(After drafting this blog post I looked at Joachim Boaz's 2013 post on Chronocules, to find that Joachim and I are basically on the same page on this one; often we have different opinions of works, or engage them from different angles, but not so much this time. So, you should feel free to read his post and skip mine, which just goes into more detail and includes far more spoilers.)
I was immediately disappointed to find that the first pages of Chronocules, a "Prolog," were written in a jokey, sarcastic, smart-alecky style. I don't need any more sarcasm or any more unfunny jokes in my life; everybody I know, and I am the worst of them, talks like he thinks he is a comedian, so in fiction I hope to find sincerity, counterfeit or otherwise. But I persevered.
The prolog is about a low-IQ hermit, Roses Varco, a man born of a broken home who in 1968 is living alone like a wretched squatter in an abandoned English village on the coast, Penheniot. One day Roses is by the water reading some kind of comic book or children's adventure story and hears a loud noise from inside his dilapidated cottage. A high tech book has teleported into his home, its materialization causing what amounts to an explosion. (The appearance of the book has also left an odd smell that serves as the title for at least one edition of Chronocules.) The book glows with a cool light, stimulates the pleasure center of the imbecilic brain of the imbecilic Roses when he touches it, and is constructed of indestructible materials. The text is too challenging for this uneducated pea-brain to read, so he throws the book in the water.
An "Author's Note" follows the "Prolog;" the author tells us he found the indestructible book and that the lion's share of this book we are reading is an attempt to "reconstruct" the challenging glowing book, which the author admits is "quite intolerable." The preceding prolog, he tells us, is based on his interview of Roses Varco.
Roses is still in Penheniot, kept around to serve as village idiot by the people who have taken over the now bustling village and filled it with laboratories as well as spiffy shops and housing. The Penheniot Experimental Research Village (P.E.R.V for short) is the brainchild of Immanuel ("Manny") Littlejohn. The raison d'etre of P.E.R.V. is the development of an apparatus that will make an object disappear and then reappear at a specific time; during the period of its absence the object will not age. The senior of the two scientists working on the project, Igor Kravchensky, explains via an analogy I found somewhat slippery that all objects are in the stream of time, which itself is moving, and typically such objects are moving at a different rate than the stream, moving through time like a boat in a river that is propelled by a motor is moving at a differentrate than the water; Kravchensky hopes to be able to make objects temporarily match the movement of the stream of time, which means they will, temporarily, be like a boat adrift with its motor off, moving at the same speed as the river. Such objects will no longer be in contact with our, moving, universe, and no longer suffer the decay caused by the time particles he calls "chronocules." In this way, in theory, a person could be sent on (what amounts to him or her) an instantaneous one-way trip to the future. The eccentric Kravchensky bristles at the phrase "time travel," insisting he is working on a means of achieving and controlling "chronomic unity." In Chapter One, however, the process is far from perfected, and only metals can be reliably made to disappear and reappear on schedule; organic objects (wooden chairs, for example) have failed to reappear and those that do return are catastrophically damaged, falling to ash upon reappearance.
Our main characters also include P.E.R.V.'s 46-year-old Operations Supervisor ("O. S."), David Silberstein, who is in direct command of everything, answering only to Littlejohn, and 26-year-old scientist Liza Simmons, assistant to head scientist Kravchensky. Silberstein is attracted to Simmons, but they are from different generations and on totally different wavelengths; Liza is promiscuous like most people of her generation and directly suggests to Silberstein that they have sex, but while she thinks of sex as just a fun trifle, David is shy and nervous and apparently thinks sex is, or should be, meaningful--Liza considers him crippled by "hang-ups" and thinks he talks like a "caricature of the fifties."
Chapter One focuses on Silberstein, Chapter Two on Simmons, Chapter Three on Immanuel Littlejohn, founder, financial backer and dictator of P.E.R.V. In this third chapter it is made plain that P.E.R.V. is meant to be a self-sufficient community and that its inhabitants have been enjoined (on pain of death!) to cut all ties to the outside because Littlejohn envisages moving the entire village to the future! Littlejohn's aim is to escape the problems of the current time and to access future high tech medical care that he, a man in his eighties, can take advantage of to prolong his life. Littlejohn is presented as calculating, callous, ruthless, selfish and self-indulgent, an amoral man with bad taste devoted to his own pleasures no matter the expense and indifferent to the fates of others.
When I wrote about Compton's Synthajoy some years ago I made some remarks about Compton's treatment of Jewish characters, how he portrayed them as an exotic community distinct from the English or British community and associated them with business and capitalism. The portrayal of Jews in this book is also of interest, and seems similar. On page 25 Compton (or should we say the nameless author of this book, or the author of the high-tech future book he seeks to interpret?) details Silberstein's thoughts on how difficult the chronomic unity project is, taking the opportunity to hint that Silberstein thinks Jews are smarter than gentiles:
After all, even the Americans, with the help of the best Jewish brains in the world and a budget equal to the combined GNPs of all the emergent nations, had taken God knows how long to ship their puny little space station up onto the moon. Two years for a project such as P.E.R.V. was engaged upon was next to nothing.
I have pointed out that in Chapter Three that Compton offers an abundance of evidence demonstrating Littlejohn's distance from the people around him, his contempt for them and alienation from them. Is this a portrayal of the Jew as an outsider who uses his cleverness and wealth to manipulate others, as a creature who uses his gifts to improve his own lot and enjoy himself and cares not a whit about the mass of gentiles among whom he lives? After all, Littlejohn isn't bending his vast resources to the task of solving the problems of the late 20th century (pollution, overpopulation, exhaustion of natural resources) but rather to escaping them.
One of these pieces of evidence of Littlejohn's alienation from Chapter Three seems to emphasize the wealthy man's ethnic/religious identity--Littlejohn says of David Silberstein on page 82 that the O.S. is "so British," hinting that, compared to the Jew Littlejohn, his fellow Jew Silberstein is assimilated into English culture (even though in Chapter Two we saw that Silberstein is not at all in sync with the current casual sex culture exemplified by twenty-something Simmons.) Perhaps we should see the episode of the dog as another way of contrasting Jewish Littlejohn with English Roses Varco--there is the stereotype, remember, that English people love love love animals.
In Chapter Four we learn the true mission of P.E.R.V. is kept secret from the government when a woman from the "Committee for Moral Responsibility in Science" comes by to aggressively investigate the place. David Silberstein and his colleagues lie to her outrageously, including about the murders they have committed in their quest to sever the ties of the P.E.R.V. staff and residents to the outside world.
Chronocules is full of skepticism of science, a skepticism the Committee woman makes explicit: "...you, in common with most scientists, are socially and environmentally irresponsible. Criminally so." Compton is not employing her as a mouthpiece, however, at least not solely--she is about as much a victim of Compton's satire as any of the other characters. While Manny Littlejohn is a caricature of the gauche nouveau riche Jewish businessman, she is a caricature of the absurdly openminded liberal who excuses the behavior of murderous rioters and considers all forms of sexual license and drug use to be "healthy experimentation" and, when late in the novel she achieves prominence in the British government, she becomes the avatar of extreme and self-destructive government incompetence.
More subtle presentations of Compton's themes of skepticism of science--or at least scientists--as well as skepticism of modern methods that stress efficiency and skepticism of modern notions about what constitutes freedom, are offered by a decorative clock in the lab where Kravchensky and Liza work on the unreliable chronomic unity device, and by the novel's touchstone and moral center, Roses Varco. The elaborate clock, I guess some sort of hip novelty or art installation, deliberately tells the wrong time, and offers useless trivia to the scientists, like the arrival and departure times of trains in India. Roses initially fascinates Liza Simmons and David Silberstein, who cultivate relationships with him and (in the first half of the novel) suspect the low-I.Q. man, an adult virgin in a world of casual sex who sits by the river and fishes with a line when he could catch fish much more easily with a net, is some kind of wise man in touch with nature. Of him, Liza thinks,
One of Roses' great qualities was that he was always occupied, but never busy....She could think of no better way of living.
While Manny Littlejohn grasps at money and power and Liza Simmons pursues knowledge and career, Roses, like a classical stoic or a Christian embodying the serenity prayer, is satisfied with what he has and doesn't push himself to acquire more.
The chapter with the Committee lady, Chapter Four, is followed by an "Interjection" in the voice of the writer of the prolog that sits at the halfway point of the novel and gives us more info about the glowing book that the text we are reading in the numbered chapters is meant to reproduce. The glowing book is apparently an interactive work somewhat like one of those Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks which have brought me so much pleasure over the decades--its plot adapts to reader predilections or is largely determined by reader choices. The author of the prolog and interjection is, it seems, rewriting the book in a linear fashion, relating to us the plot his own choices produced, not a definitive version of the narrative of the high-tech volume.
Chapter Five continues with the animal business. Roses likes to go look at rabbits and swans, and takes Liza on some of these little expeditions. In Chapter Four they found rabbits that are mutants with only three legs, and in Chapter Five they find some swans that have died from pollution. The plot advances quite a bit in Chapter Five, as Kravchensky (on his own, without Liza's help, while she was hanging around Roses) has achieved a breakthrough, figuring out how to send living things into the future, and David orders an end to all intercourse between P.E.R.V. and the rest of the world because a mutant disease, maybe born of pollution, maybe having escaped a government lab, has struck England. Liza admits to herself that she is in love with Roses when they (having come in contact with outsiders on their ill-fated swan-watching jaunt) are quarantined together in the same hospital room.
In Chapter Six a group of outsiders invades P.E.R.V. and is easily neutralized. David figures out that a minor character of whom we have seen little, Sir Edwin Solomons, is a traitor and passed to this crew of interlopers a description of P.E.R.V.'s defenses. David interviews this Solomons, who says he was disillusioned by the project once he realized that there can be no free will if time travel is real, and then has Solomons summarily executed.
Most of Chapter Seven is about attacks on P.E.R.V. by riotous outsiders and efforts of the hapless government to investigate the place (government officials claim to suspect it is the source of the plague); employing high tech weapons, David and his security apparatus repel these incompetent interventions.
Chapter Eight finds David, his thinking influenced by Solomons's philosophical talk back in Chapter Six, beginning to doubt the whole "time travel" chronomic unity plan, just as Kravchensky and Liza are achieving success in sending mammals safely into the future--or so they think! Rushed by events, as more criminal attacks and more government interventions threaten P.E.R.V., Kravchensky and Liza run their first test on a human, a woman chosen by lot, Rachel Moser. Moser returns from chronomic unity precisely on schedule after fifteen minutes, but has suffered terrible brain damage--the sort of damage it has been impossible to easily detect in the quadrupeds who were the earlier, apparently unharmed, test subjects.
In Chapter Nine, Roses Varco is selected to be sent to the future, Kravchensky and Liza using a different technique which, it is hoped, will not scramble his already inferior brain, but which is not quite as reliable when it comes to scheduling the moment when a subject will emerge from chronomic unity. David Silberstein strongly supports sending Roses, showing himself to be as selfish and ruthless as Littlejohn--David is under the misapprehension that Liza is still in love with the dolt and that Roses's death or disappearance will clear the way for a relationship with her, the only woman David has ever loved.
Chapter Ten, the final proper chapter, the author tells us, is not based on the glowing book, but is pure speculation. (Chronocules not only warns us against trusting scientists, but against trusting authors, who will just make stuff up and present it as fact.) This brief chapter of speculation suggests that Roses, undamaged, reappeared 57 years later, within the lifetime of Liza Simmons. Simmons is the ruthless dictator of a new world, a world she and her armies have pacified through merciless violence. She co-wrote with a minor character whom I have not mentioned that glowing book which was somehow sent back to 1968. Liza shows Roses the book. Liza has a son, now in his late fifties, whom she has told was the product of a coupling with Kravchensky, but when the son sees Varco he realizes Varco is his father. It is Liza's son who uses the advanced version of the chronomic unity device to send book and Varco back to '68; after he does so, his mother murders him. Adding to these melodramatic speculations are the author's speculations that soon after the events depicted in Chapter Nine that David Silberstein will commit suicide, Manny Littlejohn will be murdered by the wife he mistreated, and Kravchensky will be killed by a mob.
In the "Epilog" we are told that when Roses Varco reappeared in 1968, with the book, because two versions of a man cannot coexist in the same time period, he vanished, leaving only the indestructible book for his younger self to find.
On the plus side, Chronocules has a kind of Gene Wolfe-like unreliable narrator thing going as well as the sort of mind-blowing ending in which everything comes full circle that I associate with A. E. van Vogt's work as well as some of Wolfe's novels.
Chronocules is OK; I can see people who actually want a pessimistic satire that attacks science and progress and social change and authority and expertise enjoying Chronocules, but if you aren't one of those people you are likely to find it underwhelming.
Ummmmm........yeah........I think I'll pass on 'Chronocules'......it's going into the 'Library Donations' box.
ReplyDeleteI don't know, tarbandu; maybe if you read it you will discover some unplumbed depths, decipher some esoteric meaning, that Joachim and I missed.
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