"Strangers in Town" by Shirley Jackson
"Strangers in Town" starts with a traditional obvious joke. Our narrator, a housewife, tells us she hates gossip, and then proceeds to provide us readers page after page of gossip and descriptions of the many ruses and maneuvers she engages in to facilitate her spying on her new next door neighbors so she can talk about them with her other, long-term, neighbors. Based on limited evidence, she fears the new neighbors keep a dirty house and drink a lot. Then she meets the next door people's maid, and it turns out she is a witch who uses magic as a labor-saving device. I guess the joke is that the witch, and the lady of the house when our narrator meets her, just openly talk about magic instead of being sneaky about it.
The narrator and her fellow gossips are suspicious of the new neighbors, whom they think may be foreigners and/or heathens, but the new neighbors are very kind and sweet, always using their magic to do good deeds about the town, so I guess the banal point of this story is that suburban people are closed-minded and judgmental and mean to new comers and minorities who try to join the community even though the new comers and minorities are generous and helpful and in fact better than the suburbanites, smarter and more sophisticated (this family with the witch for a maid have modern furniture and are vegetarians.) I guess this story is an allegory of blacks or Jews or Catholics or bohemians or whoever moving into a middle-class WASP neighborhood and being cruelly rejected by the bourgeois WASPs, who are scared by their different (but superior!) cultural practices.
Anyway, the kids in the little town like the new people because they give them gifts and because their talking cat can tell them stories. Eventually the women of the town get together in a mob (except for a fat woman who is late to the gathering because she has to put on her corset) and insult the new people and the new people leave. But the strangers leave something behind--their magical cat impregnated the narrator's cat and the kittens have strange eyes and are quite oversized; the neighborhood kids adore these kittens but they scare the adults.
I can't say there is anything wrong with "Strangers in Town"--the pacing is fine, the characters all act in a more or less believable way, Jackson gives the narrator a personality and a consistent voice, and so forth. (I won't get into whether or not there is a risk associated with inviting strangers into your town, whether they might rape your daughter or burn down your townhall or defraud your welfare system or start a grenade-throwing gang war with the other immigrants you invited in last month. Jackson asserts that immigrants and minorities are awesome and we are going with that.) "Strangers in Town" is professionally written and polished. But the themes and the plot are boring, like stuff we've seen a hundred times before on TV--this isn't the first time I have been told that suburbanites are unsophisticated jerks and native-born middle-class white Christians should treat non-whites and immigrants and non-Christians better than they do. I'll call "Strangers in Town" acceptable. We don't have to wonder why Merril would enjoy and promote this story, as it expresses boilerplate liberal/left ideology and appeared in a mainstream publication, and Merril is always looking for examples of mainstream writers and outlets in the act of employing speculative fiction devices in order to buttress her contention that genre boundaries are bogus.
"Breaking Point" by Colin Kapp
...the current story which follows, a breakaway from the traditional approach to a psychological story. Colin Kapp now joins Brian Aldiss and Jim Ballard as British writers who are pioneering the new type of science fiction which is rapidly replacing the old."Breaking Point" is a quite pretentious but quite weak story full of empty and uninteresting philosophical banter among the various uninteresting characters; all the major characters declare each other insane and unfit to wield authority, though each has some kind of claim to authority, and then it is revealed that all the characters are secretly working together.
Civilization (sometimes spelled "civilisation" in this poorly copyedited story which doesn't maintain fidelity to either US or UK spelling but switches between them) is collapsing and the nation is being shaken by mass rioting. Our lead character is Lieutenant Penny, an Army officer and a psychologist. The Army is trying to quell the riots, without success, and we get poorly written action scenes in which the mob attacks the soldiers with bricks and bottles, Army trucks crash while trying to negotiate the barricaded streets, and so forth. Serving in the same unit as Perry is Major Bannerman. When Penny's unit is about to be overwhelmed and destroyed by the mob, a tall man among the the crowd, Pandi, stops the attack by emotionally manipulating the mob members using poetry. Penny and Bannerman compare this man's charisma, his ability to drive men hither and thither with words that seem like nonsense, to Hitler's. They also discuss the nature of civilization--is it natural or unnatural? Colonel Foresyte appears on the scene, demands the capture of Pandi and conducts an interrogation of this enigmatic figure. Here is a sample, from that interrogation, of typical dialogue from this sterile and dog-chasing-its-own-tail story.
"...that which is obvious is frequently not logical, and therefore difficult to justify. I claim that you cannot give me a rational reason why you must save civilisation.”“That may be true, but the relevance escapes me. Civilization is an illogical entity. It has a different meaning for every man. I intend to save it for what it means to me.”“Would you believe me,” asked Pandi, "if I said that your kind of civilization is already dead?”“No,” said Foresyte,“it is going through a period of trial, but it will rise again.”“Not so! It should never have existed...."
Foresyte's interrogation becomes extreme, little better than torture, so Penny assaults Foresyte and liberates Pandi. Bannerman appears--is he trying to capture Penny and Pandi or trying to help them? Is he trying to run them over with his truck or trying to pick them up? A theme of this story is that everybody's motives and goals are unknowable and changeable besides. The Army camp erupts into gunfire, bullets and shells whipping every which way. Is there an enemy attack under way? No, like civilization itself, the Army camp is collapsing into violent insanity because modernity--"dogma, advertising, education, politics, brainwashing, and similar invasions of the soul"--have driven every individual and the entire human race insane. Or sop says Bannerman.
Bannerman, Penny, and Pandi take refuge in a remote cabin. Pandi leaves with the truck and returns with the injured Foresyte. Bannerman reveals that Pandi is an actor working for Foresyte. Foresyte set up the whole complicated business with Pandi in order to test to see if Penny was one of the few sane men left in the world. And Penny passed the test! Such men as Penny will be sent to an island like Arthur was sent to Avalon--the few sane men will rebuild civilization after all the insane have killed each other. Penny in the last sentence of the story weeps.
Thumbs down for this ridiculous thing. We might see it as a New Wave story, but at the same time it bears many resemblances to the work of Golden Age SF writers like Asimov, Heinlein, and van Vogt, in which the cognitive elite behind the scenes manipulate people with their superbrains and incredible knowledge of psychology and sociology in hopes of guiding fragile civilization to the conquest of the stars someday. But while those old stories had a measure of gee whiz fun about them, and felt fresh and exciting, "Breaking Point" is depressing and drab and wears you out.
"The Oracle of the Fish" by Gerald Kersh
"The Oracle of the Fish" is a joke story the beginning of which is full of obvious jokes of the kind with which Jackson tried to entertain us, people saying something and then contradicting it with their actions. A barkeep says she trusts her customers but always empties the till into her pocket when she leaves the bar, a Welshman says that Welshmen all brag about their ancestors, but he never does, and then proceeds to do so. Set in Wales, Kersh also makes jokes about how long and unpronounceable Welsh names are. these jokes are not bad, but feel very tired.
The narrator, an Englishman, encounters a Welshman with a PhD and has a long conversation with him; the Welshman takes over as first-person narrator and his story is the meat of "The Oracle of the Fish."
The Welshman tells the story (full of digressions and trivia) of how in 1939 he acquired by his cleverness from a talking fish an ancient ring with symbols on it, and then a goat accidentally pointed him to an ancient standing stone carved with identical symbols, so he hired a mute imbecile (mentally damaged by a fall on his head two decades prior) who is also an expert miner to help him dig under the stone. The two explored a cave, found ancient coins and fossilized bones of cave men and mammoths, and eventually came upon a lost race of troglodytes, descendants of the Picts driven underground by the Romans who have kept up their numbers and diversified their gene pool by kidnapping babies from the surface at night. The imbecile realizes these are his people, and joins them--the PhD escapes the hideous cannibalistic subterraneans by blinding them with the flash bulb on his camera. The Welshman planned to explore the caverns further, with a heavily equipped team, but an errant German bomb hit the site and caused a cave-in that destroyed everything.
A jocular version of an H. P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard story. Parts are engaging, some of the jokes inspire a smile, but portions of "The Oracle of the Fish" are long and tedious. Adding up the pluses and minuses, we come to zero, the break-even point, and conclude this story is acceptable.
These stories are not great. But I feel like they are a good representation of Merril's characteristic and closely linked projects--dissolving the boundaries between genres and promoting the New Wave. We've got two professionally written mainstream stories from magazines that are not ostensibly dedicated to speculative fiction, and we've got a story from a science fiction magazine that features no high technology and focuses exclusively on psychology and sociology and is vague, philosophical in a show offy but ultimately empty way, and pessimistic, thus ticking plenty of the boxes of what we think of as New Wave.
A crop of stories that are more interesting from an historical point of view than actually enjoyable to read. Maybe the 1959 "L" stories picked by Merril will go down more smoothly? Stay tuned and find out.
No comments:
Post a Comment