Eve's Alexandria

An Emblem in Her Person

Nic:

Here in the mountains, alone in hard, clear air by the waters of Kuala Nor, far to the west of the imperial city, beyond the borders of the empire, even, Tai was in a narrow bed by darkfall, under the first brilliant stars, and awake at sunrise.

It's entirely appropriate, with a title like Under Heaven, that Guy Gavriel Kay's new novel should open beneath a big sky. An almost overwhelmingly big sky. All that stands between it and Shen Tai - sometime soldier, sometime student, son of an elite general and two years into a self-imposed exile in the desolate west - is the roof of the tiny cabin in which he sleeps. To honour his late father's memory, or make expiation for his deeds - or both - Tai has taken up residence on the haunted battlefield by Kuala Nor, and spends his days burying the bones of those who fell there. At night, he hears the voices of the ones he has not yet reached, and knows that

It was beyond hope to ever finish this: it was a task for gods descending from the nine heavens, not for one man. But if you couldn't do everything, did that mean you did nothing?

The fact that he makes no distinction between the two sides, laying to rest the Kitan whom his father commanded and the Tagurans who fought them alike, makes Tai - alone and exposed under a big sky between two great regional powers - an object of some interest. The sort of interest that, say, a pair of cats might take in a mouse that had scampered obliviously across the path of their staring match. One day, out of apparently nowhere, Cheng-wan, the White Jade Princess - a daughter of the Kitan emperor, sent west to join the Taguran emperor's wives by way of sweetening the peace treaty that ended the Kuala Nor clash - sends Tai a gift in return for his labours: two hundred and fifty horses.

Just as they were by T'ang China - the regime on which Kay's Kitan empire is based - good quality ("Heavenly") horses from the plains far to the west are endlessly, hopelessly coveted by the Kitai. "Tai’s people," we're told, "longed for them with a passion that had influenced imperial policy, warfare, and poetry for centuries." While the gift of the horses initially seems like little more than a gambit to force Tai from his solitude and get the plot in motion, as the story plays out the truth of this passage becomes more and more clear - not least, in the equal weighting it gives to policy, war and poetry. Seasoned Kay readers might suspect that this is a major reason as to why he chose to create a culture based on the T'ang, and indeed there are numerous examples of T'ang-style poetry sprinkled throughout the book. As it was in the T'ang period (and under later dynasties), poetry is not a matter for lone outsider artists, but a fundamental means of communication and display for the elite men of the Kitan empire.

Like any well-educated Kitai, Tai has been trained in the proper forms and themes of poetry, and can come up with an appropriate verse within moments, as the situation demands (which it frequently does). It is indispensible for his career and social status; poetic composition is one of the central skills tested in the civil service examinations, for which Tai was studying when his father died. (This, again, mirrors the history of the real China, in the T'ang period and later.) One politically pivotal exchange takes place through the medium of a poetry contest, and an important secondary character is a legendary poet and carouser named Sima Zian. Tai, on meeting him for the first time, is endearingly starstruck and immediately charmed - as are we - but he also notices something that marks Zian out from the polished, carefully controlled individuals Tai is used to seeing in the Kitan capital of Xinan:

It was easy to see a tiger in the wide eyes holding his, Tai thought. For all the wit and worldliness of the poet, there was also something feral, a link to the wilderness that lay outside the walled and guarded cities. Sima Zian had been a bandit, on rivers and roads, never entirely part of court or courtesan district.

The conceptual space of the wilderness, set against the safe, confining city, is another touchstone of Kay's earlier work. The reappearance of this juxtposition in Under Heaven feels both familiar and entirely correct: both China and Kitai have a long history of being haunted, enchanted and attacked by the peoples of the steppes to the north and west ("where the emptiness of the grasslands could dwarf a man, or change his soul"), and the Kitan elite derive much of their sense of worth and identity from the physical and cultural walls separating them from what they are not. For Lin Fong, commander of a two-bit border fort in the far end of nowhere - and one of many examples in the book of a minor character who comes to vivid life in the space of a few pages, rounding out our picture of this world - it is vital to follow the new Xinan fashion of drinking tea:

He wasn't that sure he liked the taste of the drink, even sweetened with mountain honey, but he did enjoy the idea of himself as a man in tune with court and city culture, even here on a desolate border where it was almost impossible to find a man worth listening to.

What did you do when faced with this as your life? You reminded yourself, over and again, that you were a civilized man in the most civilized empire ever known.

Seeing this theme evoked here reinforces the impression that, in T'ang China, Kay has finally found the Platonic form of his thematic and artistic concerns. Another of these is beauty - which, as Niall notes in his review, is explored amply in Under Heaven - and, in particular, the way that beauty is imagined and valued by a culture. Central to any discussion of this is, of course, the position of women, who are so often the repository of ideas about beauty rather than its shapers. It is to the women of Under Heaven that I shall devote the remainder of this post.

I have mentioned that it is a gift of horses which sets the plot in motion. Such is the importance of horses among the Kitai that possession of so many of them puts Tai in grave danger - there are plenty of people who would kill for such a prize - and gives him, abruptly, not only access to power but an obligation to exercise it. Before receiving the gift, Tai was not a nobody; his father was a prominent general and his elder brother, Shen Liu, has become a high-level courtier. But he can no longer avoid political life; two hundred and fifty horses are enough to shift the balance of power in the empire quite decidedly.

What is particularly interesting, for present purposes, is that it is a woman who makes this gift. We never meet Cheng-wan directly. In many respects, she is the very archetype of the high-born woman in a patriarchal society: innocent, marriageable pawn subject to the winds and whims of male politics ("An emblem in her young person [...] a slender, graceful token of peace"), grown into a capricious power-behind-the-throne, forever doomed to work her inscrutable will through male agents. A vehicle for men's artistic and political expression, without a voice in her own right:

There had been a fall of poems like flower petals in Kitai that autumn, pitying her in parallel lines and rhyme: married to a distant horizon, fallen from heaven, lost to the civilized world (of parallel lines and rhyme) beyond snowbound mountain barriers, among barbarians on their harsh plateau.

It had been the literary fashion for that time, an easy theme, until one poet was arrested and beaten with the heavy rod in the square before the palace—and nearly died of it—for a verse suggesting this was not only lamentable, but a wrong done to her.

Nor does she get her own voice, even here; Tai is given a letter from her, but its contents are not related, only their effect on him (the typically Kay "It became something of an exercise to breathe"). Nonetheless, Cheng-wan's story is echoed, amplified, and to some degree avenged through what is done to and by Li-Mei, Tai's sister and second only to Tai as a viewpoint character. While Tai has been engaged in his somewhat solipsistic toil in the west, the machinations of his brother Liu have sent Li-Mei to the north. Like Cheng-wan before her, Li-Mei is to be married off for the sake of political stability, far from home and to a man she has never met. In return, Liu has risen considerably in the service of the new prime minister, Wen Zhou.

The necessity and rightness of obedience to her elder brother's will has been drummed into Li-Mei all her life, since - patriarchal power structures being what they are - his will is the family's, and family is everything:

"And, sister, you will always remember that you represent this family, not only yourself, in everything you do. Do you understand?"

And a third time Li-Mei nodded her head.

"Say it," her brother commanded.

"I understand," she said, as clearly as she could manage. Six years old, mud and overripe fallen fruit on her face and hands and clothing. Representing her family in all she did.

When we meet Li-Mei, then, she is both stunned and upset by the utter transformation of her life, but she is also doing her best to meet the challenge with courage. Where Tai is reserved and serious to a point just short of pomposity, Li-Mei is warm and immediate. Her sections are narrated in the present tense, and she hides her self and her fears and hopes much less well. Although she has even less control over her situation than her brother does over his, and has a fraction of his experience of the world outside their home estate - let alone the lonely, frightening expanses of the north - she proves resilient and even adaptable, willing to learn and compromise rather than cling to an idea of what the world offer her:

No water this time, where he's decreed their evening rest. She was hoping for a pool. She badly wants to be clean again. It is a part of how she understands herself. This begrimed, lank-haired creature on a Bogu horse in Bogu clothes (the shirt is much too large and smells of animal fat) is not who, or what, Li-Mei considers herself to be.

She is aware that this is more and more inadequate as a way of thinking with every day that passes.

Seeking to rally her flagging spirits, she vows to "represent her father's bright, tall memory". She recalls, too, the example of several women she has encountered in her short life, among them Wen Jian, beguiling young Consort to the Emperor Taizu whose rise to influence at the imperial court has so thoroughly reshaped Kitan politics of late. "A woman could change the world", she reflects - a phrase that has more significance in terms of the larger story than is immediately apparent.

As Li-Mei notes, Wen Jian is the most obvious candidate for world-changer: she captivates an emperor and (it is rumoured) leads him to forget his duty in an obsession with discovering the secret of eternal life; moreover, the faction that comes to political power in her wake is an upstart, inexperienced one, which ends up destabilising the empire.

Jian's cousin Wen Zhou proves a weak and erratic prime minister, and a poor balance to Roshan, an ambitious general ("ferociously aggressive [...] uncouth and illiterate") with a huge provincial power base. For my purposes, he is also an example of patriarchal power in extremis, who combats feelings of inadequacy and insecurity in his political life by beating his servants ("amus[ing] yourself", as he puts it). Masculinity, in a hierarchal society like this, is about having power over others, and to reassure himself that he's a man, he needs to show it:

Zhou was inclined to disagree. If he wanted a woman or a horse, they were his until he grew tired of them. If he wanted a man dead he could have him killed. Why else be what he was? This came with power, defined it.

Wen Jian herself might be "like intoxication" to the male characters, but she never really emerges as a character rather than a talisman and an object for formulaic poetic praise; like the emperor, she is several grades of formality and beauty beyond anything Tai can relate to without awe. She is a character type familiar from Kay's other novels: the sharp-witted, breathtakingly beautiful woman whose glittering performances in both public and private almost hide the fact that she is essentially a caged bird, who has agency and autonomy only insofar as she remains pleasing to men, or a particular man. Talismanic and thus distant as she is here, though, she ends up being a rather blunt instrument for exploring this theme; there is barely a glimpse of the person beneath the glamour.

A better example of the type, on a slightly lower social strata, is the courtesan Spring Rain, a former paramour of Tai. Frustratingly, she functions in the story primarily as an object for Tai to pine over, but what little we see of her - both in his recollections of her, and in occasional scenes with the narrative's present - shows a woman who is both self-aware about the limits of her freedom, and less interested in protecting men's feelings on the matter. Tai remembers, for example, the way she chided him for not being politically wary enough:

"You need to think about these things."

"I could let you keep doing it for me?"

She stiffened, shifted. He regretted his words as soon as he'd spoken them.

"I am," Spring Rain said, "only a humble singing girl of the North District, hired by the hour or the night, owned by the proprietor of this house. It is in appropriate that one such as I be offered such a role. It is cruel to say so, even in jest."

This being fiction, of course, even after two years of his absence she thinks of him with almost as much misty-eyed affection as he does her, because apparently there's nothing more attractive than a naive young man who enjoys buying your attentive compliance and permits you to contradict him wittily and gently every now and then.

It is in the nature of the sort of society that Kay is evoking that women's roles in events - especially world-shaking political events - are circumscribed, and that they must win their status through carefully calculated appeal to men. It becomes a bit wearying, though, that we don't meet any ordinary women at all; Tai encounters a number of lower-class men on his travels, but the few women are all courtesans or daughters of the elite, and not one is less than strikingly pretty and focused like a laser-sight on the needs and wants of the men around her. This is where Li-Mei comes as such a relief: in her down-to-earth humanity, but above all in the fact that she has her own fears and dreams. Even if, ultimately, her agency too is limited to the influence she can have upon a man, of all the women in the novel Li-Mei is the one who really feels like someone with her own ambitions and goals, with an agenda in her own right. When the story leaves her to history, she has reached a point where she knows what she wants to do with that power-behind-the-throne influence - and looks like she might be able to enjoy it, too.

But the woman who changes the world, I would argue, is Cheng-wan. In gifting the horses to Tai, Cheng-wan is giving someone the tools to save Li-Mei from the fate she suffered - and, in so doing, she sparks a civil war that overthrows her father. Looked at one way, the whole story is a daughter's elaborate act of revenge - the marriage pawn using what power she has gained to sow chaos in an unstable empire.

Any new Kay novel is an event to be savoured, and Under Heaven is a fine addition to the canon: as I said above, it feels like the perfect match between author and subject. Turning T'ang China into Kitai allows Kay to explore his favourite themes and use his characteristic narrative techniques in a way that feels organic to the setting; even his love of foreshadowing has a strong cultural context, in the attention paid to omens and the heavy use of hindsight by its historians. But I found reading the novel a curious experience, at times. The very formal, controlled characters - and their equally formal environment - coupled with the tendency to pull back from the pivotal plot moments and adopt a historian's eye view of things, especially towards the end, meant that while I was lost in admiration at the skill and cleverness on display, I was also very conscious of that cleverness. I found myself distanced from the emotion of the story, to a degree that is unusual within my experience of reading Kay. It's not simply that I didn't cry (not once!), it's that this world and its people never quite lodged in my heart with the urgency of Tigana or The Lions of al-Rassan.

I'm rambled plenty; over to Vicky.

--

Vicky:

Before I begin it is best to say that I finished reading Under Heaven nearly six months ago now, and inevitably my impressions of it have fuzzed at the edges.  I can't offer Nic's detailed exposition (I certainly don't have her extraordinary memory); rather, a series of disconnected observations, and general impressions.

Reading the first fifty pages of the book - entranced and giddy - I was overwhelmed with a sense of relief: I thought, here is the Kay I have known and loved.  The grand sweep, the foreshadowing, the intense sensibility of the writing, all served to convince me that Under Heaven was a strong return to the stylistic ground that Kay left behind after the Sarantine Mosaic duology.  I enjoyed and greatly admired The Last Light of the Sun and Ysabel, in their way, but both felt to me like acts of experimentation gone somewhat awry.  I read them as the work of a writer in the throes of disengagement from his past works; a writer trying to move beyond the groove he'd worn deep,  When I wrote about Ysabel for Strange Horizons I suggested that it represented the end of something for Kay as a novelist, a stroke of his pen that completed a thematic cycle he began with the Fionavar Tapestry over thirty years ago.  I interpreted the book as a knot tied at the end of a thread; and I anticipated that what came after would be different, or would at least look different.

Under Heaven sounds, plots and reads like another first-class alternate history novel by GGK; all the bright show is right there on display.  The prose is almost appalling beautiful, constantly on that rope-wire between sentimentality and emotionality that Kay loves to walk end to end without falling.  It has his trade-mark syncopation, and poetic rhythm, and force of imagery.  As Nic has already observed, style, form and historical setting are almost perfectly synthesised in the book, to the extent that one wonders whether Guy Kay wrote Under Heaven or it wrote him.  But, but, but. The effect is so overwhelming that it glutted this reader: too much beauty, too much acute poetry, too much exquisite sadness.  And yes, even too much of that marvellously clever dialogue that Kay is so renowned for.  The wit and verbal acuity of Tai, his allies and his enemies as the narrative unfolds is freighted to death with meaning, and occasionally opaque. 

What am I trying to say?  Essentially, I think that Under Heaven is so gorgeously done, so harmonious and true to its historical parallels, that it lacks a certain freeness of spirit.  It embodies its artificial conceit to the extent that I can't connect with it.  It makes for an enormously successful exercise in world-building, but for less of a satisfying novel about characters; because the artificiality of Kitai, the sheer dazzling lie of it, can't help but rub off on the people that move through it.  Which is why the sections of the novel which take place outside of the tightly woven web of the imperial bureaucracy - Tai in Kuala Nor, and Li-Mei in the Bogu steppes to the north - come as such blessed relief.  It is only in these places that the characters can breathe, and engage in simple exchanges of thought and feeling.  The rest feel like reflections in a perfect glass (or shadows in the cave).

The dynamics of the plot suffer from the tyranny (I don't mean this as harshly as it sounds) of the style too, I think.  Nic has noted the Deus Ex Machina of the gift of the horses that propels Tai to dangerous fame, but this is only the first in a number of coincidences, contrivances, unexpected meetings and unlikely love affairs that shift the book forward.  The ending is a surprise, but more because it feels unearned than anything else. Kay has always relied to a greater or lesser extent on such things, and has used foreshadowing to great effect to hide it, but Under Heaven is different from his earlier novels in that the plot serves the style utterly and completely.  It is the subjugation of the will of the author and his characters to the demands of the world, and shows the complex relationship (particularly in fantasy novels) between character and environment.  Ordinarily it is the environment that alienates the reader, while the characters draw them in close, and thereby reconcile the disconnect; in Under Heaven the characters are as alienating as the world they move through.  The disconnect prevails to the very end.  It is the epitome of the fantasy ideal on the one hand, and a self-defeating exercise on the other.  

It showcases Kay the thinker and the philosopher-historian rather than Kay the novelist.  This is nowhere more evident than in the passages of the book that are devoted to the theory of history and the place of fiction in it.  Under Heaven opens, unexpectedly, with a foreword-cum-apologia on the subject of alternate history vs. historical fiction, a theme to which the last 100 pages of the novel returns again:

...truth when examining events and records of the past was always precarious, uncertain.  No man could say for certain how the river of time would have flowed, cresting or receding, bringing floods or gently watering fields, had a single event, or even many, unfolded differently.  It is in the nature of existence under heaven, the dissenting scholars wrote, that we cannot know these things with clarity.  We cannot live twice, or watch the moment of the past unfurl, like a courtesan's silk fan.

It can hardly be an accident that the title of the book is rooted in this passage, because the anxiety implicit in writing about history seems to be what the novel is, finally, about.  It has always seemed to me that the central, psychological tension of Kay's work lies in his relationship to history and the past.  His moral determination not to write about 'true' historical incidents, figures and places is belied by his repeated return to alternate historical settings and his tendency to mirror the stylistics of his chosen milieu to such an extent that we end with a hyper-real representation of it.  I have always sensed conflict in this dichotomy: not to be a historical novelist but, conversely, to be better at historical fiction than any novelist before.

Under Heaven brings these issues to a head.  Kitai is not Tang China, Kay says.  Or rather, it isn't Tang China the second time around - Kay is absolutely clear, this is not a retelling, or a reimagining of our historical past.  This is the original: it is Tang China, but the first time around, and it is called Kitai.  In this sense he is and is not a historical novelist; he is and is not an alternate historical novelist.   It is not just a matter of being inspired by something; or changing some names, or not wanting to make presumptions about the thought patterns of men long, long dead; it is all about a pure, aching yearning towards an impossible truth.  Nic called Under Heaven Kay's arrival at the Platonic form, and I think she's right.  It perfectly encapsulates the conflict between shadows and forms, what is real and what is not real, the history we have and the history we can make. 

Can such self-conscious styling and philosophising alone a novel make? The answer is, of course, yes and no.  Under Heaven is a great novel, and a strange novel, and a novel I cannot love, but admire furiously.  Whatever else can be said about Kay, and whether this is his best, worst or most indifferent book (I feel I could make an argument on all counts), Under Heaven shows a prodigious mind at work and is worth every effort.  My handwritten reading notes on it end with a two word sentence: 'Must re-read'. 

The Sum of All Possible Galileos

The four stars were moving around Jupiter, orbiting it in the same way the moon orbited the Earth. He was seeing circular orbits edge-on; they lay nearly in a single plane, which was also very close to the plane of the ecliptic, in which the planets themselves moved.

He felt the ringing in him. He straightened up, blinking away the tears in his eyes that always came from looking too long, and that this time came also from the sudden surge of an emotion he couldn't give a name to, a kind of joy that was also shot with fear. "Ah," he said. A touch of the sacred, right on the back of his neck. God had tapped him. He was ringing.

No one had ever seen this before.

I've been meaning to write this post for some time. Since April, in fact. It's not unusual for a book to wait longer than that for a review here, these days; I'm a chronic procrastinator. But I'm also OCD enough that I find it nearly impossible to let books go without writing about them, even if it's a year since I read them.*

Particularly such interesting ones as the last of my Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist reading, Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream (2009) - a big, rich, thoughtful, deeply enthusiastic book, overflowing with a love of humanity and of our spirit of enquiry. It's a science fictional biography of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) that dances back and forth between past and future to explore the different ways that we perceive, understand and represent the world: through personal experience and memory, positivist historical narrative, individual biography, imagination of the future and, centrally, the experimental observation and theorising of science. As I noted in my Clarke round-up in April, it's infuriating at times - I don't think I've ever spent so much time arguing with a book I really admired and liked - but it's certainly a work-out, and it does all add up to a novel that I felt I'd lived through.

The bulk of the story centres on Galileo's astronomical observations in support of Copernicus' heliocentric model of the universe, and his subsequent clashes with the Catholic Church over his findings. This strand opens in 1609, with Galileo and his faithful assistant Mazzoleni - whose "weathered face [is] an entire topography of wrinkles, delta on delta" - building a modified telescope (the device had been invented only the previous year, in the Netherlands). Galileo's priorities are signalled early: in his excitement, he "tousle[s Mazzoleni's] hair as he would a child's", reflecting that the two of them share a bond unlike any other relationship Galileo has known, because "they made new things together, they learned new things". The empirical urge - the desire to formulate theories, test, and observe - is evoked wonderfully; for all the drama of Galileo's life, on one level this is quite simply a book about the joys of learning and thinking.

The rest of Galileo's life is in a semi-permanent state of "pandemonium", by comparison. Learning the world is his consuming passion, and - being a man of a certain social standing and wealth - he has been able to pursue it at the expense of everything else, and furthermore can spend much of his time cushioned from the consequences. His household, a continually rotating and perpetually neglected collection of students, children, servants and other dependants, is "crazy as a convent and running at a loss". In one of a number of self- and historically-reflexive moments in the opening section of the novel, the omniscient first-person-plural narration (on which more below) notes that this has much to do with the fact that "La Piera had not yet entered his life, and no one before her could ever keep order". Biography, for all its pretence of linear storytelling, can rarely resist the allure of foreshadowing.

The historical sections are interspersed - rather disorientatingly, for both reader and protagonist - with episodes set in the far future, on the very moons that Galileo is watching through his telescope. Waking up there for the first time, Galileo believes himself to be in his own Dante-esque afterlife, and addresses the first person he encounters as "My Virgil"; he understands little of what he sees, and believes even less, but he is fascinated by it all and characteristically eager to learn:

"Reality is mathematical, as long as you understand that uncertainty and contingency can be mathematically described, without them becoming any more certain."

"Teach me," Galileo said. "Teach me how you breathe here, and what these tides of colour are, and - teach me everything. I want to know everything! Teach me everything you have learned since my time."

He is told that his 'Virgil' (whom we later learn is called Ganymede) is part of a group of people who wish to consult with Galileo - as humankind's "first scientist" - on certain issues regarding exploration of the moons and contact with possible lifeform(s) on them; coming from the distant past with no awareness of the intervening years of human history, they believe he will be a suitably unbiased subject.

In general, I found these passages much less compelling than those set in the past. The setting feels rather insubstantial beside lively, noisy, untidy Italian city-states like Venice ("its usual grubby midday self. Magnificence at low tide"), and there is a tension between the limits of Galileo's viewpoint - he recognises next to nothing of what he sees, of course - and the omniscience of the narration; the mixture of the two is uneasy, and sometimes ineffective. The thematic and plot implications of these sections, though, are fascinating, opening up the historical story in a number of different ways. We gradually learn that several members of the group have another agenda: some wish to interfere with the events of Galileo's life, in the belief that by doing so they will change their present; others are equally convinced that Galileo must remain 'on course'. But even the act of observing, of course, creates changes in the object observed - and, in any case, it is nearly impossible for any of the observers to resist the urge to meddle.

A contemporary portrait of Galileo, by Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630); taken from here.

No-one - whether time-travelling scientist, church official, family member, or Galileo himself - can resist imposing a narrative on Galileo's life: the birth of modern science; the great clash of reason and religion; the further revelation of the marvels of Creation; a beleaguered Pope fighting for his authority and the Church's independence from powerful neighbours; a terrible father treating his offspring terribly. Robinson is not only aware that this is what he, too, is doing, he makes thematic hay with it. He is interested in Galileo, of course. But more broadly, he is interested in why certain people and events are remembered, while others are allowed to fade from the picture: why some things are considered historically and culturally important, and how those things are affected by the act of remembering them. We bring our own significance, he concludes, to the things we observe, creating them anew in our memories and histories. ("Paying attention", Galileo notes - our rather, our narrator guesses at his thoughts and notes for him - "was itself a kind of magnification.") At best we can only approximate the reality of the thing, because we - unavoidably - seek meaning.

Put another way, what happens when people start trying to write your story when you're still in the middle of it? On this evidence, they spend a lot of time telling you that you're doing it wrong. Robinson gives us a Galileo who is blithely - or arrogantly - ignorant about how his work might be construed. He is utterly convinced that no-one could be anything other than as intrigued and gleeful as he is; presented (or brow-beaten) with the facts, people will see the world as he does. Thus he proceeds to, um, tell the Pope how he should see the theological implications:

Mostly he talked about the joy of seeing new stars in the sky, and of the blessing it was to witness the new powers now given to man by God.

"Some speak of theological problems arising from the new discoveries," Galileo said calmly, "but really these problems are not possible, as creation is all one. God's world and God's word are necessarily the same, both being God's."

Yeah, that'll work. Can't think of any reason why the Catholic Church, rarely keen on sharing religious authority, might have become a bit more twitchy about people running around interpreting doctrine for themselves in the last hundred years. Again, we run into issues of narrative, and hindsight; the reader knows how this will end, and so the reader finds herself wanting to give Galileo a swift elbow to the ribs before he can dig himself in any deeper. Events gain significance by their placement in the narrative: we know that this will prove to be a contribuing factor to Galileo's persecution, because it has been selected for inclusion in the story.

Galileo is naive, but he is hardly unusual in not recognising the full extent of the danger he is in, or expecting that the entire force of the Church is poised to fall on his head. He sincerely believes that he is doing no wrong - that he is, in fact, helping to demonstrate the glory of his God ("'God makes the world using mathematics, and he has given us minds that can see it. We can discover the laws that He used! It is a most beautiful thing to witness and understand! It's prayer. It's more than a prayer, it's a sacrament'"). He forgets that human institutions are subject to human whims, and the vagaries of circumstance, and all manner of pressures.

Hera, another of the time travellers, does her best to get him to understand. She lets slip that there may be trouble ahead ("'No one has ever forgotten the price you paid for insisting on the reality of the world'"); in response to his fearful questioning, she gives him, in a striking, disturbing passage, a glimpse of his future:

The pain was such that he would have screamed immediately, but an iron muzzle clamped an iron gag into his mouth. His tongue was nailed into his palate by a spike set in the gag. He worked desperately to swallow the blood pouring into his mouth fast enough not to choke on it. His heart was racing, and when he saw and comprehended where he was, it beat even faster. Surely it would burst with the strain.

It continues, in the same vein, for a couple of pages. This is not the fate of our Galileo, of course; but it is the fate of this Galileo, as seen from the future he visits. Among Hera's colleagues, as I have already noted, there are those who wish to alter this fate, and those who are determined to keep things the way they are/were. Hello, many worlds theory: there are many possibilities branching out from Galileo's lifetime, and as many different ideas of which one would offer the best outcome for humanity. In short, Galileo has become a pawn in a struggle to control the narrative not just of his own life, but of all human history after the early seventeenth century.

Hera is of the change-the-past persuasion, and she expends quite a bit of energy on trying to nudge Galileo in her desired direction. Unlike Ganymede, Hera opts for education over sleight-of-hand (and, since this is a Kim Stanley Robinson novel, the reader might thus develop a hunch that she's the good guy), giving Galileo a crash-course in scientific, political and social developments during the centuries between her time and his. At length, however, she gets more personal; with the true biographer's conviction that the key to her subject's intellectual life lies in his home life, she sets about dissecting his relationship with his mother, partner, and children. Unlike contemporary biographers, who must just imagine their subjects' thoughts, the people of Jupiter can simply invade Galileo's head:

Well, these people could voyage among the planets, and back and forth in time; of course they would also have tried to dive into themselves, penetrating the vast ocean that lay under every skull. So they had developed the power to dive into consciousness itself. [...]

It was a power that made Galileo more frightened of the Jovians than ever. Which didn't really make sense, he knew: remembering something vividly should not be more alarming than being transported across centuries. But one's mind was a private place.

This pushes some of my buttons, and taps into a discussion Vicky and I have had before, both here and elsewhere. I have reservations about the use of real people in historical fiction - and, for that matter, with some of the excesses of biographical writing - because I am uncomfortable with the appropriation of people as public property, as well as with the claim to authoritative knowledge of an individual beyond their actions or their own self-expression. (This is not to say that such works can't be creatively interesting!) I find it interesting, therefore, to see Robinson engage with this, letting his protagonist protest the intrusiveness of those who feel entitled to know everything about him so that they can better construct their narrative - and, in turn, questioning our own motives for reading biographical-fiction of this nature. He is explicitly not the real Galileo, or even an attempt to recreate him - the whole point is that he comes from an alternative world - but he nonetheless baulks at efforts to construct a reading of his life from the inside out, without his consent.

That said, I'm going to talk about his home life anyway. ;-) It's another important facet of the central theme: what and who gets remembered, and who and what is forgotten. Women - with the exception of the hot young love interest model - are so often left out of this sort of story, both in fiction and in history. Hera aims to put them back in, although I found myself frustrated and puzzled by her methods of trying to convince Galileo that he treats his family like crap in his self-centred pursuit of knowledge. Take the glance back to Galileo's youth, via the Jovians' mind-reading device, and the difficult relationship between his "gorgon" mother (Galileo's word) and his under-achieving musician father:

[Y]et in his own kitchen the nightly debates revealed him mostly cruelly to be only the second smartest person in the house - and really, after Galileo reached the age of five, the third. It must have been disheartening. And so he had died. Without your heart you died.

Now, I could snark at this sob story all day: Remember, ladies - hide your intelligence, lest you dishearten your poor husband to death; that's what masculinity is all about, after all, making sure your womenfolk wrap your poor ego up in cotton wool so you don't have to learn difficult truths, like maybe you aren't the most important and wonderful person in the world. But Hera chooses to psychoanalyse the situation. In a patriarchy, she explains, seeing one's mother be so much stronger than one's father is a source of ridicule and shame, as a result of which Galileo grew up to hate women.

As a theoretical explanation for someone familiar with the theory - for example, what patriarchy is - this is fine, but I fail to see how it helps Galileo in his own daily life, as it is supposed to. Would it not be better to put this is terms he will understand? If he is to survive at all, let alone become less of an entitled idiot, he needs to learn how to function in his own society. Because even by the terms of  patriarchal early-modern Italy, Galileo is a failure. Hera is entirely correct - and her cluestick starts to find its mark - when she points out,

"You ate yourself sick, you drank yourself into a stupor. And it wasn't the first time, or even the hundredth. While your women drudged and starved. Had the babies and raised the children and did all the real work, the work that's work. The woman you had children with, she didn't even know how to read, isn't that what you said? Didn't know how to add or subtract? What kind of a life is that?"

But perhaps a better place to start might be: call yourself the head of the household? You don't even provide properly for your children. Galileo's two daughters are illegitimate, and thus unable to make any sort of marriage - particularly since his salary is too poor to provide an incentive in the form of a reasonably dowry. Italian life being what it was in this period, and Galileo's finances being what they are, the pair are consigned to a convent; convents being what they were in this period, their life there - without financial backing from a family - is appalling. (Individual nuns were largely left to their own or their family's devices when it came to their food, clothing, and other comforts; most convents were desperately poor as institutions.)

Suor Maria Celeste - aka Virginia, Galileo's saintly eldest daughter (from here).

Galileo recognises this - some of the time - but is quick to declaim any blame for their situation. He hopes instead to pass the responsibility for their living conditions onto influential friends within the church; as he tells Hera:

"Well - my daughters are in a convent. But their order is too poor. A lot of them are sick, and some have gone mad. I'm hoping I can get this new pope to grant them some land. Because it's bad for my daughters."

"You are the one who put them in their situation, right?"

"Yes yes."

(He then swiftly tries to distract her from that line of questioning.) The fact that he has made stunningly little effort to maintain his relationships with these influential friends - and, indeed, has gone out of his way to antagonise them with his experiments - does not impinge on his imaginings at all. Indeed, his treatment of his family is only a symptom of Galileo's wider problem: he cannot, or will not, play the game. In a society almost entirely organised around the cultivation of personal relationships - a world of patronage and favours, of gratitude measured in money and opened doors - Galileo burns all his bridges on a semi-regular basis. In a fit of pique and wounded ego, he is ready to abandon his dependants - family, employees, and most significantly clients - at the drop of a hat to move to a city where his research will get more respect, trashing the social nexus of his status and protection without a second thought. It is a broken, deeply unfair system, but it is the one in operation, and there is an irony - of course - in the fact that Galileo can plot the paths of the planets but miss the workings of the environment he lives in.

Increasingly as the novel went on, I found myself more interested in the women's stories behind Galileo's: the fierce lover, Marina, whom Galileo never married; the saintly eldest daughter dying in service to God, and the one who never speaks to him again once the convents doors are closed on her; the intelligent mother doomed to be the harridan who haunts her son and fights with her not-daughter-in-law. I was disappointed, then, when they disappeared from the story - if not unheralded, then certainly a long way from truly explored or appreciated.

But Robinson's Galileo is a Galileo who might be, a Galileo that those observing him need and want. He is a scientist, a father, a pioneer, a martyr, a heretic, and a patriarch who can't even do patriarchy very well. He is a Galileo that we have created with the agendas we bring to reading and writing about him. Which is why the narration is in first-person plural:

"Now you are one of my angels. I have so many of them."

He did indeed. So many, stepping onto the stage from nowhere: the people who helped him, the crowd who tried to do him harm. Any event in history that gets more crowded the longer you look at it - that's a sign. Sign of a contested moment, a crux that will never stop changing under your gaze. The gaze itself entangles you, and you too are one of the changes in that moment.

And even writing about it, six months on, I find I am moved all over again.

I'm sure that the history you tell yourself is still a tale of mangled potentiality, of unnecessary misery. That's just the way it is. In all times people are greatly lacking in courage.

But sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they keep trying. This too is history. We are all history - the hopes of people in the past, the past of some future people - known to them, judged by them, changed by them as they use us. So the story keeps changing, all of it.

~~Nic

* I've learned to take quite detailed notes...

To Get Rich is Glorious

One day I'm sure I'm going to make it big, great handfuls of bills will hit me in the face whenever I open my door; there'll be nowehere to hide. Dollars - they have this intoxicating, exotic generosity of spirit.

Heavy, bitter irony drips from more or less every sentence of Zhu Wen's short fiction collection, 'I Love Dollars' and Other Stories of China (2008, translated by Julia Lovell). So much so, in fact, that at times these rather lurid stories are surprisingly hard going - and I speak as someone who regularly reads and enjoys Russian novels, which are hardly famed for their lightness of heart.

In the first and the third stories, in particular, there are precious few flashes of humanity on display. Instead, a parade of venal, vacuous characters lie, cheat, trade insults and generally make each others' lives unpleasant just because they can - anything but communicate clearly. This, of course, is the point; the introduction notes that Zhu Wen and his contemporaries have made their names by their iconoclastic willingness to expose just far how Chinese society has been degraded by a toxic combination of repressive politics and rapacious, shameless capitalism: to get rich is glorious, Deng Xiaoping famously declared. It is not, suggests Zhu Wen, when the price is losing everything else.

But it makes for dreary, draining stuff. The first story, 'I Love Dollars' (originally published 1994), revolves around the attempts of a young man to impress his father when the latter comes to visit. It has the appearance of a familiar story, except for the terms in which the narrator conceives of his relationship with his father.

When the latter arrives at his son's apartment to find him with a woman - his girlfriend Wang Qian - who "give[s] off this pungent, earthy scent - the smell of the local women", the narrator worries that he might "lose his [father's] respect" because you can see crow's feet at her eyes when she smiles. With not a flicker of guilt, he "signal[s] to Wang Qian to get lost". His only feelings are for his father's visit; a measure of irritation, and a sort of lazy anxiety that consists largely of how he might ensure that this episode banks some credit for later in his life:

A son shouldn’t shirk his filial duties. If, some distant day in the future, I should ever find myself at a loose end and free of the self-importance that comes with age, and run off to visit my son, I’d want him to figure out what was required, to be able to search out a few glimmers of fun for his hardworking father. I wouldn’t want to end up with some idiot who only knew how to offer a pious faceful of empty respect.

A couple of pages later, the narrator embarks on fulfilling his filial duties by taking his father to a bar and trying to set him up with a waitress ("the same age as my little sister"). After some initial discomfort, his father joins in the game of crudely pushing the boundaries of the initially flirty waitress, until her composure cracks and she leaves. They then spend some time speculating on whether or not she is a prostitute. This becomes a recurring theme; all women - including the narrator's sister - are assumed to be no more than two steps from prostitution. There is no relationship that is not either mercenary or meaningless, or both; and not an opportunity is missed to quantify things (food, drink, wages, services), in both yuan and dollars.

When his father suggests that the narrator, who writes in his spare time, might "'offer people something positive, something to look up to, ideals, aspirations, democracy, freedom, stuff like that'", instead of always writing about sex, the latter is unfazed ("'Dad, I'm telling you, all that stuff, it's there in sex'"). He works seventy hours a week at the factory; it is, he frankly admits - although not to his father - sheer boredom that animates his writing just as it does all his relationships. He is, it seems, well aware of how empty his life is, and why; but he has been drained of the capacity to respond with anything but cynicism, too clever and tired for passion or regret:

If this city of ours is going to make it into modernity [...] it needs you - yes, you - to abandon all sense of restraint and moderation, to drive these outmoded concepts further and further from your mind, to fit into a future in which both will have been abolished, in which doomsday looms ever closer - closer and closer.

The dial is turned further towards darkly absurdist humour in 'A Hospital Night' (1996), but again the motifs are of individuals either ignoring their duty to their families, or making their resentment plain as they carry them out. The narrator - another writer - agrees with some reluctance to accompany his colleague Li Ping to the hospital, where his father is having an operation to remove some gallstones. She is divorced from her controlling horror of an ex, but nevertheless to show up alone would be to lose face in front of her family. (Why is it that when modern life erodes traditional structures, it doesn't get rid of the really idiotic and harmful ones?) The lie is never made explicit, as that would require some communication; everyone is just allowed to assume that the narrator is now part of the family.

Before he knows what is happening, the narrator has been assigned to spend the night in the ward with the restless, irascible (and "endlessly, inventively uncomfortable") old man. After that, it all takes a turn for the surreal, as the patient's backside inflates and deflates for no obvious reason (prompting the narrator to snap the deathless line at him: "If you were a reasonable being, you wouldn't have such a huge bottom, would you?"). The service provided by the hospital staff is neglectful bordering on callous - for all that this is a Communist country, healthcare beyond the operation itself is a remarkably DIY affair, even within the hospital - but this, too, is couched in terrifically bizarre terms, as when the narrator asks a nurse to tend to the man's reopened operation wound:

Please come and look! No reaction. What are you waiting for, I said, it's bleeding! Badly! If you don't go and look, you'll be responsible for whatever happens. She smoothed the hair over her forehead: Okay, she said, I'll go and have a look, but first you've got to let me grope you a bit more. / I never know what to do in these situations.

As if that wasn't enough, things get more ghoulish still in 'A Boat Crossing' (1995), whose twitchy protagonist appears to be on the run from something, and makes us feel every unbearably paranoid moment of his long-drawn-out escape by riverboat. It's a rictus grin of a story, with a skin-crawling air of Gogol (grotesquerie) via Murakami (randomness), as the narrator spends long paragraphs of the claustrophobic night below decks lying in bed, trying not to look round at his unsettlingly odd cabinmate (repeatedly referred to as "the ghoul") as he eats his oranges:

I pressed my face up against the wall, trying to do my best impression of sleeping like the dead. Come in, come in, come in. It was the ghoul, I now recognised, speaking with a new, louche lilt. When I rolled back over to see what was going on, I immediately shot straight up in my bed. The three of them were sitting in a row on the bottom bunk opposite, all eating oranges with this show of exaggerated enjoyment.

It's never clear why they're doing this, or whether their motives are remotely sinister. But they drive the narrator to utter distraction. The whole thing feels like a feverish dream of the main character, and it only gets more nutty thereafter. The style draws attention to the tics and tricks of a first-person account: the whole thing is told in long, run-on paragraphs; dialogue is not marked out by punctuation, and the more outlandish bits are sometimes repeated, accompanied by the reassurance "That's what he said", as if the narrator is not entirely convinced of his own story. there is thus room to doubt what we are told, but it is told with such intensity that it is difficult to shake, even so. Of all the collection, I highly recommend this story.

The alienating grimness of 'Wheels' (1998) is less dreamlike, but no less difficult. The narrator, a generally good-hearted boiler serviceman and enthusiastic cyclist, gets harassed for money by a stranger who accuses him of knocking into him while riding his bike one day. "[W]heels move faster than legs and are harder to control", he notes; accidents, and their consequences, are unavoidable. So, too, is being at the wrong place at the wrong time; bullies are random facts of life, like fate. The stranger turns out to be the grandfather of the local Mr Big, and soon the protagonist is being beaten up by a the thugs of small-time mafia family and having money extorted on a regular basis. Unable to explain why such mischance should have fallen upon him, he blames his bicycle:

And while I'm on the subject, I might as well point out that wheels are implicated - heavily - in AIDS, the most terrifying viral threat in the last twenty years of the millennium, too. It's thanks to wheels that people can now get around like they do. Wheels carry people over enormous distances to have sex, spreading AIDS as they go.

When, finally, he is unable to meet a payment, he feels certain doom is impending. And then, just as inexplicably, he never hears another thing from his tormentors.

After that, the stories take a welcome - if less memorable to me, some months after I read them - turn for the (slightly) lighter. 'Ah, Xiao Xie!' (1999) is a farce about depression (and such cheery topics as "baijju - the 55 percent liquor beloved of those who have no further use for their livers"), set in an affluent power plant whose workers get money thrown at them to keep the vital service running. 'Pounds, Ounces, Meat' (1999), about a young couple's quest to weigh a joint of meat, is even sillier (my notes say only "That was odd"). Two useful pallette-cleansers, then, after four rather difficult pieces. I'd glad I came across this collection - it was worth it for 'The Boat Crossing' alone - but I'm in no hurry to read it again.

~~Nic