Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison

Vic Serotonin is a travel agent. He guides people into - and, if they're lucky, out of - the Saudade Event Site, a fragment of impossible physics fallen to earth in the manner of Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky, where the familiar is made strange and the smallest motion might ramify out into a maze to trap the unwary. The tourists go in hoping to find something, perhaps themselves. And Vic? He doesn't seem to hope for anything much. He's a travel agent. He no longer dreams.

On this particular morning, a woman arrives wanting to be guided into the Site, a job which seems routine, but goes a little bit wrong almost at once, because - this being noir, and I haven't read much noir but I sure have heard this about it - an out-of-place woman who needs help will be more trouble than she seems.

Meanwhile, at a bar called the Cafe Surf, there is a reply to the activities of the travel agents. Entirely new people are emerging from the Event Site, and the local Site Crime department would really like to know why, and whether it will make reality change forever, and whether they can stop it.

This book is short, stylish, clean, opaque. M. John Harrison novels always offer me questions such as 'The chapter titles were following a pattern, but chapter five broke it; why?' I read the start of this one slowly, taking notes, turning those questions over. It's perfectly possible for me to read on over the top of all the subtext going 'Yes, yes, there's something here for sure, I'll come back to it later,' because it's not as though there isn't a plot to be apprehended right there on the surface. However, that plot generally consists of people wandering around not managing to do anything for a couple of hundred pages before convulsively achieving or else not achieving something, so the 'leave it to the second reading' approach has probably contributed greatly to the hate part of my love/hate relationship with M. John Harrison. Closer sustained attention certainly helps with the love part, though the fact that it's required means I'll probably never read him often.

(Having got out the notebook, I then needed to zoom back out a bit, or I become a conspiracy theorist. The place the book begins, Straint Street, anagrams to: interstates. Vic Serotonin anagrams to: coinventor. Both leave letters out, and, as the book proceeds, neither will seem to yield very much. These shots aren't worth calling: there can and will be relevant word games in M. John Harrison novels, but he plays fair, and actually points out the ones he thinks you need to catch).

A nova is an explosion of light; Nova Swing is a companion book to the earlier space opera, Light, a thematic reply if not explosive then at least skeptical. In Light, a hundred alien species have tried and failed to explain the impossible astronomical entity called the Kefahuchi Tract; the first thing Vic says in Nova Swing, when his friend is about to suggest an interpretation of the Event Site, is 'If you're just going to talk nonsense don't even bother.' In Light two different interstellar drives can rely on incompatible physics models and both work; the second thing Vic does in Nova Swing is refrain from commenting on the stupidity of the claim, "Everyone's entitled to their opinion." It's ironic that I don't easily experience these novels - as though they themselves contain the merely worldly and the transcendent aspects of existence between which, as some of them would have it, we spend our lives bobbing - since all the characters in Light had trouble with distance from reality. One of them starts inside a VR tank, cycling through meaningless fantasies; another starts as a spaceship and isn't totally happy to be there. This is not exactly the problem faced by the characters in Nova Swing. Here, it's if anything more difficult. The Event Site, the Zone, the mysterious centre of things, is right over there, you can walk in, the police might try to stop you but honestly they don't seem to be trying very hard. When asked about going inside, Vic Serotonin says there's nothing easier... but there is also risk. In the first chapter we meet someone who, instead of switching between virtual lives, is a mind regrown day after day into different disposable bodies, so he can go off and have spectacular, bloody fights in the ring. This is one hundred percent unsimulated and might be no different to the VR tank. You can experience - and then what? Action takes a toll on you; the explorer Bonaventure gets old young, leaving his daughter Edith to care for him and dream of her own glory days as an accordion player, visible to herself only in a long-past light. "The fact is, you spend all those years trying to make something of it," Vic Serotonin says. "Then guess what, it starts making something of you."

So I thought early on that this would be the book about being acted on as opposed to acting: a detective where in Light there was a murderer, a Zone that's come down to earth instead of the Kefahuchi Tract, which hangs there in the sky waiting - a book in which some interstellar drives might, who knows, just not work, because the world has teeth. This applies to the book, but it's not that simple. Nobody acts alone; the result of a multitude of actors may be chaos; solipsism is a road you can walk down almost as far as you like.

...

I was suspicious when I saw a character called Fat Antoyne. I had just read a clever science fiction writer using a fat body grotesquely as plot machinery, without bothering to include anyone else fat to indicate that there might be another reason to include multiple body types, and 3000 Years of Longing didn't clear the fatphobia bar for me either. (I have so much goodwill towards that movie, it wouldn't have taken much). But by the end of the book another character has been offhandedly described as fat, and the self-presentations of other characters are similarly emphasized - the detective is referred to as resembling the older Einstein every time we see him, and at a certain point it's made clear that the older Einstein is a package face you can buy off a shelf - so I ended up happy with how Antoyne played out.

Three times in this book the narration goes 'she was one of those women who-' and god knows my experience of the world and people and women is limited, but what came after the 'who' never sounded more like a coherent explanatory type to me than "She was one of those women who wore a yellow left sock but never said the word 'partial'. Whether this is insight I lack, or failure of insight, or deliberate setup of something to be skewered later, I have not parsed out; but some of the sexist nonsense is here to be skewered for sure. It is ages since I've disliked a character as much as the detective Aschemann. He is avuncular, and awfully charming if you get him in the right mood. Over the course of the novel, he does remarkably little detective work. Instead, he plays conversation like a game, judging his assistant's questions on a pass/fail basis by some mysterious rubric, muses abstractly about his method, and regularly tells other people, especially women, how they're feeling. When we first meet him we get the line, "He beamed down at the toddler, who burst into tears." Yes toddler so would I.*

It is notable, early on, how many minor-seeming female characters get interiority. Scenes here often follow the character you wouldn't expect - staying behind with the women sitting in the bar when the travel agent bustles out of it, or with the detective's assistant after he's gone off chasing a lead. The book is interested in what women in noir are supposed to be, but doesn't play it straight. The most dangerous type of artefact that can emerge from the Event Site, the type which don't remain inert but causes knock-on problems, is called 'daughter code' - but it was a man who decided to name it that. I almost feel like it's a thematic spoiler to answer the question 'Does this book get around to not being sexist?' but then again, I don't care, because if it didn't I wouldn't be recommending it.

M. John Harrison never looks at something bad and says "Let's start somewhere else then, let's go over here." He starts in the unfulfilled desire, the confused motive, the bad dream, the sexist nonsense. All the books of his I've read know there's a way out of it, and all of them start inside it.










* Well, actually, when I last met one of them - a theological dentist - I and a bunch of others argued with him for an hour. He seemed delighted by this. Now, I'd probably just disengage.