A Son of the Rock

Del Rey, 1996, 347 p (including 1 p each Author’s Note and “About the Author.”)

Nothing dates so quickly as the future. Think of all those flashing lights, toggle switches and grilled loudspeakers – not to mention the outrageously sexist (lack of) clothing – in the original Star Trek TV series. In this novel someone makes an analogy by asking a six-year old, “You know how the telephone wire brings grandmother’s voice in to the house?” A reminder of different times. Ah well.

Main narrator Lore (Frances Lorien van de Oest) is the daughter of an extremely rich but dysfunctional family made wealthy by their proprietary water cleaning bioorganisms – and with a secret to conceal. She spent her childhood longing to be grown up and able to take part in running the family business. Almost as soon as she did so she was kidnapped and held to ransom, shown tied up and naked on a video broadcast worldwide. But her family didn’t pay. This last she ascribes to her somehow being wanting as an asset.

The story begins after she has escaped, by not swallowing the calming drugs the kidnappers gave her and subsequently surprising them. In the process she was badly injured but thought she had killed one of her captors. Sprawling naked on the street, bleeding heavily, she is ignored by passers-by till a woman called Spanner takes her home and arranges for her wounds to be healed – at a price. This is a world where the have-nots are very definitely separated from the haves and illicit dealings common. It is also one where water is seemingly very heavily polluted, hence the van de Oest family fortune but Lore’s experience has led to her no longer wishing to have contact with her family.

Lore’s debt to Spanner is paid off in various more or less unsavoury ways, some involving an oil that is a potent, irresistible, aphrodisiac. They also have an intense sexual relationship before Lore finally breaks away by adopting the persona of dead woman Sal Bird – a procedure which requires the insertion in her arm of a type of chip known as a PIDA, a blend of ID and personal history card. With this she gets a job in a water treatment plant, where she has to wear protective clothing called a skinnysuit (but other safety precautions are notably lax and have to be paid for out of wages anyway.) Her knowledge of the processes eventually leads to suspicion from her line-manager, but in the face of cost-cutting by the management and the ensuing crisis she earns her spurs.

The text is non-linear, memories from Lore’s past family life are narrated in third person present tense, her captivity and later life with Spanner are rendered in first person past tense. Griffiths’s writing is fine, the novel is very readable but the reader is way ahead of Lore herself in working out what the family secret is. The utterly polluted water thing is a bit of a stretch, though, which is unfortunate, even if does provide the opportunity for throwing in nuggets of chemical and biological terminology.

I reviewed Griffiths’s Ammonite here. Slow River is a different type of story entirely displaying her versatility. It seems, however, that after this she stopped writing SF in favour of crime and historical fiction.

Pedant’s corner:- “None of the family ever do” (None of the family ever does,) fit (fitted,) “to insure silence” (ensure,) sprung (sprang,) hiccoughs (has no provemance, the word is hiccups.) “The only wildlife she sees are worms” (the only wildlife …. is worms,) “the music was rising to a deafening crescendo” (the crescendo is the rise, not its climax.)