I've decided I quite like the neon-blare UK cover for Maddaddam, or 'Maddaddaddaddaddaddam' as I sometimes call it. Better than the rather drab US cover, I think.
Anyway. Previously on this blog I reviewed Maddaddam Trilogy 1 and Maddaddam Trikogy 2, in one super-long post. On this very day I round off my ruminations with a review of Maddaddam Trilogy 3, over at Strange Horizons. Go. See.
It's only partly a review about the novel itself, actually. It's also a meditation, more or less annoyingly phrased, about the embargo on 'spoilers' that increasingy overshadows genre reviews these days. This gets heavy, fairly quickly:
According to the old story, when Pandora's box was opened all the myriad evils flew out into the world except one—the lid was snapped back down just in time to keep knowledge of future events firmly sealed inside. But that's never convinced me. After all, we all eventually do obtain knowledge of future events; it's just that it often takes a while. A novel or film generates a modular version of this: we start not knowing how the story is going to develop. If I tell you ahead-of-time you feel cheated of the pleasures of finding out at your own, or more precisely finding out at the original story's, pace. Spoilers, in other words, are an offence related to impatience, a violation of Keats's negative capability. Will Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy find true love together? Won't they? Until we reach the end of Pride and Prejudice these two possible endings exist in a kind of pleasurable quantum superposition, much as Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead.
But wait a moment: Schrödinger's cat is a poor model for this. If Pride and Prejudice were a properly quantum-superposition experience we would never find out whether Elizabeth and Darcy get together. They would remain both happily married and lonely-and-apart forever. Or to put it another way, we all know how the "cat" story ends, because it's built in to the experiment. We open the box. The cat is dead. More to the point, in that feline corpse we have the way all stories end. Elizabeth and Darcy's joyous wedding day is only a way-station on the longer-term road to this inevitable, leveling truth. Asking of Pride and Prejudice "but what happens in the end?" is to beg a more fundamental question: how far along do you want to take this "in the end" business? Ultimately what happens is: Elizabeth dies. Darcy dies. This is how your story ends too, and mine.
This, I suppose, is what really infuriates us about spoilers: the way they dead-head narrative suspense. We hate this because it reminds us how fragile and temporary "narrative suspense" (day-to-day living) actually is. Spoilers are a memento mori, and that's why we deplore them. They remind us that all the shifts and strategies by which we aim to fix up the existential emptiness of our lives—anticipation, looking forward to things, wondering how it's all going to work out—ultimately come to nothing. Tomorrow is not really another day, whatever Scarlett O'Hara said. Tomorrow is today, over again. And the Platonic Form of "tomorrow," the future in (as it were) the abstract, is the same for all of us. We're all mortal, after all. Complaining noisily about spoilers is the equivalent of putting out hands over our eyes and singing la! la! la! in a loud voice when faced with this fact.
If that looks like too morbid a way of putting it, then we can swing the argument about. The medieval and renaissance fascination with the memento mori had an important and therapeutic motive behind him, one that we have—in our modern-world hysterical flight from Death, with its attendant, unhealthy fetishization of youth and novelty—forgotten. It is good to remember you must die. It puts your life in a proper perspective. In narrative terms, "anticipation" is a sugary food. "I wonder who the murderer is?" propels you twitchily through the story to the end ("oh, it was the butler") and so through to the inevitable anticlimactic deflation, when the sugar rush collapses into ennui and weariness. There are other things that might interest us in a story: to do with how the story is told, and what its broader implications are. There are things other than the crude "what is going to happen next?"
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