Category: Lit

“The red blood of the Jiao-Gao soldiers and the green blood of the Iron Society soldiers converged to nourish the black earth of the fields. Years later, that soil would be the most fertile anywhere,” writes Mo Yan in Red Sorghum, set in the midst of the 1930s war between Japan and China, in what might be the covert thesis statement of the novel.

There’s a strain of blood and soil in Red Sorghum that leaches into the meaning of community, what ties together these rural Chinese outposts. What we’ve termed filial piety, what we think of as belonging to a place, these are also terms that undergird tribalism. These are terms that inform the right to a piece of earth, the right to pass it to your kin, the right to kill the outsider who would take it from you.

The grotesque barbarism of the war between Japan and China is only a part of the show. Equally indiscriminate, if not quite as cruel, are the killings between tribes of bandits and ad hoc governments within China, and the extent to which the reader is invited to scorn the social milieu of the novel is never clear. One is tempted, actually, to think we are not: we conclude with the descendant of these local warlords mourning their lack of connection to the old ways, the moral atrophy of the cities. If there is a critique of the recklessness of violence, it is at least nested with its glorification. It is posited within a naturalistic framework, wherein the red of the sorghum fields, the sorghum wine, the wars with local dogs to preserve the corpses on the battlefield, all of these natural symbols map to the world of violence in a way that suggests that the strife and killing for place and power is endemic to the soil, to the identities of its people – at least, once upon an age.

Nabokov had a great quote on writing (worth reading in full, but for these purposes, the snippet will do): “The force and originality involved in the primary spasm of inspiration is directly proportional to the worth of the book the author will write.”

There are two beautiful spasms of imagination in Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M. One is in the first few pages. One is in the last few. Because I’d like to discuss each equally, you can rest assured that I AM GOING TO SPOIL THE ENDING.

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In just the first ten pages of the book, we are given such a ferocious spurt of imagination that it could light our minds for days if Shepherd never wrote another chapter. People’s shadows the world over start disappearing, and with them, their memories. It was never suspected until that moment that a person’s shadow was where memory was stored.

The beauty in this idea isn’t just poetic, it catches such resonance with one of the core questions in neuroscience. We’ve never been able to localize memories in the brain. Disable any one part of the brain, the remainder more or less remembers everything that the whole once did, suggesting perhaps that memories are stored by a network of relations that is self-similar at different scales. Another way of thinking about it is referred to as holonomic mind theory – that the human mind functions much the same way a hologram does, in which all of the information in the signal is nested (with some resolution errors past a point) across each subset of the signal. At least, that’s one theory. The truth is we’re properly riddled by this.

This mystery of memory’s location, which is so key to securing our sense of self in the face of a materialist worldview, already has a lot of traffic in scientific circles, to the point where I think it’s pretty pop culture-y. So kudos for finding a magical realism way to play off it.

Shepherd adds a dimension to her premise by making reality adjust to fit the mistaken memories of the shadowless, but frankly (though this is easily the most awe-inspiring and fantastical element in the book), I’m less intrigued by this element. It’s a driver of adventure, more than having something to say about the human condition. And the logic of how her world functions under these rules is a bit more confounding – whose memory takes precedence, what kinds of memories change the world around them, why hasn’t one random person forgotten what oxygen is and ended the world – so that its effects feel more random and plot-servicing than numinous.

But hell, it’s certainly fun to wander a world where statues can come to life and smash buildings, so I’m not bagging on it.

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What follows from there is a dutiful, well-crafted story exploring a post-apocalypse. If you thrill at those, you’ll thrill at this.

For me, it dragged a bit. The payoff comes in the last few pages.

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Shepherd’s second great spasm of imagination comes when a great healer type begins stitching shadows back onto people, hoping to give them their memories back. Unfortunately, only the shadow of an object appropriately invested with some kind of cognition will serve this purpose. Give a person the shadow-memories of a rock, they go crazy in rock-ish sorts of ways.

The moment that sings is around a tape recorder. Before she loses all her memories, a woman named Max wanders the country recording everything she can remember onto a tape recorder. The tape recorder’s shadow is stitched back onto a woman who the healer thinks is Max. But the healer is mistaken. The wrong woman inherits the memories stored in the recorder, and with it, the identity of Max.

So when whoops-wrong-woman meets the man she now thinks is her husband, he rejects her. She has the mind of the woman who made the recordings (we can presume Max is dead at this point), but nobody else sees her that way. The pain is tremendous. She believes she’s held out so long trying to preserve her mind so she could one day reunite with her husband, but she’s in the wrong body and he’s not having any of it.

Tragic, poignant, and this is where Shepherd closes.

Hot take: this is not where Shepherd should have closed.

This is, if anything, the more inviting spasm of imagination between the two, which begs for these characters to evolve. This begs for two people, one of whom believes they are married, and the other of whom is fighting a profound repulsion to the woman who thinks she’s his wife, to explore what their relationship is now. Because it’s not as simple and pat as they don’t have one.

And in the process, this invites Shepherd to explore what it means to have selfhood, to answer serious human questions in ways that only a fantasy premise can engage in. Is it enough to believe that you’re a specific person? To have all the memories of that person? To walk in the sack of carbon that collected those memories originally? To be recognized as that person by the people who know you?

If I had my druthers, this is the midway point of the book. Strip out a certain amount of post-apocalyptic wrangling, and write me a half of a book about two people trying to see if they’re still married, in different bodies.

Or – just in case she’s reading her reviews – fine material for the sequel.

You have to read your city’s literature (and what a pleasure to say your city has a literature), but because my French is still painstaking enough to really slow the literary experience, I’m getting the Anglophone perspective on Montreal for now.

In John Brooke’s Last Days of Montreal, we step into a world where Montreal’s unique multiculturalism is interpreted as a network of divisions. Scattered across the mid-1990’s, around the time of the separation referendum, Anglophones feel ostracized and transgressive for simply flying the Canadian flag. Communication breaks down with their French wives, and they look for connection with their immigrant neighbors. French radio hosts try to mythicize the everyday flying of the fleur-de-lis, but the people they are mythicizing don’t recognize themselves in the story. And homeless men stop suicides and think that they’re in love with their rescuees, who think they’re in love with trees, and junkies plan to move to Toronto because they can’t communicate with their families, and every individual in this colorfully-peopled world seems to be struggling with their relation to community. Which community, the reader sees in aggregate, appears darker, more mysterious and with more internal division and opacity than any of its members can appreciate. It’s a salient perspective on a city of languages and how those contrasts define its people.

And as one would hope, eventually the network of community exposes some shocking or tragic turns to the reader that none of its members can see from their limited perspective. And as one would hope, our characters end up a little more self-defined by virtue of their struggles against a community in turmoil.

The book’s objective can be its weakness, too — the tone can seem indulgently dark sometimes, full of drugs, prostitution, infidelities and loneliness (although I must admit, I’m seeing all the intersections Brooke is describing in 2018, and 1995 was a different world, in literal terms, and psychic ones, too, for the Anglophone community at the height of separatism). The dialogue seems to reach too hard for that literary loadedness sometimes and slips sensibility.

But a worthy perspective to absorb, all in all, getting to know a place. I hear John Brooke still lives around the Jean Talon market, writing mysteries. I wonder if I won’t see him sometime there, contemplating life’s darknesses, buying peppers.

“You don’t just stroll into another woman’s life and take over her husband. Everyone in the women’s group agreed, in theory at least, on the reprehensibility of such behavior, although they also agreed that married people should not be viewed as each other’s property but as living, growing organisms. What it boiled down to was that man-stealing was out but personal growth was commendable. You had to have the right attitude and be honest with yourself.”
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-Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man

I looked at Lettie in the moonlight. “Is that how it is for you?” I asked.
“Is what how it is for me?”
“Do you still know everything, all the time?”
She shook her head. She didn’t smile. She said, “Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you’re going to muck about here.”
“So you used to know everything?”
She winkled her nose. “Everybody did. I told you. It’s nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play.”
-Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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There’s a version of this thought around consciousness and recursion, because of course the universe can only be infinitely varied and wonderful if it is not a simple, recursive system. But if we take Douglas Hofstadter’s thesis seriously, all consciousness derives from recursive properties — the system knows itself only when it is limited, retraces its steps. Ergo, the lovely possible mysterious universe is ultimately constrained by our sheer ability to apprehend it.