Monica Byrne, The Girl in the Road (2014)

This is a really good novel. Hard to summarise, and at times hard to like, it is always written with courage, vividness and power.

It starts out more-or-less near-future SF conventional: Meena, one of our two heroines, wakes in Mumbai with snake-bite wounds fresh on her chest. Convinced she is being targeted for murder, she flees; and her slightly paranoid, cycloptropic character is very well drawn as she makes her way across India to Africa. This entails crossing the Arabian Gulf on a bridge known as “The Trail”: a pontoon made of cleverly designed blocks to harvest wave-energy (walking, and indeed living, on The Trail is supposed to be illegal; but that doesn't stop people). Meena's journey is full of colour and incident, much of it sexual; but it becomes plain early on that she is an extremely unreliable narrator, and that the mysterious trauma from which she is fleeing more complicated than we at first think. The other heroine, Mariama, is younger and a little more reliable; crossing Africa towards Ethiopia, escaping the repeated rape of her mother by the man who insists he owns them. She joins an overland caravan transporting oil and falls under the spell of a beautiful woman called Yemaya. This grown woman engages in sexual acts with child Mariama, and Byrne's handling of this element is rendered hard to read by a refusal to simply repeat the narratives structures of uncomplicated outrage that usually frames accounts of sexual activity with children. That's doubtless Byrne's point (her view of the ghastly consequences of sexual exploitation and abuse is, otherwise, clear-eyed and unsentimental). Saying so doesn't make it any easier to read. The Girl in the Road understands how sex can be oppressive, and also how it can be liberatory; understands how vast the human forces and energies are that it channels. This certainly adds nuance to the story, although it also perhaps muddles the whole. 'How beautiful and revolting sex was,' one character thinks, late in the novel. 'How its juices are both nectar and poision' [193].

More than that about the book is hard to lay down in a short review, partly because Byrne doubles down on her point-of-view characters' unreliability or partiality because much is told via a complex network of mythic and magical allusions (snakes figure a good deal) dreams and magic. The novel goes out of its way to avoid being too pat or obvious, and Byrne's energetic and sometimes over-energised writing style refuses to let the reader settle into any kind of complacent groove, reading-wise. That's a good thing, by and large. We assume that Meena and (the rather more likeable) Mariama are going to meet, or at least that their storylines are going to intercept, even though it becomes apparent that the narratives are set at different times. Byrne's future-third-world felt real to me, though I hold up my hand and confess I'd be the last person to be able to judge the accuracy of portraiture of places and cultures I have never, myself, visited. Byrne's prose is a superior instrument, and she is mostly in charge of it (she's especially good on descriptions of landscape and the natural world; and her dialogue is snappy and well flavoured). I like the bright-eyed way the novel handles its future tech; none of that Frankenstein-syndrome bollocks here. It's people who cause other people hurt, not tech, in Byrne's world. All in all this is a remarkable novel, made more remarkable by the realisation that it's a debut. The road goes ever on.