Syzygy by Michael G. Coney

"We're all human, and the sooner we understand that, the better chance we'll have to overcome this Effect.  Nobody can lie anymore.  Suddenly the human race must become honest, and about time, too.  It's easy for me, because I've always had the money to be able to afford to say what I think.  It's going to be difficult for some of you...."

I've only read two short stories by Michael G. Coney over the course of this blog's apocalyptic life, "Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel" from 1976 and 1971's "The Sharks of Pentreath."  (Joachim Boaz and tarbandu are far more familiar with Coney than I am.)  But just recently I purchased a copy of Coney's 1973 novel Syzygy because I was hypnotized by Gene Szafran's blondetastic cover illustration--it's like a Botticelli for the modern age!  Well, I liked those two stories of Coney's I blogged about, so, hey, might as well read this novel whose title I can't recall the meaning of and can't pronounce, either.

(Joachim wrote about Syzygy in 2019, but I can't really remember what he said about it, so I am still going in cold; after I have read the book myself and drafted this blog post I'll reread Joachim's post and see to what extent we disagree and to what extent we are on the same page.)

It is the interstellar future!  For like 130 years humans have been on planet Arcadia, a world with six moons, a world with no sizable land predators.  Our story takes place in a small village of fishermen and farmers on the coast next to a research station; the head of the research station is our narrator, marine biologist Mark.  Even though this is the space-faring future and the colony has been on Arcadia for over a century, almost all the technology and culture in the story feels like the mid-20th century, like the story is taking place in a 1950s in an English coastal village or a little New England town--Coney makes almost no effort to make the novel feel like it is in the future; the sea life in the story all has clear Earth-analogues, so it doesn't even really feel like the village is on another planet.  People drink brandy and smoke pipes and cigarettes, they kill sharks with knives and spear guns, they catch plankton in nets, they listen to government communications and the news on the radio, they hang around in the pub, they get around in rowboats and sailboats and motor boats that run on "petrol."  (My edition has American spellings, but Coney is British and the text has some Briticisms: young troublemakers are called "tearaways," people don't "dump" a handful of small items into a bag or a truckload of material into a river, they "tip" it, and boring stick-in-the-mud politicians are called "blimps.")  Coney does insist on calling the village a "colony" or "sub-colony" and the villagers "private colonists;" the pub is the "Social Club" and everybody calls his house his "unit," but this just feels odd instead of evocative of another time or another planet.

Narrator Mark was engaged to blonde beauty Sheila, but six months ago, a few days before their wedding, Sheila was found dead on the shore, perhaps victim of an accident, perhaps a victim of murder.  Had she just fallen of a seaside cliff, or been slain by a blow to the head and tossed into the water?  This murder mystery is woven into the story's main plot, and so we get detective fiction scenes here and there--people find clues and commit burglaries to steal the clues and that sort of thing.  

The main plot has to do with a unique natural phenomena which, as the novel begins, is just beginning and will peak in a few weeks.  Every fifty-two years all six of Arcadia's moons are on the same side of the planet, something most people on the planet have never experienced.  Records from the past are vague, but there are lots of stories about how when this happened 52 years ago, the village was struck by a ferocious crime wave that featured riots and murders, and there are even stories of people enjoying strange psychic powers during that period of a few weeks before and after the conjunction of the moons.  Significantly, the crime wave was confined to coastal villages like Mark's--inland towns did not experience the disaster.

A psychiatrist, Arthur, has arrived in the village to observe the villagers during the approaching conjunction, and asks Mark to help observe.  Mark, however, has his hands full with the extreme tides caused by the conjunction of the moons; water is already rushing at terrible speed in and out of the estuary upon which the village and research center are built, and at the peak of the conjunction the ocean will rise up the coast a hundred feet higher than usual, which threatens the research center's fish farms and will force quite a few villagers to temporarily move out of their homes.

As the conjunction approaches, there are lots of inexplicable fights, villagers just flying off the handle in ways they themselves can't explain.  Mark himself takes a crazy risk on impulse, jumping into murky water to fight a shark hand-to-hand to protect his fish farms.  The native wildlife acts strangely, as well.  A small animal, I guess like a monkey or squirrel, presents to Mark a clue about Sheila's death.  The unusual movements of the water in the local estuary have lead to a high volume per cubic foot of plankton, and when some people from another village come by to gather the plankton to sell, sharks attack their boats and kill them, acting not like individual fish but like organized members of an attack group.

In the second quarter of the novel Mark and Arthur figure out that the plankton have psychic powers and use those powers to enlist the sharks to defend them during the once-in-52-years extreme tides, the only time the plankton can mate and reproduce.  These powers are causing telepathic feedback among nearby humans; people can subconsciously sense others' feelings and sometimes even involuntarily read their thoughts, especially the pervasive negative feelings we all have for each other but hardly ever voice.  Sensing these feelings of hostility is what is causing all the unaccountable outbursts of violence in the village.  Mark learns he may be at  particular risk of being attacked because some people already suspect he murdered Shelia to get his hands on Sheila's nineteen-year-old sister, Jane, who is always hanging around thirty-two-year-old Mark; her behavior makes it clear to the reader that she is in love with Mark, and when the telepathic phenomenon really gets going her desire for Mark becomes clear to everybody.  

In the third quarter of the novel we witness the responses to the now universally acknowledged crisis of telepathic broadcasting: the efforts of scientists to communicate with the plankton, the efforts of the government to lockdown people so they can't harm each other (Coney contrives reasons why the coastal population can't just move in inland for a few weeks--there isn't enough housing or whatever), and all the ways the villagers, involuntarily picking up others' hostility and responding with their own hostility which is in turn detected so that a whole cycle of rage develops, get into fierce and dangerous disputes.  The government decides to kill all the plankton by poisoning the coastal waters, which of course will destroy the jobs of all the fishermen and ruin years of progress at Mark's research station; it will also take the government two days to get the poison ready, during which time many more people will be killed in violence.  So, a village mob rises up with the aim of dynamiting the local plankton.  As we sort of expect in old SF stories, Mark, the man of science, acts as a foil for the stupid common people and the stupid government and the stupid religious authorities, but in this novel the man of science is pretty ineffectual; Mark's efforts to guide others come to nothing, the dynamite attack goes forward and is a total disaster, and a lynch mob comes after Mark.  A blunt and domineering old rich woman who has been quartered with Mark because her home is too close to the shore saves him from the mob by threatening the angry populace with a pistol, and he flees on foot to hide at a farm just beyond the village limits.  The action scenes that follow his flight are a high point of excitement in this talky and slow book.

In the same way that Mark was surprised that that jerk of an old rich woman turned out to be more level-headed and helpful than almost anybody, he is amazed when a troublemaking young man turns out to be adept at resisting the powers of the plankton and helps Mark escape from the village mob.  In the final quarter of Syzygy, Mark learns that this young man's resistance to the plankton is thanks to his habitual use of a drug made from Arcadian grass.  "It doesn't get a hold of you; you can leave it off whenever you want.  It just makes you feel good for a while," he says, comparing it to habit-forming and carcinogenic nicotine and cognition-impairing alcohol.  These SF stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log often have elements of wish fulfillment fantasies, and we can add "opiate that has no ill side effects" next to "girl over ten years your junior chases you" on the Syzygy scorecard.

The discovery of the drug sort of feels like the resolution of the plot, but there are still like 50 pages to go in the 215-page novel.  Our heroes stop the poison from being put into their estuary by the government, but can only convince a small number of villagers to take the drug and thus get immunity from the plankton's psychic powers.  The plankton's abilities increase, and most of the villagers are hypnotized into worshipping the sea and seeking to commit suicide by jumping into the shark-infested waters.  (This is why there are no large land predators on Arcadia--every fifty-two years large animals that don't eat the local grass are impelled to commit suicide.)  The drug users take desperate measures to shock some senses into the hypnotized people, one of which is Jane's disguising herself as her sister Sheila.  Most of them are saved, though there are some fatalities, including the weak-minded rector who is the leader of the suicide cult and the man who turns out to be responsible for Sheila's falling off that cliff six months ago.  In these tedious final 50 pages we also get a resolution of the Mark-Jane relationship and a full explanation of the mystery of Sheila's death.     

Cover artists have striven mightily to make Syzygy look exciting, at least

I'm judging Syzygy to be just barely acceptable.  While the different plot threads all work smoothly together and Coney's writing style is professional and free of faults (it is certainly better than that of the Lin Carter books I have been reading), the novel feels very long and slow and Coney's style lacks personality or feeling.  Horrible stuff, the kind of stuff that we see in gruesome detective stories and weird tales and gory horror stories, like four men being torn to pieces by sharks in front of dozens of witnesses, a guy looking for clues as to who murdered his fiancé, and a whole community being tricked into joining an alien death cult, happens, but Coney fails to convey any sense of fear or urgency--the plot of the book is an intellectual exercise, not a foundation for thrills or chills.  Could Syzygy be one of those "cozy catastrophes" I hear people talking about sometimes?

There are lots of characters in Coney's novel, and I didn't particularly care about any of them.  Mark, our main character, is pretty boring, and he doesn't drive the narrative, even though he is one of the most important members of the community, a man vested with authority; he never feels like a leader whose decisions matter, neither his specialized knowledge nor his position play any role in the resolution of the plot--Arthur the amateur is as good a practical biologist as Mark is and when Mark tells people what to do they just ignore him.  Beyond our narrator, Coney uses his characters to trot out the prejudices common among the sort of educated middle-class people who write and read novels: people without college degrees are always moments away from becoming a dangerous mob; religion is a scam and clergymen are interfering busybodies with second-rate minds (the prominence of the rector in the "colony" is one of the things that makes Syzygy feel like it is taking place in a little village on the English coast and not on an alien world in an interstellar civilization); politicians will do anything to get reelected; rich people are jerks.  Do I read SF to be fed this conventional fare that I could get anywhere?  Not really, and even worse, Coney's misanthropy lacks any passion.  The most passionate passage in the book, and the most surprising and unconventional thing in the novel from the perspective of us inhabitants of 2023, is when Mark recognizes thanks to the telepathic feedback effect that Arthur is a closeted homosexual--homosexuals make Mark's skin crawl and make him want to vomit!  

Disappointing.  

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Having drafted the above, I reread Joachim's take of three years ago on Syzygy, and we seem to agree on the main points, which saves me the work of marshalling evidence to defend my arguments but also means this blog post is sort of superfluous.  Well, I guess I can't blaze a trail every episode.

More British shenanigans in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.