Ian Watson, The Book of the River (1984)

I enjoyed Watson’s The Book of the River, first published back in the Winston-Smithy darkness of yer actual Thatcherite 1984. It’s the first of a trilogy, completed by The Book of the Stars (1984) and The Book of Being (1985)—collected as an omnibus under the title of its protagonist’s name, Yaleen (2004) and sometimes called The Books of the Black Current. But for the time being I’m going to concentrate on just volume 1, and come back to its sequels at a later point.

The Times (of London) is quoted on the back of my paperback copy of this book praising it as ‘one of the most satisfyingly accessible of all Mr Watson’s novels’, and that’s exactly right, for better or worse. ‘Worse’ seems harsh, I know; but ‘accessibility’ and ‘satisfaction’ are the two stocks-in-trade of many other writers, most of whom are not worthy to rub the blacking onto Watson’s steel-toe-capped boot, such that there’s something ever so slightly underwhelming about finding them here. I'm not sure that accessibility/satisfaction are what I go to Watson for. But I shouldn't complain: I read this novel quickly and with pleasure, and that’s not a thing to be sniffed at.

So (sniff! sniff!) the novel sets up a pleasingly constrained Fantasy realm. It reads more like a chess-problem than the actual en train two-player chess game of life-as-it-is-actually-lived—but, to repeat myself, that’s not a problem. That’s what Nabokov explicitly did in his fiction, and he’s one of the great gods of 20th-C prose (it’s what I do in my writing, often, too; to, you know: step from the sublime to the ridiculous for a moment). The world is a river on an alien planet, flowing from an equatorial jungle to a northern sea. We’re on the east bank of this neo-Nile, in a varied set of matriarchal societies very efficiently and vividly rendered by Watson. To the east is a desert that, as far as the humans who have settled this land can tell, goes on forever. Trade happens up and down the river, and only women can sail the river-craft—men can go on the river once only; twice and they go mad and run towards the centre where they drown. What’s at the centre? Why, a great black current that runs from the water’s source (an unscalable cliff-face out of which the river abruptly pours) all the way to the sea. This black current cannot be crossed, and it acts as an impenetrable barrier. It turns out to be a sort-of sentient superbeing. The west bank is just about visible from observation towers on the eastern side, but there’s not much to see. The inhabitants of the far bank eschew the water and live inland. Early in The Book of the River we get intimations of the harshness of the west-bank patriarchy, when a telescope happens to catch sight of them burning one of their burqa-clad women in a public execution. So the set-up is laid before us, chess-problem-wise: people on the east bank can’t cross the Black Current in the middle of the river—because, well, they just can’t. They can’t go south of the river’s source and come back round, because: unclimbable cliff. They can’t sail their boats out into the northern sea and come back round that way, because: er, I’m not sure that we’re told why not, but they can't OK? And they can’t fly over the river because the technological level of this society is pre-Wright-Brothers (which is to say: pre-Montgolfier-brothers). So that’s your world.

Very early on in the story, it becomes clear that contact will be made with the mysterious west bank; that the mysteries of its society will be laid out before us. Similarly, we intuit, we'll discover the nature of the Black Current. Which is exactly the way the Standard Model Science Fiction Text rolls. How cheated the average reader would feel if she were baulked of proper explanation and loose-end-tying up! It was (sniff! sniff!) unreasonable of me to feel a small sinking at my realisation, early in my reading, that the novel was indeed going to pan-out this way. I think what I felt was a sense of the desolate lack of proper Negative Capability in contemporary science fiction—I mean the phrase in the strict sense that Keats coined it. The sense that obtains in, say, Stalker.

But that’s a large question, and one for another time. And although most of this novel runs along the rails of its kind, a Cook’s Tour round the imaginary realm, discovery, adventure, narrative set-back and set-forward, there are also some set-pieces of proper Watsonian gnarliness and oddity. The best of these (this is a spoiler, sort-of) comes in the fourth section, where Yaleen, wearing a mocked-up old-school diving suit, climbs into the vast mouth of the head of the planet-sized tadpole that the Black Current is revealed as being and stomps about in its innards, like a secular Jonah—Joanna and the Whale.

There are other splendid moments. The novel’s thumb was in the balance to the extent that the women-lead rivertrader’s society was just so much more attractive than the grim, puritanical woman-burning patriarchy on the other side (hard to imagine it going the other way, of course). But beyond this obvious partisan-ship is a more interesting dialectic between straight ‘seriousness’ and ironic comedy. Having sampled both cultures, Erin decides that the ‘Doctor Edrick and his cronies would never get anywhere with their quest for knowledge. They were far too serious about it. The real and the true could only be seized in a laugh, a laugh which would rattle the stars’ [219]. Spot on, that (and A Laugh That Would Rattle The Stars wouldn’t be a bad title for a critical study of Watson. If, that is, I hadn’t already decided on a different title.) There's some interesting speculation on the 'masculine' and 'feminine' principles as thrust and flow respectively. And there’s this nice interpretation on the name ‘Adam’ (an ancient and honourable name! The name of princes and scholars!) by the east-bankers, who have picked up that the west-bankers call themselves ‘Sons of Adam’ and repudiate Satan:

“So what’s Satan?” asked Hasso, expressing the general puzzlement. “And who’s Adam?’

“Maybe Satan is ‘sanity’, mixed up?” I suggested. “Because the black current drives men mad…”

Yosef nodded. “Possibly. And possibly the word Adam had a negative prefix, as in words like ‘abort’ and ‘apathy’—and dam is a female parent? Thus ‘sons without a mother’.” [54]

Hmm. You reckon?

Still, I come back to my off-kilter sense of disappointment that the novel sets up the barrier, and the mysterious people on the far side of that barrier, only in order to reveal so many of the mysteries associated with it. It could be the violation of the principle of Negative Capability that narkled me, I suppose. Or it could be something more specifically Watsonian. One thing he’s fascinated with, as a writer, are the essentially arbitrary but binding barriers that are erected in human life. Externalising those as literal walls, or barriers, is something he has done before. In another place, I talked about his short-story 'Our Loves So Truly Meridional' (it first appeared in Science Fiction Monthly, 1974; and is collected in The Very Slow Time Machine (1979)). This

is set after the mysterious appearance on Earth of 'the glassy Catastrophe Barriers' which divide the whole planet into areas as 'neat as the segments of an orange' along the meridional lines. The story itself is set in that portion that runs from south to north pole including a good quantity of eastern Africa, and bits of Europe and England ('sliced through Greenwich, with the East End of London included in our powerful Conglomeration as a useless backwater town.' Since the barriers are translucent ('not actual glass. Though it looks like glass and feels like it. Some forcefield they say') it is possible to 'read signs held up by the other side' and 'speak in sign language'. Accordingly, our narrator (Obi Nzekwu, a teacher from Eastern Nigeria) knows about the rest of England:

London itself in total decay, and the rest of the country a surly dicatatorship obsessed with tilling the land. What else do they have in their segment? A few French fields, most of Spain, the poverty of Morocco, Mali, the Sahara ... along with a knob of Brazil.

It's a splendid concept, ingeniously batty and fun to inhabit imaginatively (better than some of the premises upon which whole novels are based today, I'd say). But Watson, if you'll excuse my French, pisses it away in a ten-page squib about a trek to the north pole

That’s rather harsh, now I look at it again (it’s a very good short story). But my point is otherwise: Watson is good on barriers, and when—as here—he makes that barrier too permeable, it dilutes the effectiveness of his other insights. But I’m being sniffy. Sniff! Sniff!