A shame this title seems to have been largely overlooked from last year’s batch of SF: it’s a coolly written, deceptively straightforward tale that manages to stir the silt from some properly unsettling depths in its pool—really, a very noteworthy book that deserves to be better known. Or maybe it is better known, and the ignorance is mine alone—it was shortlisted for the Philip K Dick prize after all, and rightly so.
We’re in a near-future Manchester, where the proles have been shunted into unappealing banlieues on threadbare universal wages, and the better-off concentrate in the city centre. Some of these better-offs have been ‘augmented’ in subtle ways; and some, like our heroine Jayna, are ‘simulants’—in effect, replicants, with a nicely rendered spock-ish mixed bemusement and curiosity about the way ‘regular’ humans conduct themselves. Jayna leads a carefully regulated and timetabled life, living in a hostel with other synthetics, working for a company where her superhuman processing skills are employed looking for correlations between various sets of data, ideally in order to locate trends that the company can monetize. That’s it, pretty much: and most of the novel is given over to Jayna moving through the cityscape, Jayna’s work-day practices and Jayne’s astringent perspective on normal human life. Intimations of social unease, and a background anxiety about Jayna’s future are hinted at, not beaten on the head. There are rumours of other comparable simulants, working in other companies, going off the rails—(eating, shock-horror, in an Indian restaurant rather than chowing the hostel’s carefully prepared and, we assumed, drugged food! Having sex with normals!)—and being retired.
One thing is novel does exceptionally well is convey a texture of actual life, a carefully pitched low-key verisimilitude. I fear that name-dropping ‘replicants’, as I did in the previous paragraph, gives rather the wrong impression: Charnock’s Manchester is quite unlike Blade Runner’s hyperreal city, and her prose creates a much more rounded sense of actual life than the deliberately flattened paranoidal patterns of Phil Dick’s writing. What she shares with Dick is the ability to write unease. Jayna’s genius-quasi-asperger’s apperceptions lead her to test her own limits, and through that the novel unobtrusively—but all the more resonantly for that—leads the reader into emotional territory of impressive nuance and range. Charnock has fascinating, complex things to say about work, sex, family and hope (and that pretty much covers it, don’t you think?). Indeed, the emphasis on the routines of work struck me as one of the strongest things here. Too much SF and Fantasy is concerned with the life of play—of aristocrats and the superwealthy, say; or of ordinary people taken out of their humdrum lives and sent on exciting adventures, because that makes for a notionally more ‘exciting’ story. Charnock, though, captures the flavour of regular work, and that is (after all) what most people’s lives are mostly like. And that sets it aside, and I think above, its most obviously comparator as a novel: Ishguro’s Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s simulant-equivalents just loll about like bored teens, because that’s what they are; and whilst that’s fine, it also means that the novel itself can’t quite escape a faintly adolescent vibe. Charnock’s Jayna undertakes a similar process of ‘growing up’; but because A Calculated Life engages with all the external trappings of the adult day-to-day the novel itself has a broader affective range.
Loveed reading this thanks
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