Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds (2013)

So, Jo Fletcher, whom I have known for years, and whose taste in books I trust implicitly, kindly sent me a copy of this (seeing as how Jo Fetcher Books is publishing it in the UK). And so I read it. Lots to admire: it is proper grown-up SF, an emotionally complex, character-driven piece that held my attention all the way through. Its narrative is pleasantly inventive and varied, within the fairly generic-familiar Le-Guinly parameters Lord has taken as her mis-en-scene, it takes a group of characters on a work-related tour of many different communities and environments. Two characters are at the heart of it: the reserved Spock-ic Dllenahkh (we're told how to pronounce his name early on, but I never quite got it), one of a human-variant peoples called the Sadiri who are super-wise, emotionally-controlled, long-living, telepathic and so on. Then there's spiky, passionate, chatty Grace Delarua, a civil servant assigned to work with Dllenahkh. In a prologue we learn that Dllenankh's people were almost all of them wiped-out when their planet was destroyed. Most of the women were back on the homeworld when this catastrophe occurred, so the remaining Sadiri are in an Ents-minus-Entwives situation, something they handle with quasi-Vulcan dignity. D, G, and some others form a work-team tasked with surveying the disparate Sadiri settlements of the planet Cygnus Beta as part of a plan for the eventual repopulation of the Sadiri race. The group goes from place to place, encountering a variety of problems, and solving them. I liked the slow-burn of the narrative; I quite liked the deliberately wrong-footing way Lord focalised and defocalised her narrative; the episodic nature of the bulk of the book renders it bitty, but in a way that relates to the larger theme -- the fragmentation of peoples scattered by history.

With so much to like, I found myself a little surprised the novel didn't do more to my pulse rate. I ended up admiring rather than loving it. The Spencer Tracey (without the irascibility) meets Catherine Hepburn vibe of the Dllenahkh/Grace romance is traced out in a way that doesn't match the rhythms of the episodic things-happening narrative very well, and kept bouncing me out of that particular affective through-line. There were a couple of other things, but I'll confess they may be me post-facto rationalising the way the novel seemed to slide past my metaphorical 'Really Like' button.

For instance, I did like the way the focus was on work, and that work was conceptualised as more than just assembling Prodigious Machines or Massive Structures -- for most work has much more to do with human interaction and management than Big Physical Engineering Projects, and this novel groks that. It is one of the resonances of the Voltairian title of the novel, after all: and Lord understands that, come tragedy come joy, il faut cultiver notre jardin.

But then again, "Candide" is a satire; and I couldn't work out to my own satisfaction whether Lord's meditations on the dangers of intimacy, of traditionally conceived 'masculine' and 'feminine' roles, of monogamy versus polygamy, and of the question of how far the future of the species should be left to the individual whims of individual hearts, as opposed to being planned and structured at a macro level -- all fascinating questions ... couldn't work out whether these were framed by the novel in a François-Marie-Arouet-satirical manner. If they were then I missed the punchline. I found the garrulous ingenuousness of those sections narrated by Grace increasingly annoying. Garrulity is part of her characterisation, but in the same way its hard to write boring characters without boring the reader, it's hard to write an endlessly chatty person without it coming over like a tediously splurged blog-post about the Teleconference Blogger X had to sit through at work today:

The teleconferencing centre was state of the art -- it had to be, to give such clear reception ... I had to remind myself not to jiggle my feet or pick at my nails in the mistaken belief that I was not completely in view. I stood alone at the head of the table and waited for the holo of my interviewer to appear. When it did I saw that he had already seated himself, and he indicated with a nod and a gracious wave that I should do the same etc etc. [202]

That 'holo' feels like a layered-over detail on a recognisable early 21st-century circumstance; and this is all a bit flat. Indeed, the narrative is full of some minimally tweaked very early 21st-century references and tones:

We had washed up at one of the legendary monasteries via some underwater cave or passage or secret way that lurked behind or behind the falls. I wanted to feel excited about such a beautiful cliché coming true, but mainly I felt hungry, worried and very unsure. This was not an Indiana Jones classic holovid: it was real life.’ [109]

All of which brought my 'yeah, right' hackles into play. The de-emphasising of rockets and rayguns is commendable, but I could have done with more actively estranging stuff. Indeed, the main 'novum' here (holo-thises and groundcar-thats aside) is telepathy, which the novel uses as a trope for 'intimacy', and often as a means of saying, in effect: 'it's OK if you're a bit wary of intimacy, you know.' Which is fair enough.

One thing the book brought home to me is the way our genre throws its unique light on one particular love-object fetish. Because we love our Vulcans. And actually, it occurs to me that what 'we' love are not actual Vulcans, but Spocks, half-Vulcans, the person who presents to the world their emotionally-repressed, buttoned-down self-controlled exteriors only until 'we' reach past their exterior to find and release their hidden heart of passion. That's what Dllenankh is: not a Vulcan, but a Spock, that unlikely but empirically demonstrable sex symbol. See also: Rochester, Darcy, 50 Shades of Grey guy. See all of them, actually. As to why 'we' love these figures, I can't say, because actually that's not the type that does it for me, and so I have to come clean and separate out myself from the 'we' of whom I have hitherto been speaking. The lack of spark undermined the central romance here, which I daresay is my problem. All those boys and girls who love characters like that may find themselves more persuaded by the Best of All Possible Worlds lovestory than I was.