Beckett, Chris: The Holy Machine
The Holy Machine (2003)
Written by: Chris Beckett
Genre: Science Fiction
Pages: 287 (Mass Market Paperback)
I don't remember where I first heard about this book, but I suspect it was through Fantasy Book Critic. Wherever I heard about it, I was interested enough in the premise and the solid reviews that I took a chance on ordering it. And since I've been on an SF kick, I decided to get this one under my belt.
The premise: this is just one of those books I have trouble summarizing, so here's what Barnes & Noble.com has to say, which is also the back-cover blurb: Illyria is a scientific utopia, an enclave of logic and reason founded off the Greek coast in the mid-21st century as a refuge from the Reaction, a wave of religious fundamentalism sweeping the planet. Yet to George Simling, first generation son of a former geneticist who was left emotionally and psychically crippled by the persecution she encountered in her native Chicago, science-dominated Illyria is becoming as closed-minded and stifling as the religion-dominated world outside...
Review style: Two sections: Likes and Dislikes, with MASSIVE SPOILERS. Also, actual citations from the text (you know you're in trouble when I actually QUOTE FROM THE TEXT).
What I Liked
Here's an odd thing. I suspect this book honestly has the makings of a classic. And by classic, I mean in the 1984 and Brave New World sense. If I stepped back from all the things that bothered me about the book and just paid attention to the overall message, the journey of the hero, and the dystopian/utopian elements, I found myself thinking this could very well be a classic in the future. Especially if read not as a mass-market paperback, but in trade paperback format, which makes a book seem more important without having the pretensions of a hardcover. And I refer to format because this is a book that really made me think about why certain types of books are published in the formats they're in. Mass-market is for mass-consumption. Hardcover is for collectors, something that's supposed to stand the test of time. Trade is somewhere in between. If you don't get my reasoning, I don't blame you, but thinking about said reasoning in light of this book made a lot of sense. Bottom line: I might've taken this book a smidgen more seriously had my copy been in trade.
Also enjoyable was Beckett's treatment of SenSpace, the virtual reality program that citizens of Illyria have the option of occupying. I loved Ruth's addiction, and I loved what it did to her physical person. I think Beckett did a fantastic job with that set-up, those descriptions, and the outcome of it all. Though I will express some confusion about the THING that ate up City Without End (TM), as I thought it was a reflection of what was happening in the world outside, before we saw that the world outside hadn't changed at all. Whatever. Good stuff, there.
I also liked how we saw a turning point in the book that the Illyria mindset became just as bad as the mindset of the outside world. No one, regardless of religion or lack thereof, was free from hiding within themselves and viewing all things different as wrong and bad. At first, I found it excusable that Illyria wanted to carve itself out as the ONE PLACE in the world where religion wouldn't be tolerated, simply because if someone wanted religion, that's what the rest of the world was for. Of course, that was until violence erupted, and then I saw how Illyria was no better than the rest of the world, only they were using the name of science to defend their actions, whereas the rest of the world was using the name of their particular brand of God.
I was very, very pleased that The Holy Machine turned out to be Lucy. If it hadn't, I would've been infuriated and called the author lazy for missing such an obvious opportunity. He didn't, so I won't, and I'm happy with that particular plot-line, how Lucy evolved a spark that led to a soul, and became a kind of common sense Messiah to the religious masses. What will ultimately come out of that, I don't know. The ending is rather something of a non-ending, but I'll get to that later. Still, Lucy's/The Holy Machine's story tied up rather nicely. Also, I really liked the scenes from Lucy's POV, once I figured out what was going on. If there was ever any confusion there, it was when she recognized someone else in the room with her and her customer, not recognizing that someone else as herself. Confusing, but that got cleared up quickly.
What I Didn't Like
Oh boy. As Samuel L. Jackson's character said in the movie Jurassic Park, "Hold on to your butts."
Our narrator, George, starts out as pretty much a boring, dull, stereotypical blank slate. A linguistic genius who has no life and lives with his mother Ruth and is responsible for her care, as she spends WAY too much time in SenSpace and must be reminded to eat, sleep, and must be removed from the apparatus. He's inept around women, and becomes fascinated with the syntecs, namely Lucy, who are modeled after real women and who offer real pleasure. George falls in love with her, and once it becomes clear that Illyria is going to wipe the minds of robots every six months to prevent them from going loco, he engineers her escape. His journey with Lucy is an interesting one, and it was on this journey that I started wondering if this book might not have the makings of a classic (and if not this one, maybe a future title from the author). Lucy struggles to learn and understand the world around her, all the while expressing, over and over, "I am a machine." She reads the Bible and asks questions, and George finds that what he thought was love wasn't love at all. When she destroys the flesh of her body, he lets it slip--in a drunken stupor--that his woman is a machine, which pretty much seals her fate, and the townspeople burn her alive.
He feels guilty for this, and that is good. His journey brings him back to people he knows but can't honestly connect with on a human level until he finds forgiveness that no human priest can give him. When he meets the Holy Machine and learns it's Lucy, a weight is lifted, and by this point, he understand his sin and makes really interesting observations about love and how it's no different in what he felt for Lucy, a syntec, than between two real human beings. That we all say "I love you," but when the flesh is stripped away, can we really say the same all over again?
The book inches to a close, and George is gaining my sympathy, until he reunites with his mother in SenSpace and learns that after he left, she never left SenSpace and had to be rushed to a hospital, where her body ended up seriously mutilated so she knows lives in SenSpace all the time. His outburst (p. 269):
"And now you're going to tell me it's all my fault I suppose! If I hadn't gone away and left you it would enver have happened, is that right? It was all because of George being selfish as usual! Well, you listen to me. It wasn't my job to look after you. You were the parent, not me. I tucked you up in bed and I held your hand when you cried, but it wasn't my job! It wasn't my job, do you hear?"
Any sympathy cred George had built up until that point in the book is gone, blasted away. Of course it's your fault you fucking idiot! His mother couldn't look after herself while he was HOME, what did he THINK was going to happen when he left? Her condition is a DIRECT RESULT OF HIS ACTIONS. It doesn't MATTER that it "wasn't his job" and that she's the "parent," not him. Welcome to the real world of adulthood, Georgie-boy. We all have responsibilities placed on us that aren't fair and aren't right and sure, we'd love to escape them, but at least most of us have the good grace and GUILT to recognize where the fault lies if SOMETHING LIKE THIS HAPPENS.
Asshole. You deserved to be raped (and he was, before this scene).
Now, the nice thing is Ruth completely ignores his outburst. She's exhausted of SenSpace, and has decided to let her poor body die. There is a bit of genius when Ruth uses a Vehicle to maneuver in the outside world to retrieve her body, when she sees it as the most beautiful thing she ever saw. What a lovely contrast to George, who couldn't stand to look at Lucy once her lack of humanity was revealed. I'm sure that was intentional.
But George's breakdown in the car, crying for his "Mummy" is laughable. Tough cookies, kid. Tough cookies. I don't feel sorry for you in the slightest, and maybe, just maybe, that's the author's intent.
I also had trouble with the world-building. Because Illyria is a safe haven for anyone in the world who's been persecuted for their science and/or lack of religious faith, you would expect some kind of mosh-pit of culture, some fascinating melting pot, right? Oh no, it's all bland, boring, and just incredibly lacking. The only thing distinguishing people is their faith or lack there of. Science or religion, and any cultural identifiers are lost out the window. That's a shame, because truly, it made Illyria a bland place where so much had been lost, and I don't mean that which came from religion. There's a Japanese character who makes a brief appearance in the book that I don't even know is Japanese until another character says the Reaction in Japan was REALLY BAD. Jeez. I guess that once a world transcends to uptopia/dystopia, culture must vanish. After all, something has to unite people, and too many competing cultures will just clash, right?
Lastly, I must talk about style. I really wish I could find out where this book was published originally. I do know that the hardcover was published in 2003, but I don't know if that was in the US or the UK, and if it was never meant to be a UK release, I'm really confuzzled.
Here's the thing, and it relates both to my comments on CULTURE and my problem with George as a character: the language of the narrator is too university, and it uses certain British-isms that don't identify themselves as culture so much as they stand out as (to my American eyes) archaic usages.
Now, a couple of disclaimers: if this book was originally published in the UK, I don't have much to complain about, as Beckett's target audience probably won't take issue to certain things that bugged me. Also, I haven't read anything else by Beckett, and I hear he's an acclaimed short-story writer, so I hope this means not all of his writing sounds as pretentious as this. But all I have is this, so that's what I'm working with.
The language bugged me from the start. Over the top, rather melodramatic, almost in a Homerian kind of way. Makes sense, as the book does take place in or near Greece, but when I associate the language with George, who's a translator--not a literary professor--I just can't believe that THIS voice on the pages is coming out of THAT boring, bland character's mouth. I can't. It doesn't fit, and that's where the lack of culture comes in. He sounds bland, and it feels like it wouldn't matter WHO was narrating this book, we'd get the same voice. That's unfortunate.
Also unfortunate is the regular use of passive language and weak voice. Unfortunate because in a first-person narration, you want the personality of the narrator to be THERE ON THE PAGE. They don't have to be totally modern vernacular, but they do have to have gravitas, and this reads like someone WANTED gravitas and just couldn't pull it off.
Stuff that undermined the voice (bold emphasis mine):
It was as if I hadn't truly grasped the terrible consequences of failure until now. (p. 135)
It was if I had found a little glowing ember and was trying to fan it into flame. (p. 122)
The was as if-isms KILLED ME. In the second case, JUST MAKE IT A DIRECT METAPHOR! "I had found a little glowing ember and was trying to fan it into flame" is SO MUCH STRONGER than "It was if." I'd even ignore the "was trying" just to GET RID of the "It was if." In the first case, dropping the "It was as if" would create a much stronger admission of guilt and realization on the part of the character, rather than creating a distance using "It was as if" that makes everything that comes after a vague observation.
It's like this the whole book. And then there's the distance factor when, after walking in the heat for days on end without proper nutrition and getting raped, George starts seeing himself from above, therefore distancing himself from the action, particularly the rape. Okay, I get that's actually a rather realistic device in those circumstances, but so close to the end, I found myself distanced instead of engaged. I would've rather the language become more dream-like and abstract rather than a mere watching-oneself-from above. That's me. What Beckett does is reasonable, I just don't like the execution.
The book also was in desperate need of another copy-editor. Not only were slip-ups like "boarder" for "border" missed (p. 133) (please don't tell me "boarder" is the British spelling of "border" like "theatre" is to "theater," because I might cry), but there were SO MANY INSTANCES that a paragraph indent? COMPLETELY MISSED. Talk about jarring the eyes.
Now, one more complaint about language: learnt instead of learned. Maybe this common in the UK, and my picking on this is the equivalent of someone from over there picking on me for saying "y'all" instead of "you all" but "learnt" seems so arachiac to me, and it's not like "learned" is a misused word.
And AGAIN, this goes back to my issue with culture. We don't learn what George's schooling was like, if he had a stuffy old British professor who taught grammar this way. We do know that George's mother is AMERICAN, and trust me, I've yet to hear Americans use "learnt" over "learned" unless they're from the South and have a strong dialect. You feel me? Yeah, I hate that dialect, so you can imagine me CRINGING over the use of "learnt" in the text.
And the thing is this. I've read authors from the UK who use British/UK dialect and it only bugs me so much, because the dialect is such an innate part of the setting that I can ROLL WITH IT. It's like me reading Hunter's Run, which uses Spanish quite frequently, and I--who do not speak Spanish--rolled with it because of the obvious Mexican influences so prevalent in the culture created on this far away planet. It works when there's culture to support it. When there isn't, it stands out like a sore thumb. If Beckett had done a little more to show us the culture mosh pit that is Illyria instead of just saying one guy's Japanese and one guy's from Brazil, it would've gone a long way. But everything's the same, bland and boring in regards to dialogue and language, merely a platform for the more important debate at hand: who's right: the religious fanatics or the science ones?
With this, I move away from my language diatribe and say this: there is no real ending, no resolve, no sense of closure save for Lucy's death before the masses. George reconnects with Marija with the obvious sense that he wants to make things right, but the book ends with her threat of "so help me God if you don't tell me what's going on," which implies that things may not work out the way he hopes.
And really, the war in Illyria, against Illyria or WHATEVER, ended as quickly as it begun, and the only thing George did was smuggle Lucy out, where she became the Holy Machine (no thanks to him) and he takes pride in that. Okay, fine, but that was never his INTENT. He never meant to change peoples' minds, he just wanted to save his favorite sex robot. Unheroic by all accounts, and the end doesn't give us the slightest clue where the world is headed, where he is headed, and really, no sense of what we're supposed to feel, though I suspect the very last paragraph is supposed to do just that.
My Rating
Wish I'd Borrowed It: while I still stand by my claim that this book has the potential to be a classic--or at least, its author has the potential to pen one--I had too many problems with it to truly embrace the book as a whole. The stuff that bothered me far outweighs the stuff that didn't, though that won't stop me from trying Beckett's work in the future, perhaps short stories (a print anthology, please) since I hear so much good stuff about them, and it'd allow me to see what kind of variety there is to his work when I have several shorts to compare side to side. This book is . . . interesting. Worth reading for how it treats virtual reality and people's addiction to it, but that's not the point of the book. No, the point of the book is ultimately the battle between science and religion, and what happens when the countries and peoples of this world take definitive, black-or-white sides. By the end, though, I could care less for the main character (I border on hating the guy, actually, though that may have been the author's intent), and by the end, I'm not sure what the message is that Beckett wants the reader to walk away with. The book's gotten very positive reviews on Amazon, but I feel the world-building is weak, and the characterization alone is something that really hinders the overall enjoyment of the book. It's one of the most passive first-person voices I've read, and if anything is strong in this book, it's the discussion of science versus religion, and truly, that's what it is: a discussion. Various viewpoints and a character's search for truth. Worth reading through the end, despite the fact I wish I could take a red pen to the text, but after it's all said and done, I wish I'd found this sucker in the library.
Cover Commentary: pretty fascinating. I keep staring at the face of the model, and the robot face beneath the skin and the obvious injuries. It's eye-catching and does what it needs to, so bravo.
Next up: Scarlet by Jordan Summers