she has nothing but disdain for those who are less glittering. She looks down on her brother’s conventional wife and equally on her own conventional daughter, Lisa. She is easy to picture; sweeping into a room and commanding the attention of all present, but dismissing those she considers uninteresting.

What I could offer Lisa was not the conventional haven of maternal love and concern but my mind and my energy. If she had not acquired these genetically then I was quite prepared to show her how to think and act. I was no good at kissing away tears or telling bedtime stories – any mother can do that: my uses were potentially far more significant.
She was a disappointment to me. And I, presumably, to her. I looked for my own alter ego, the querying rebellious maverick child I had been myself; Lisa looked for a reassuring clothes-shopping sherry-drinking figure like the mothers of her school friends. As she grew older I felt more and more her silent stare, each time I visited her at Sotleigh, took her over to Beaminster to stay with my mother, or had her in the flat in London for a couple of days. There, she would wander around, a skimpy pallid little figure standing in doorways or perching on a sofa. I bought her books. I took her to museums and art galleries; I tried to encourage opinion and curiosity. Lisa, growing longer of limb and less flexible of mind, became ordinary. She began to bore me. And I sensed her disapproval.

Lively shows the pre-war years in which Claudia grows up and the post-war world in which people jockey for position and prominence. There’s a nice sequence where Claudia’s husband goes to a post-war country house in which various members of the great and good are gathered – a sort of micro Davos. He hopes for a job with Nato or perhaps on television. For those who are the right sort the possibilities are endless.

Where the book truly shines though is in its depiction of the war years in Egypt. It is there that Claudia meets the love of her life; a love that her family and later husband know nothing of. Cairo is filled with parties and amusements. Officers on leave live hard while they can. The few women are in constant demand. The locals are barely involved. It is not their war and the British do not hold them in high regard. Meanwhile in the desert it is chaos and burnt-out shells of tanks. The British are winning, but not without cost.

In places this is a difficult book to read. Egypt is so vivid because that’s where Claudia fell truly in love, but it is no spoiler to reveal that the love did not outlast the war (the opening of the book makes this perfectly clear since we know she marries Jasper whom she only meets later). Claudia is reconstructing what most mattered to her. She is taking fragments of her life and holding them up for examination. Her gaze is unsparing and because of that even though the precise conversations held may be unclear the emotional importance of them is not.

Claudia is like a Pharaonic queen. Her memories are her pyramid; her way of preserving the life of the people she has outlived and of making sense of her own. It has to be a history because her life cannot be understood otherwise. Without the war she would not have been a correspondent. She would not have met the man she loved. Everything is connected and so a history of Claudia must be a history of the universe and of everyone. Nothing else is possible.

This is a book about memory and death. It is not comforting. Noone here speaks of any belief in any afterlife. Claudia’s only expectation as her periods of lucidity grow less frequent is that she will live on briefly in the memories of others, but if the book has shown anything it is that memories are partial and only ever one side of a story too complex to be told. All we ever know is aspects of each other, and even those we love may hold secrets we couldn’t guess at. In the end we all die alone.

Moon Tiger (it’s also available on Kindle, which is how I read it). I discovered Moon Tiger through Sam Jordison’s Guardian Booker Blog. His excellent Moon Tiger review is here. Sam’s Booker blog is generally well worth following so if you do follow that link I’d suggest having a dig around to see the others he’s written up. While writing this I also found that the Guardian Book Club had covered this novel. Here‘s a link to the first of four articles and the other three are linked to from a sidebar to that piece.

she did not want to worry

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, by Friedrich Christian Delius and translated by Jamie Bulloch

I read Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman twice. Each time I read it straight through without a pause. It’s the third title released by Peirene Press in 2010 and for me the best yet. If I’d read it a month earlier it would have made my end of year list.

The novella takes place in Rome in January 1943. A young German woman is living in a German speaking enclave. She is heavily pregnant. She came to Rome to be with her husband Gert who had returned from the Russian front with an injured leg.

Gert’s leg is unhealed and his dressings need to be changed daily. Even so within a day of the woman’s arrival her husband was called back to duty. Reverses in North Africa mean that every soldier is needed. Gert is a military clerk, and clerks can serve sitting down.

The woman then is on her own in a foreign city. Her husband in his letters urges her to enjoy its beauty, but it’s hard to enjoy even the most marvellous things when those you love are far away and in danger. The entire novella takes place in the space of a single afternoon’s walk as the woman goes from the convent where she is staying to a Lutheran church where a rare afternoon performance of Bach is to be held. Along the way she thinks, and tries not to think.

Portrait is written in an unconventional style. There are no chapters and no full stops. Each paragraph either simply breaks with the next picking up from it or ends in a comma. It’s not quite a stream of consciousness. It’s more a stream of experience. As the woman walks she sees familiar but little understood sights of Rome. She thinks about her past and about her family and husband. They have not been married long. She thinks too about the war and about the regime back home, but those thoughts are dangerous and she shrinks away from them.

Formatting constraints with WordPress prevent me showing how the paragraphs are arranged on the page in the actual book. There each paragraph opens with an indented line, which gives it a far more pleasing appearance on the page than these quotes suggest. Otherwise the book is up to Peirene’s usual standards in terms of its sheer physical quality.

again she thought how fortunate she was, provided with everything she needed, not starving, and not having to queue like the Roman housewives or their maids, how lucky she was that at this hour she was able to go to church, and even to a concert, and was only vexed for a second by the question of

why there is not enough bread in wartime, and why it is getting ever scarcer, seeing that ever more land is being conquered and ever more victories are being reported, after all the wheat is still growing, and the rye, you can see from the window of the train how all the fields were blooming and ripening, so where is the bread, but that was not a question you could ask, it was a test, it was God’s will, he provided the daily bread and allocated it,

The woman is devout. Her father is a minister and so will her husband be – if he survives the war. They are fortunate. She keeps reminding herself how fortunate they both are. He is serving in a comfortable billet in North Africa which is far better than the Russian front. She is in Rome and is largely spared the privations the locals and people back home are suffering. Still, she is not with her husband. She might never be again.

Announcements of victories and exhortations to more of the same are painted on the street walls. They are seen and heard ever more frequently.

and yet there were too many defeats, in Russia the picture was no longer one of great victories, they hardly spoke about victories any more, they only spoke of the length of the war, and what was the point of this dreadful war if there were to be no more victories, they could not imagine a war without victories,

since she was twelve years old the Fuhrer of the German Reich had proceeded from one triumph to the next, for as long as she could remember he had only won, conquered, been celebrated, cheered, even during church services thanks were offered up for the political and military successes too, and her husband would only be able to return soon if they were victorious, but if more defeats threatened on almost all fronts he would stay there, his life in ever-increasing danger, and she would have to wait longer and longer,

it was impossible to think what might become of the beautiful Germany withouth victories, thinking this was forbidden, she forbade herself from thinking it, and while her yearning flew south to Africa,

What it is permissible to think is key here. This is a loving young mother. She is only recently wed. She is pious and humble. She is not well educated, but she is a decent person. Of course, in 1943 she is also a tiny part of the Nazi state. The state doctrine sits uncomfortably with her faith. Both her father and husband have spoken critically of Hitler and of how he seems to put himself above god. Both have reflected that the bible contains no requirements to hate the Jews. She has no personal animus against them either.

They are all, as the phrase goes, good Germans. None of them actively support Hitler. In fact, they do not agree with him. Her father and husband both still do their duty though and every time the gap between national rhetoric and church teaching occurs to her she does her best to think of something else. She just wants a small and quiet life. No doubt millions of Germans feel very similarly.

On her own she could not work out what you were allowed and not allowed to say, what you should think and what you ought not to think, and how to cope with her ambivalent feelings, all she could do was to keep these things to herself until his return,
…
there is the weapon of silence and the weapon of words, she learnt with the League of German girls, and as she preferred to remain silent anyway, especially if she was not confident of her thoughts and her faint doubts were not assuaged, she knew what she had to do, to trust patiently in God, and continue undeterred along her path,

Portrait contains, fittingly enough, a marvellous portrait of the young woman. She is convincing and for me sympathetic. Her plight is an easy one to care about and to relate to. She’s not in any sense a bad person. None of the people she knows seem to be bad people. They’re all just keeping their heads down, doing the best they can and waiting for the war to end.

That’s what gives this book its power and impact. What Portrait addresses is life under totalitarianism. Here it’s Nazi Germany, but I’m not sure what’s explored is unique to that. There have been many regimes throughout history where it could be dangerous to say the wrong thing or even to think the wrong thought. All empires built on terror depend on the acquiescence of the bulk of their population. Most of those living under such systems will just be ordinary people trying to get on with their lives.

In a brief foreword to Portrait Meike Zeirvogel of Peirene Press talks about how if “we can relate to her we come close to understanding the forces that were shaping an entire generation.” That’s exactly right. That said this isn’t a didactic book and there’s a lot I’ve not talked about here (partly as it’s skilfully examined in the review at Just William’s blog here which convinced me to read this book).

There’s the contrast between the Germanic, protestant, Northern European culture and the Italian, Catholic, Southern European one. There’s the dizzying spectacle of antiquity undermining the certainties of the present and refusing to comply with her Lutheran expectations. Above all for me personally though there’s the insight into the mind and experience of a person who in a small way was part of what is widely seen as the greatest evil of the twentieth century (some would argue for Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot as having that honour, lovely century the twentieth).

In terms of style I was initially concerned that the lack of chapters and more critically the lack of full stops would seem gimmicky and contrived. In practice though I found the rhythm of the text had a sonorous flow to it. It was smooth to read and felt like a river of thought and experience. A river full of eddies, small diversions and strong undercurrents barely visible on the surface. The style is unusual, but it works.

Both times I read Portrait I read it straight through on a single sitting. Each Peirene title is designed to be capable of being read in that way. Here though I think it’s actually important to do so. This is a short work of 117 pages and its structure is such that interruptions would break that flow I spoke of above. I would strongly recommend that anyone tempted to read this put aside a couple of hours in which to do so. The paragraph structure intentionally avoids any breaks in the narrative. Imposing breaks from outside would damage it and I suspect reduce the impact considerably.

I’ve read all three of Peirene’s 2010 titles. Stone in a Landslide is here and Beside the Sea here. Comparisons between different authors from different countries are both pointless and a bit absurd, but so by and large is life so I’m going to make some anyway.

This is my favourite Peirene title to date. It’s the first I’ve read twice (though I’ve kept all of them as they all bear rereading) and I thought both in terms of style and content it really stood out. It’s a deceptively quiet work which is both highly particular (Nazism) but with wider resonance (how good people can help evil prosper). I’ve taken out a subscription to Peirene’s 2011 titles and given the quality of 2010′s offering I’m very much looking forward to them.

Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman. After writing this (thankfully after, or I’d have wondered what was left to say) I found several other reviews which may be of interest. Kimbofo’s is here. Andrew Blackman’s is here. Lizzy’s Literary Life’s is here. The Fiction Desk’s is here. Finally, Nicholas Lezard of the Guardian’s is here.

Just as I was about to press publish on this entry I saw that my copy of Peirene Title No. 4 had arrived. It’s Next World Novella, by Matthias Politycki and translated by Anthea Bell. I can’t wait.

It was hard to concentrate on god when his feet were so sore.

Quarantine, by Jim Crace

Jim Crace is one of those authors whose books I’d been vaguely aware of for years without ever actually reading any of them. It’s curious how that can happen. I wonder how many great writers, writers I’d love, I know of but have never read. All too many I suspect.

That’s no longer an issue with Jim Crace. Quarantine is a deft and subtle book which takes a premise that really couldn’t appeal to me personally much less and weaves around it a disquieting but highly satisfying story of myth, faith and the power of narrative.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

Miri’s husband was shouting in his sleep, not words that she could recognize but simple, blurting fanfares of distress. When, at last, she lit a lamp to discover what was tormenting him, she saw his tongue was black – scorched and sooty. Miri smelled the devil’s eggy dinner roasting on his breath; she heard the snapping of the devil’s kindling in his cough. She put her hand on to his chest; it was soft, damp and hot, like fresh bread. Her husband, Musa, was being baked alive. Good news.

Musa is a merchant. He is rich and highly successful, but little loved. He is a master of the marketplace – a skilled storyteller and bargainer with a shrewd instinct for the fears and desires of others. He is also though obese, often petty and prone to violent rages. He beats his wife. When he falls sick his uncles and cousins are quick to leave him in the wilderness. They leave Miri with him to take care of him while he dies. They take his goods and promise her that they’ll pick her up on their return journey. It seems unlikely that they shall.

Miri digs a grave for Musa with her hands on a plain near some caves. She does so gladly because his death promises her freedom. As she digs though four people arrive, each separately, and each takes residence in one of the caves. They are each on quarantine.

A quarantine here is a ritual 40 day fast in the wilderness. During the quarantine nothing may be eaten or drunk during daylight hours. Those on quarantine spend their time in meditation and prayer. Each of the four has their own reason for seeking out solitude.

Aphas is an old man dying from cancer and hoping for a cure. Marta believes herself barren and wishes to be blessed with fertility.

A hundred times and more, she’d done her best to fend off with prayers and lies the monthly rebuff of her periods. Now she only had till harvest to conceive. Then, her husband said, he would divorce her. The law allowed him to. The law demanded that he should, in fact. After ten years of barrenness a man could take another wife. ‘You don’t cast seed on sour land,’ he said. He had a right to heirs. It was a woman’s religious duty to provide and bring up children. He’d had to divorce his first wife, because she’d failed to conceive. Marta had failed as well. So Thaniel would have to turn her out and look elsewhere.
Of course it was regrettable and harsh, he said, but he could hardly blame himself. Not twice. He’d marry ‘Lisha’s daughter. She was youg. Her father owned some land adjacent to his own. The prospect was a cheerful one. And sensible.

Shim is a Greek with pretentions of holiness. The fourth is a Badu – a tribesman who may be deaf and who in any event speaks no language the others are familiar with.

Meanwhile, a fifth traveller is coming to do his quarantine. As he travels he comes across Musa’s tent. He asks for water, but Musa is in no position to respond. The traveller takes the water and out of guilt at his theft gives a small blessing to Musa who has woken and is objecting to his property being taken without recompense.

That fifth traveller is a young Galilean named Jesus. He has come determined to take no food or water at all in his forty days. He has come to find god. He chooses a cave more secluded than the others – one that is on a slope that is dangerous even to approach. He expects that god will bring him sustenance if he requires it.

With this Crace’s stage is set. When Musa recovers (to his wife’s great disappointment) he believes it was because of the Galilean’s touch. Finding himself abandoned and with his trade goods taken by his departed caravan he determines to make a profit from each of Aphas, Marta, Shim and the Badu. He determines too to lure out the Galilean from his cave that none can reach.

Everyone then has something that they want. Musa wants to make money and force the others to help carry him back to civilisation. Miri wants to be free, though has no prospect of getting her wish. As for the others, nobody goes to live forty days in a cave without serious cause.

The landscape is barren and unforgiving. It is harsh scrub with little to eat or drink. By day it is searingly hot and by night it is bitterly cold. It is a landscape devoid of life upon which those present project their own dreams and desires. In truth what it is is nothing. A derelict waste upon which they create meaning because it offers none.

Jesus here is a holy fool. He is still very young and often thinks about how everyone will treat him differently when he goes back blessed by god. He is utterly impractical. He interprets everything in the light of his belief. When Musa calls in the mornings for him to come out of his cave he hears it as the voice of the devil come to tempt him.

In a sense Musa is like the devil. He’s a tempter. He sees what men desire and offers it to them but for his own betterment. He is rich and gluttonous and lustful. Jesus by contrast is barely of this world and less so each day he goes without food and water.

There’s an element then of Manichean conflict. The difficulty is though that though Jesus believes Musa to be the devil he’s wrong. Musa is just a man. Musa believes Jesus healed him, but he doesn’t remember what happened clearly and there’s no particular evidence that he’s right. Each of them has taken chance events and from them formed a narrative which places them as its central figure.

What’s happening here is the birth of myth. Musa persuades the others that Jesus is holy. Only Shim resists out of his own desire to be the only holy man present and he is bullied by Musa into submission. Musa is utterly selfish, but he is also when he wishes charming and he soon has everyone (except the unreachable Jesus) listening to his stories and his glib lies which perhaps even he believes as he tells them.

It’s possible to read a religious interpretation to this novel. It’s possible to read it as showing a Jesus who through his quarantine really does become more than human. It’s possible.

It’s a stretch though. Yes, people have visions of Jesus but they do so while exhausted, asleep or where they can’t make out what they’re seeing properly. Musa is described in serpentine terms but he has perfectly explicable reasons for being there and seems very much of this world. Miracles perhaps occur, but every one of them can be explained by other means.

These are superstitious people. Musa’s illness is explained by him having slept on his back with his mouth uncovered, so letting a devil climb in to take residence in his ribcage. The Badu is able to survive in the wilderness unaided and shows signs of using reason to investigate his world (at one point he takes someone’s pulse, but they have no idea why), but everyone disregards him as mad. There is no scientific understanding here.

On their first night in their caves each traveller hears what they believe to be vicious animals, bandits, murderers outside their caves but it’s just the wind in the bushes and their imaginations in the frightening dark. They create small myths that vanish in the morning, and together in the daylight they create greater myths born equally of ignorance and their own secret fears and hopes.

What perhaps most impresses me with this novel is that although it’s philosophically dense it’s all wrapped in an excellent story. The characters are rounded and well realised (some more than others, but none stuck out to me as unconvincing). Their conflicts are interesting and although Musa is a monster he’s an explicable monster. He’s human. For all the talk of god, of devils and messiahs the sadness and success of the novel is that they’re all human. They just don’t always see it in each other.

I would never ordinarily have read a book about Jesus, historical or otherwise. I’ve never previously read Jim Crace and wasn’t really familiar with his work. All that means that without Kerry’s excellent review here at Hungry like the Woolf I wouldn’t have discovered this novel. I’m glad I did. Thanks Kerry.

For those interested in reading more about Crace, Kevin of Kevinfromcanada and John Self of The Asylum both reviewed his book All that Follows, here and here. There’s also a fascinating interview with Crace by John Self over at The Asylum here.

Quarantine

The joys of trickledown

Woken Furies, by Richard Morgan

I noticed recently that I don’t read much science fiction any more. I don’t seem to enjoy it as much as I used to. There are always exceptions though, and for me Richard Morgan made ideal Christmas reading. If Christmas isn’t about bloody tales of vengeance and left-wing politics after all, what is it about?

Woken Furies is Morgan’s fourth novel and the third (and so far final) in his Takeshi Kovacs sequence. I’ve written up his previous books here, here and here.

Altered Carbon shook up the dead genre of cyberpunk and reinvigorated it. It went back and drew on the same sources of inspiration Gibson had – hardboiled and noir fiction – and used them to craft a genuinely exciting story that mixed crime, politics and hard sf.

Broken Angels also drew on Gibson, but was much more inspired by the traditions of military sf than cyberpunk. It was good and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it wasn’t as original as Altered Carbon. What was most surprising about Broken Angels was how different it was to its predecessor. Morgan wrote a novel set in the same world, but arguably not quite in the same genre.

After that Morgan wrote Market Forces – his satire on contemporary neoliberal politics and market philosophies. I almost didn’t read it, but when I did although I had criticisms I found a lot in it to like and much in it that I recognised from my own life working in the City.

With Woken Furies Morgan returns to his Takeshi Kovacs character. The action takes place on Kovacs’ homeworld, Harlan’s World. It’s a planet ruled by its equivalent of the Founding Fathers and their families. The nobility here, the first families, are of course immortal because in Kovacs’ universe everyone has digital stacks implanted in them which record a person’s thoughts and experiences. On death, anyone with the money (or decent health insurance) can be resleeved – their stack excised and placed in a new and youthful body.

If you have the resources or someone else is willing to pay you can also be resleeved while alive. You can trade in your existing body for one better suited to your lifestyle. The poor though live with the bodies they’re born with and when they get old they just die. For the poor the future is not that different to all the long centuries that have gone before it.

Morgan has always been a political writer, and this is a highly political book. 300 years previously Harlan’s World saw a revolution. A Che Guevara-like figure named Quellcrist Falconer led an uprising against the first families. She lost, and was destroyed along with her datastack leaving no possibility of her return.

As the book opens, Kovacs is back on Harlan’s World. He’s temporarily sleeved in a cheap body which he’s using to carry out what are essentially acts of terrorism against a local fundamentalist religious movement. Why he’s doing this is unclear, but what is clear is how much trouble he’s in when after slaughtering several priests he finds the body he’d planned to go back into has become unavailable. Worse, he falls foul of the local Yakuza which leaves both the church and the mob looking to kill him. He needs to get out of town, and fast.

Here’s Kovacs in action, intervening in a bar fight that’s got out of hand:

She’d killed the one on the floor, let the others alone for time you could measure. The nearest priest got in close, lashed out with power knuckles and down she went, twisting, onto the ruined corpse of the officiator. The others closed in, steel-capped boots stomping down out of robes the colour of dried blood. Someone back at the tables started cheering.
I reached in, yanked back a beard and sliced the throat beneath it, back to the spine. Shoved the body aside. Slashed low through a robe and felt the blade bury itself in flesh. Twist and withdraw. Blood sluiced warm over my hand. The Tebbit knife sprayed droplets as it came clear. I reached again, dreamlike. Root and grab, brace and stab, kick aside. The others were turning, but they weren’t fighters. I laid open a cheek down to the bone, parted an outflung palm from middle finger to the wrist, drove them back off the woman on the floor, grinning, all the time grinning like a reef demon.

Kovacs falls in with a team of deComs. These are technologically augmented mercenaries fighting a war of aggression to reclaim a continent abandoned by humanity after that centuries-old revolution and which is now inhabited by the intelligent war machines of that era. The deComs use their skills and technological edge to wipe out the machines. The morality of this is, to put it mildly, questionable.

Static Hiss. The general channel was wide open.
‘Look,’ said the scorpion gun reasonably. ‘There’s no call for this. Why don’t you just leave us alone?.’
I sighed and shifted cramped limbs slightly in the confines of the overhang. A cold polar wind hooted in the eroded bluffs, chilling my face and hands. The sky overhead was a standard New Hok grey, the miserly northern winter daylight already past its best. Thirty meters below the rock face I was clinging to, a long trail of scree ran out to the valley floor proper, the river bend and the small cluster of archaic rectangular prefabs that formed the abandoned Quellist listening post. Where we’d been an hour ago. Smoke was still rising from one smashed structure where the self-propelled gun had lobbed its last smart shell. So much for programming parameters.
‘Leave us alone,’ it repeated. ‘And we’ll do you the same favour.’
‘Can’t do that,’ Sylvie murmured, voice gentle and detached as she ran the crew link-up at combat standby and probed for chinks in the artillery’s co-op system. Mind cast out in a gossamer net of awareness that settled over the surrounding landscape like a silk slip to the floor. ‘You know that. You’re too dangerous. Your whole system of life is inimical to ours.’
‘Yeah.’ Jadwiga’s new laugh was taking some getting used to. ‘And besides which , we want the fucking land.’

The Sylvie mentioned there is the leader of the deCom group. She has a new form of software interface technology embedded in her head. It goes wrong and she starts manifesting a second personality. A personality that appears to be Quellcrist Falconer. One theory is that Sylvie’s been infected with an ancient computer virus designed to sow confusion and programmed to believe it’s Falconer. There’s always the possibility though that somehow, impossibly, it really is Falconer’s personality and a recording of her somehow survived after all.

Kovacs takes Sylvie/Falconer to friends of his some of whom are old enough that they were part of that 300 year old revolution. They don’t necessarily care whether she’s really Falconer or not. For them she’s their revolution reborn. Their desire to believe is enough and events start moving towards a new insurrection.

All this and someone has got hold of an illegal backup of an earlier version of Kovacs himself. It’s illegal to have two versions of the same person alive. That earlier Kovacs has been well paid to hunt down his later self, and has the added incentive that legally only one of them can exist at a time. Kovacs isn’t just fighting the yakuza, a militant priesthood and the government of a planet. He’s fighting himself.

It’s high octane stuff. Morgan fills the book with his usual blend of hyperviolence, explicit sex and solid sf worldbuilding. The plot is twisty and complex, but not so much so that it can’t be followed. As a story it’s very enjoyable though it’s straight sf and so unlikely to appeal to those who haven’t already some interest in that genre.

Along the way Morgan takes diversions into a surfers’ community populaced by retirees who’ve bought themselves surfing-adapted bodies and who spend the long centuries seeking the perfect wave. He explores Kovacs’ abused childhood and adolescence as a petty criminal and what it was that made Kovacs into what he is (essentially a monster). He brings the deComs to life and stops off for an exciting battle among some alien ruins where an unarmed Kovacs takes down a party of mercenaries trying to kill him. There’s an awful lot of rock climbing. It’s fun stuff.

The key though is the politics. The revolution 300 years previously happened because the conditions of the poor were genuinely appalling. Afterwards things improved. The first families spread their wealth around a little more and conditions for the working classes became much more comfortable. As time’s gone on though the balance has shifted back and while things aren’t too bad there are signs that the gains won by the failed insurgency may not stick.

Falconer may be back and the revolution may be back with her. Will that make any difference though? The live Falconer seems in some ways quite different to the myth of her and is prepared to use methods that according to history she would never have countenanced. The question arises again, is it really her at all? Does anyone care? If the revolution finally happens will it just change one set of rulers for another?

This is a novel in which some characters make a defence of tyranny and it’s not clear that they’re wrong. Living standards are reasonable. People mostly are doing ok. Does it matter that they have little say in how they are governed? The revolutionaries are prepared to kill to free the people, but they’re not particularly inclined to ask the people if that’s actually what they want. The defence of tyranny is ultimately self-serving, but then here what isn’t?

Politics here is just something else to get people killed. Another means by which the few take power over the many. The personal though isn’t much better. Kovac’s campaign against the fundamentalists gets explained, but it’s deranged in its savagery and cruelty. Kovacs wants to rescue Sylvie from those who would use her for the personality she carries, but does she even want rescuing? Everyone here acts for others, but really everyone is acting for themselves.

I enjoyed Woken Furies, but I wasn’t sorry to know that it’s Kovacs’ last outing (at least for the moment anyway, Morgan hasn’t ruled out returning to him). All the Kovacs novels contain references to William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and though they’re less obvious here they’re still present (mostly in ways I can’t discuss without spoiling this and MLO). In that sense there’s nowhere further for it to go but also I thought Morgan had made his points. The essence of Kovacs’ universe for me is technological immortality and what its implementation tells us about ourselves.

The people of this future have access to science we can only dream of. They have settled alien worlds and conquered death. For all that though nothing has really changed. Those in charge rule through control of force. The poor distract themselves with drink, religion and cheap entertainment. The existence of immortality just means that when people are murdered care is taken to destroy their datastacks so that they can’t be brought back.

This is a society that could build a heaven for everyone. They could build a utopia in which nobody need ever die. Instead they use their wealth and brilliance to benefit a handful while the majority live in squalor. The parallels with our own world are all too obvious.

Woken Furies