Synthajoy by D. G. Compton

"What you're doing to Tony there--can you justify that as satisfying a need?"

"Of course I can.  The need for innovation.  It's as potent as the need for sex, or for power."

Against his rationalizations I could only range a deep, instinctive repugnance.

As a kid growing up in Northern New Jersey I spent lots of time riding in the car on Route 80, travelling between home and my maternal grandmother's house. Nana, as we called her, had lots of cool old toys that I now see in antique stores, a round tin box full of like 12 pounds of fascinating buttons for us to sift through, and a bookcase full of hardcover books, including an encyclopedia published during World War II that, among other things, had black and white reproductions of Charles R. Knight paintings under the dinosaur entries, and a lot of those Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I bring this up not just because I like reminiscing about my prosaic childhood, but because it appears (according to this page at the New York Review of Books website) that critically acclaimed SF author D. G. Compton has done work for Reader's Digest Condensed Books as an editor and as a condenser!

Compton's first science fiction book published in America was 1968's Synthajoy, and this week I read my copy, the Ace Science Fiction Special edition with the cover by the Dillons.  I liked Compton's Steel Crocodile when I read it in July, so I expected to like this one as well, and I was not disappointed.  Joachim Boaz read Synthajoy in 2011 (check out his review here) and on this topic we are in close agreement--he also quite liked it.

Synthajoy is presented in the form of a first-person narrative from Thea Cadence, a nurse and the wife of Edward Cadence, a doctor and the co-inventor of Sensitape. The text switches back and forth between a day to day narrative of her confinement in a mental hospital, and flashbacks to what I think of as "the main plot," the story of the development of Sensitape and of Thea's relationships with Edward and with electronics expert Tony Stech, the other half of the Sensitape development team. The irony is that Thea is now receiving the very Sensitape treatment she helped devise with her husband Edward and his partner Tony!

Synthajoy sees use of literary or "New Wavey" techniques, like a sentence typed in undulating curves instead of on a level line, passages written in the form of a film script or a play, and sections and chapters that end in the middle of a sentence--many of these sentences are never completed.  Most importantly, the main plot is not related in strict chronological order.

The main plot: An increasing number of people in overcrowded England have come to feel life is not worth living, and they just lay down and, after a few weeks, even though their bodies are perfectly healthy, die. The medical professionals call this "Uncompensated Death Wish," or UDW, and over a million people a year are dying of it!  Edward and Thea Cadence treat UDW cases, one of whom is the Jewish owner of an electronics shop, Jacob Stech. Jacob's death inspires his son, Tony, to devote his electronics expertise to curing the disease, and together Edward and Tony invent a machine that cures UDW, Sensitape. Sensitape is a system by which people's thoughts and feelings are recorded and can be played back for others via a headset; the first tape, called Relaxatape, plays a recording of the brain waves of a person at peace, and the brainwaves of those who "listen" to the tape conform to the recording, forcing them to relax. Millions of lives are saved from UDW through use of such therapeutic tapes and Edward becomes a national hero, but the Sensitape team doesn't stop there.  Soon Edward and Tony are at the head of a major commercial enterprise, recording tapes of all kinds of experiences, from artistic creation to sexual intercourse, and selling the tapes and the machines needed to play them not only to medical institutions for therapeutic use, but also on the retail market for entertainment purposes.

While not a scientist herself, Thea is instrumental in the development of Sensitape; for one thing, she introduces Tony to Edward, suggesting that Tony ("the electronics king of West London") could be of assistance in overcoming apparently insuperable technical challenges faced by Edward.  As Thea begins to doubt the morality of Senistape, her essential role in its development burdens her with tremendous guilt. ("All this, the whole hellish structure, is my fault....I could have altered the fate of the human race.")  As she sits at the machinery with Edward and Tony while they record the brain waves of a couple having sex, she becomes vomitously ill.  She is in physical contact with a dying priest as his last thoughts are recorded and is a witness to Edward convincing musicians and artists to have their acts of performance and creation recorded.  And then there is a scene which explicitly tells us Sensitape is something like drug abuse, when gangsters who control the European heroin and cocaine trade knock on the Cadences' door and, guns drawn, demand they be given a cut of the profits of Sensitapes sold as a narcotic substitute because this product is driving the drug dealers out of business.

We've seen this sort of thing, artificial dreams or recorded thoughts used as therapy or entertainment/pornography/addictive substance more than once over the course of this blog's life, in numerous early '70s Barry Malzberg stories, in Lin Carter's 1968 "The Thief of Thoth", and Evelyn Lief's 1972 "Every Fourth House."  New Jersey's own Malzberg, one of the premier critics and historians of science fiction, in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, cites Peter Phillips as being the first to do this sort of thing back in 1948.

The human part of the plot concerns how Edward's and Thea's marriage is a cold sham, how Edward starts having an affair with the woman known as Mrs. X (the woman who was recorded for the sex tape--she has perhaps the highest sex drive in Britain!) and then Thea starts an affair with Tony.  Everything comes to a head after Tony dies in an experiment in which he "listens to" an experimental tape which Edward has prepared, Synthajoy, a tape which synthesizes various pleasurable and ecstatic experiences to create the ultimate pleasure, and Thea has a bad reaction to a recording of the emotions of a genius conductor leading his orchestra--she can feel the love of the genius for Brahms, and it makes her feel like an abominable interloper. ("To experience the tape was to trespass on that love....")  Edward is murdered; Thea tells us that Mrs. X, wanting to renegotiate her sex tape contract for a bigger share of the profits, killed Edward so she could steal the contract, but Thea herself is convicted of the crime. (All this adultery, murder, and murder trial jazz perhaps reflects Compton's career as a mystery novelist.)  Thea is sentenced to confinement in the very hospital for which she did interior design and subjected to the very sort of therapy she helped develop, compelled to experience tapes designed to induce contrition...or is it guilt?

In the last pages of the novel we realize how mentally unstable and how unreliable a narrator Thea may really be when she provides a different version of the story of the murder, we learn the truth(?) about her alleged frigidity, and, after spending the whole book talking about how she hates Sensitape and what it has done to British society ("hellish structure") and how she looks down on profit seekers ("To buy (with money) what Beldik had recorded (for money) was to compound a moral felony"), she declares she will perfect Synthajoy--the ultimate Sensitape!--and make a bazillion pounds selling it, apparently to get revenge on Mrs. X.  (Shades of Winston Smith!) To what extent has Thea always been flawed, and to what extent has the Sensitape therapy/punishment/brainwashing turned her into the troubled person we have spent this book with?

Synthajoy is a good novel and I enjoyed it.  The characters and their relationships are all believable and interesting, and all the literary touches (the somewhat experimental stuff I've mentioned, and also more conventional things like detailed descriptions of rooms and landscapes) aren't just showoffy frippery that obscure the narrative, but actually make the book more engaging.

Back of my copy

The science fiction elements are alright, but are secondary to the human drama.  The obvious novels to compare Synthajoy to are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, but while those novels create rich fictional worlds and address, head on, important political and philosophical debates, in Synthajoy Compton doesn't really describe a world much different than our own or make a very direct or convincing moral or political argument.  The reviews from UK periodicals quoted on the back of my copy claim the novel is "horrifying" and "hair-raising," but I didn't feel that it was all that "horrifying" myself.  The England depicted by Compton isn't some kind of totalitarian nightmare; it seems like everybody whose brainwaves are recorded on Sensitapes, and most everybody who uses Sensitapes, is doing so voluntarily.  (As a convicted murderer, Thea is the exception.)

Compton's gripe seems to be that the people who produce the tapes are doing so for money, and that those using them are decadent sheep, the prey of manipulative sleaze merchants; Compton's complaints about Sensitape are reminiscent of the evergreen complaints we hear about drugs, pornography, television, rock and roll, comic books, etc., that these are shallow forms of addictive entertainment that turn their consumers into soulless zombies, or at least fail to elevate them the way high brow or wholesome art is reputed to by the intellectual elite or moral arbiters.  Synthajoy is an attack on capitalism and on innovation for innovation's sake, on business and science run amuck, and Compton's case is not based on logic or evidence or historical analogy--it is based on irrational emotion, the "instinctive repugnance" expressed by Thea in the lines I chose as an epigraph for this blog post.

A clue that the book is taking a conservative stand based on tradition or prejudice or some kind of "precautionary principle" is that the book's villains, those who keep promoting Sensitape and keep pushing the envelope, accuse Thea, our heroine, of being a prude, a puritan, or a reactionary, while calling themselves "progressive" and trumpeting how they are serving mankind even as they claw and scrape for money and fame.  

There are lots of thought-provoking things going on in Compton's book that are worth talking about.  As a man, the author takes a risk in writing a first-person narrative in the voice of a woman; and when I say "risk" I basically mean a risk that women will find his depiction of a woman unconvincing and that feminists in particular might consider it an outrageous act of misrepresentation or cultural appropriation.  (Let me repeat that from my perspective the character of Thea is convincing and compelling.) On the one hand, Compton does things with Thea that feminists may appreciate: her husband uses her to advance his career, he can be dismissive of her, and he can fail to recognize her contributions.  There's a good scene in which Thea enters the room where Edward and Tony are working on their invention; the men just met this very day, but Thea finds she is already treated as an outsider by them--among men she is "the other" despite her essential contributions and her previous relationships with them.  On the other hand, Thea says stuff like "No more or less than men, women judge you, dominate you, flatter you, compete with you.  But unlike men, their motives are unfathomable," her frigidity is a major plot point, she is a victim, she acts kind of hysterical, and much of what she tells us may be a self-serving lie.

While relationships between the sexes are at the center of the novel, there are also issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural difference presented in Synthajoy, and I have to admit I am not sure why these issues were presented (though I have a theory!).  The Steches, Jacob and Tony, are Jewish, and Thea's attitude about Jews is to see them as a sort of exotic species.  "I'd seen him [Tony] and his father together--there was a feeling between them my hospital experience had already shown me to be peculiarly Jewish."  After Jacob's death, Thea goes to visit Tony's shop: "I was there because I was cold, and already dead, and I wanted to see how Jews kept warm and alive."

There is also a minor black character, Dr. Mbleble, the giant ("six feet seven, with neck and shoulders like a big black bull") Nigerian sexologist who diagnoses Thea as being sexually dysfunctional because of what he calls "the repressive puritanism Mrs. Cadence was brought up under."  I probably don't have to tell you that the oversexed Negro is a sort of cliche.

My aforementioned theory is that a minor subtext of Synthajoy is of non-Christian, non-English people changing English society, and not changing it for the better.  Tony basically invented the Sensitape that changes English society in ways Thea finds so objectionable, and Mbleble spars with Thea's lawyer at her murder trial--he not only represents sexual license, but is a threat to her freedom.  The idea of the Jew as influencer is highlighted by this line: "'No strings,' he [Edward] said, spreading his hands in Tony's Jewish way."  Tony's "Jewish ways" are infecting English Edward!

I've already told you I see Synthajoy as an attack on capitalism and the profit motive, and I probably don't have to tell you that for centuries a standard trope among anti-Semites has been the image of the Jew as the cunning and ruthless businessman. Well, late in the novel we realize Jews aren't the only category of people Thea finds exotic and fascinating:

I occupied my time observing the other members of the board, businessmen, a phenomenon I had only recently come into contact with.  Everything about them fascinated me, the way they worked, what they thought, the faces they made.  Merchants, with merchants' eyes.

Here I will note that Mrs. X, another threat to Thea, is also a foreigner, though not a particularly exotic one; she is an American.  The United States, of course, is seen by many people as a sort of archetypal capitalist country, and it is common for people to characterize the U. S. A. as a place where the only thing that matters is money. According to my theory, the Jew, the American, and the black represent a new English culture, one based on technology, profit-seeking and sensuality that is killing the old English culture based on things like Christianity and classical music (over the course of the book a priest dies and a musician has a stroke in Thea's presence) and the heroism of people like Horatio Nelson, whose column is mentioned a few times. Maybe we should see this as a bourgeois or popular revolution against society's traditional elites?

As I have suggested, to me these (perhaps unsavory) elements of Thea's personality and/or Compton's beliefs serve to make her and the book more interesting, but it seems possible that other residents of our early 21st century might find them, as the kids say, "problematic."  Your humble blogger does not hesitate to recommend Synthajoy; it is a smooth and entertaining read without any fat or fluff that is also thought-provoking and rewards close attention.  Worth the time of anybody at all interested in "literary" SF or SF that touches on psychological or gender or race issues.

The Steel Crocodile by D. G. Compton

"Why are you keeping an eye on me?"

"Orders."

"And that's all you know?"

"More than that'd only be trouble to me."

"Do you often have to watch perfectly innocent people?"

"Innocent's a big word."  He scratched his cheek.  "But I expect so."

"And that's the way you serve society?"

"I hadn't thought about it.  I don't see why not.  It's a job in a growth profession--aren't many of them left."

In our last episode I read, for the first time, one of Joachim Boaz's fave authors who perhaps is nowadays underappreciated, Langdon Jones.  Let's repeat that experiment today, this time with Boaz-approved D. G. Compton's The Steel Crocodile.  Joachim wrote about the 1970 novel back in 2011, so my memory of his review has had time to fade and I can attack this work without many preconceptions.  I own the Ace paperback, Ace 78575, with the cover by the Dillons.  I love the title--is there any hope this novel is about a tremendous mechanical war machine, like the ones in Jack Vance's  The Killing Machine and Michael Moorcock's Land Leviathan?  Let's see!

(It seems that the original British title was Electric Crocodile, which sounds like a disco dance move. Writers always complain that editors change their titles, but sometimes the revised title is an improvement!)

The people of Europe, united under a single heavy-handed and surveillance-obsessed government, live uneasily in a world characterized by unemployment and political murder.  Ripped from today's headlines, eh? Well, at least the members of the British elite (i.e., government workers) in this world enjoy such luxuries as laser pistols, force fields, carcinogen-free cigarettes and electric cars.

Matthew Oliver is one of these elites of post-industrial Europe, a sociologist who works for the government and thus enjoys the selfless generosity (ha ha) of the taxpayers. He's got two electric cars, and, before the book is a quarter of the way through, is temporarily moving out of his fine London demesne into a second beautiful house! You see, he just got a cushy job at a government research center in the country, the Colindale Institute, and is provided housing on the fortified campus.  He also is provided his own bodyguard! (Wait, that guy seems as much like a jailer, or "gaoler" as our English friends might put it, as a bodyguard.)  Maybe Matthew needs that bodyguard--his predecessor as director of the sociology department at Colindale was assassinated!  Quite the coincidence--just this week one of Matthew's old college chums, Edward Gryphon, also got himself assassinated! And Matthew was one of the last people to see him alive!

Gryphon was one of those people who thought the government was too oppressive, what with all that spying and censorship and all that bother, and was a big wig in the underground, illegal but somewhat tolerated, Civil Liberties Committee. When Gryphon found out Matthew was going to become a department head at Colindale, he wanted to ask his old buddy to act as a sort of spy in there, to uncover what the government was up to behind that force field.  Being something of a civil libertarian himself, Matthew had, albeit reluctantly, agreed.

Around page 100 Matthew is told the secret of Colindale--they have the world's most powerful computer, the Bohn 507!  This machine can, through extrapolation after reading all the latest scholarly periodicals, predict future scientific and technological developments!  Sounds awesome, right?  But it presents Matthew with a moral dilemma. The scientists, who of course think they are smarter than everybody else and have contempt for democracy, are keeping their predictive ability a secret and using their influence to stifle research they disapprove of.  For example, when a young student figured out a way to make organ transplants more widely available, the boffins at Colindale fallaciously discredited her research and ruined her career because more transplants would mean an economically undesirable increase in population!  Matthew has to choose whether to wholeheartedly join this team of egghead manipulators, or to expose them the way his late pal Gryphon and the Civil Liberties Committee would want.

Steel Crocodile has some of the structure and tone of a noirish detective story and/or a cynical spy novel.  There are many characters and we wonder which are murderers, which are spies, which are working for the European Federation and which are working against it, and Compton tosses out little clues here and there to fuel our speculations.  I often complain that a book has too many characters, but not this time: I was pleasantly surprised at how well-written the book was, and Compton, who spends a lot of time on the characters and their relationships and emotions, makes all these people distinctive and interesting.  (Anne McCaffrey, in her blurb on the back of my copy, appropriately highlights this welcome facet of the novel.) 

The most important and compelling character in the book may be Matthew's wife, Abigail.  A dedicated Roman Catholic from a poor family, Abigail has her own attitudes and beliefs about Gryphon and about the Colindale Institute, and is at the center of moving subplots that involve her aged grandfather and her younger brother. Through these male blood relations of Abigail's we get an idea of how unfulfilling life is for many people in post-industrial big-government Europe--both Grandpa and her brother Paul are totally alienated from modern society.  In a great scene at the nursing home Gramps denounces all the available television programmes (including a documentary extolling the virtues of post-industrial European life that he thinks is full of "rubbish") and declares he wishes he was dead.  Meanwhile, Abigail loans Paul a packet of dough for some ostensibly benign purpose, only to later realize he is going to use the money to finance revolutionary violence!

Abigail and Matthew's marriage is at the center of the novel--while Matthew has some sympathy with the elitist technocracy of Colindale, Abigail is dead set against it from the moment she hears about it. Is this because of her staunch beliefs in democracy and free will, informed by her Catholic faith? Or because she is a passive person who naively trusts things will work out for the best and is unwilling to take any risks or responsibilities to make change happen?

In the final chapters of the book Matthew is told by the Colindale Center director, Bollin, that the Institute's double-super-secret self-appointed mission is to repair the malaise suffered by European society by producing a messianic leader!  They input all the sociological data they can find into the Bohn 507, and ask it what sort of messiah the European people are in the mood to embrace, and then ask it to identify just the person to lead the masses to tranquility.  To the shock and amazement of everybody, Bohn 507 calculates that the people of Europe are ripe for spiritual leadership from none other than Bohn 507 itself!  

(When we and Matthew first hear about the Bohn 507, the Colindale staff call it "Boney," presumably Compton's sly reference to that pan-European tyrant of the climax of the 18th century, Napoleon Bonaparte.  Is Compton suggesting that at the climax of the 20th century we will see arise from the crises brought about by the welfare state and the technological age a computerized technocratic tyranny, the way Bonaparte arose from the conditions created by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution?)

Bollin decides to scrap the whole project, and seconds later the bomb set by Paul and his group explodes, killing "Boney," Bollin and poor Matthew.  Paul dies in a laser shootout with the authorities, and Abigail is dragged off to a lifetime of confinement. When she asks for a lawyer she is told the government is not pressing legal charges, but putting her in a mental institution--there are no due process mechanisms to hinder the state from imprisoning those deemed mentally unstable. 

Steel Crocodile is one of those novels that reminds you that life is pointless and meaningless.  Habitually passive Abigail takes action, and her actions are a series of blunders and she ends up imprisoned in a mental institution.  Matthew vacillates between individualist libertarianism and paternalistic elitism, does nothing to further either of them, ruins his marriage and gets killed.  Director Bollin works himself to the bone, and then realizes his big project is a total failure, a dangerous menace that has to be abandoned.  Paul and his fellow saboteurs commit terrible sins--theft, deception, vandalism, murder--for nothing, as the director was going to shut down the computer anyway, and their sabotage campaign merely serves to kill people needlessly.  (When I mentioned cynical spy novels above I had in mind John Le Carre's Looking Glass War, in which naive people try to fight for freedom against tyranny and blunder stupidly, causing innocent people to suffer.) 

Compton's novel is also about how difficult human relationships are, how we are all truly and terribly alone.  Again and again characters, most prominently Abigail, reach out to other people in hopes of making physical or emotional contact, of achieving some kind of intimacy or sharing some kind of support.  These people reach out only to be rebuffed, or, perhaps worse, grudgingly tolerated.  In one sad scene Matthew and Abigail have sex out of a sense of duty rather than love or lust, and then Matthew lays awake in bed beside her as she sleeps, regretting their "lovemaking."

I don't think there are any positive, fulfilling relationships in this book.  Matthew and Abigail's marriage collapses under the weight of their differences over Colindale; Bollin's marriage is shown to be cold, even abusive; Paul exploits his relationship with his sister; Matthew and Abigail both have bad relationships with their parents.  Steel Crocodile reminds us that, even if we say and even believe relationships with family and friends are the most important things in our lives, we don't necessarily act that way, and when we do, we often find ourselves disappointed.  Several times in the book Matthew tells himself that his marriage to Abigail is the most important thing in his life, but he risks it all pursuing the Institute's schemes and his own career; other times he regrets all the accommodations he has made for her in his efforts to make their marriage work.  Is this book trying to turn you into a hermit?

I'm not exactly sure what attitude towards government and religion Compton is putting forward in Steel Crocdile.  Obviously the European Federation is oppressive and corrupt, but Compton offers no ringing endorsement of representative government or the liberty of the individual or social equality or anything like that.  The people in the book who do talk up such things turn out to be liars or fuckups.  I'm afraid Compton is hinting that people get the government they deserve, that government is a reflection of the people's morals, and since we are bad, our government will be bad.  Similarly, while it seems possible that the book is lamenting the collapse of religious faith, Abigail's faith doesn't seem to do her much good--it seems to make her naive and passive.  It is perhaps noteworthy that Paul and the other saboteurs are at least nominally Christians, but spend the book lying, murdering, starting gunfights, etc.  If religion is supposed to make life more bearable and make society more stable it doesn't seem to be fulfilling its purpose in this book.  Is this book trying to tell us life sucks and there is nothing we can do about it?

Well, there's no gigantic war machine, but Steel Crocodile is very good and I strongly recommend it.  Compton masters all that technical stuff I sometimes talk about on this blog, pacing and economy and structure and tone and all that, and he addresses fascinating issues like government, religion, and human relationships.  The little SF touches, like high tech means of shaving and packing boxes for a move, and how a society might respond to a dearth of work for ordinary people, are also good.  Joachim has been promoting Compton for years--maybe I should have listened to his advice sooner!