A Son of the Rock

Angry Robot, 2018, 380 p.

The first sentence of this novel sets the action in 1959. But it’s not the 1959 of our world. Though the tale proper starts off in a noirish way a prologue chapter has already revealed to us an apparently dead man on a library floor whose skin is covered in words; not tattoos, since they’re moving. A man covered in stories.

For we are in Storyville. A city run by a Narrative Council. A city whose suburbs and streets are named after writers – Lower Shakespeare, Rabelais Walk, Calvino Road, Plath Lane etc. There’s even a Bradbury Avenue, plus an Asimov reference. A pivotal location is the Melville Estate, particularly Melville Tower Five.

Our protagonist is Nyquist, a private investigator whose current case involves following a man called Patrick Wellborn. Inside Melville Tower Five Wellborn attacks him with a knife and Nyquist kills him in self-defence. Ramifications ripple out from this act. A woman named Zelda Courtland was to meet Welborn in the Tower and becomes embroiled with Nyquist. This brings them both into conflict with a heavy called Dreylock whose body is criss-crossed with scars, liable to open at any moment and pour blood everywhere. Bee-like creatures known as alphabugs, each marked with a glowing letter, – though never an ‘x’ – occasionally flit about. Partway through the novel we discover Melville Tower Five has a tree growing up through its floors – all the way to the roof and beyond. Whether this is meant to refer to the Yggdrasil legend is not entirely clear (though seems likely) but it nevertheless comes over as a bit gratuitous.

Referentiality or self-referentiality is a recurring emblem. Nyquist is a character in a book who comes to think of himself as a character in a book – or is at least reading about “himself.” He encounters pages from The book – called The Body Library, fragments written in midnight’s ink. The pages of the book can be burned and the smoke inhaled. Later we read, “The night had been cut up into pieces, sliced by a blade into strips, and then glued back together in the wrong order.”

In his search for the lost Zelda Nyquist comes across the place where she is said to have been executed. A boy witness says to him, “‘All the stories, mister …. all the lousy, unwanted, lonely, disgusting, forgotten stories, all the tales that no-one wants in the city, they flow through the pipes, they get flushed clean away and they get pumped out, right here, in the mud and the dirt and the shit.’”

Dreylock tells Nyquist, “‘The Body Library is a novel, a book, and a rather special one at that.’” Made of extracts of cut-ups and splinters. “‘Everything that happens in this tower’” says Dreylock ,…“‘happens because of The Body Library.’” The book contained the city, it was the city. For the people whose skins are covered in words midnight’s ink makes them believe they’re inside a story. “‘Words make us, and keep us. Words embrace us. Words save us from our true selves, covering us in story. Words deliver us from everyday life.’” A woman called Daisy says, “‘Zelda was scared to death of words.’” Storyville’s Grand Hall of Narrative Content, where the city’s inhabitants’ stories are being written down, is an instrument of control.

The whole thing of course is a metaphor for reading – even a pleading for the necessity for story. But it’s slightly misplaced. However much an author may try to steer the reader to a certain point or conclusion he or she is not in sole charge. The reader brings his or her own experiences to the enterprise, makes his or her own judgement while they are reading. Sometimes that means concluding the author has gone too far. In literature, less can be more.

Pedant’s corner:- Written in USian. Otherwise; “femme fatales” (fatale is an adjective here – even in English. The noun is ‘femme’, its plural is ‘femmes’ hence we should have ‘femmes fatales’.) “‘So why don’t you sit down and tell me.’” (Is a question and so requires a question mark at its end.) “He hardly noticed when one of the screws worked itself free” (a page earlier he had been panicking as this started to happen.) “‘Who it is?’” (‘Who is it?’)