Nova Swing, by M. John Harrison

[rachelmanija]

The cold air was perfectly still, but full of old shoes--old shoes cracked and wrinkled, soles hanging off, floating around one another as if they'd been lifted up on a strong wind--as if shoes were an organism, one which, given the correct conditions, exhibit flocking behavior.

My favorite M. John Harrison novels are probably his most obscure, the dreamy fantasy The Course of the Heart and the low-key science fiction Signs of Life. I read Light, the novel that proceeds Nova Swing, years ago when it first came out, and did not love it anywhere near as much as most readers. I only picked up Nova Swing when I saw it on a list of books inspired by Roadside Picnic, one of the most influential books in one of my favorite subgenres.

That subgenre is concerned with exploring a strange and dangerous but often beautiful place where the rules are unknown and you may emerge with riches, emerge terribly or wonderfully changed, or never emerge at all. Other classics in the genre are Gateway by Frederic Pohl and Annihilation (both book and movie.) My description, of course, also applies to older ideas of Faerie.

Nova Swing is set in Saudade, a city beside the Event Site, which is where a piece of a zone of weirdness landed. The Event Site is extremely dangerous and no one is supposed to go in or out, but guides take tourists in for excursions, and living beings and artifacts do get out. At dawn and dusk, enormous numbers of black cats and white cats flood the streets, running in and out of the Event Site. A nearby bar is named Black Cat White Cat, and the action of the story largely centers around it.

This is not a plotty book. At all. That is, it does have a plot, but no one seems much concerned with it. In mood if not in style, it reminded me of some lost Hemingway novel where everyone moodily drinks all the time, speaks in enigmatic and mannered diction, and self-destructs in a slow and drifting manner. It's like a mainstream literary novel written in a science fiction world.

There's a cop theoretically investigating some serial murders (he never actually does) and protecting the Event Site (he's pretty useless at this); he's been genetically altered to look like Einstein. Vic Serotonin drinks a lot of rum and takes tourists into the site; this goes wrong when he takes in a woman who is clearly mentally off and liable to freak out. A woman takes care of her father who's dying from too much Event Site exploring. A female sex worker is in love with a guy who keeps getting transferred into new bodies to do gladiatorial matches; the fighters have tusks, rooster spurs, and giant, perpetually erect dicks. A gangster obtains a site artifact which turns out to be even worse news than is obvious from the get-go.

Everyone drinks a lot. There's also a lot of vomiting. Everyone wants things they can't have or which are bad for them. One of the plot strands might be the beginning of the end of the entire universe, but it's given no more or less weight than anything else. There's lots of male-gazey sex, all heterosexual. Motivations are often unclear, which is explicitly part of the point: we don't know why we do what we do.

Very little of the book actually takes place inside the Event Site - we only directly visit it in the second to last chapter. When we do get in, FINALLY, it's extremely weird and cool and inexplicable.



Living things from the site are called "daughters" - I could never figure out why.

I think Vic Serotonin's mysterious client might have been a daughter from the get-go, and that's why she was so weird and confused and determined to return to the site. Once she gets in, she either goes completely insane or reverts back to her original state. Vic never leaves and spends the rest of his life hopelessly chasing her.

By the end it seems like the nano-stuff or whatever it is from the site is spreading, which might destroy the universe? Nobody seems to quite react to that as much as it seems like they should.



In the last chapter, there's a completely unexpected turn into something like conventional plotting and character development. Several of the supporting characters make life-changing decisions involving their futures, their relationships, and their careers, and actually follow through on them. When one of them sells their business and goes in with two other characters on a new business, I was suddenly SO INTERESTED in them for the very first time. Except for the scenes actually in the Event Site, I was way more into their small business venture than I was interested in anything else in the entire book. And then the book ends. I felt certain that M. John Harrison was sitting back and thinking, "Yep, throw them a plot and conventional likability bone, and they pounce."

I didn't really like this book (or Light, which had much more of a plot) but I think it was doing exactly what Harrison wanted it to do. It's sometimes dryly funny, or at least I found bits dryly funny. ("Insect," she concluded, "is an anagram of incest." Even for a childhood on another planet it seemed extreme.) But overall, it was a specific type of literary experience that I don't much like.