Lazy Man's Review: Specimen Days
Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham's latest novel, is another one of those mainstream-writers-does-sf books. Not dissimilar in structure to Cloud Atlas, it's made of three stories: one set in 1850, one in the present or very near future, and one in about 2150. The same three characters--or at least the same three souls--crop up in each: Catherine, a woman; Lucas, a boy; and Simon, a man. Each takes a turn as the viewpoint. And as with his previous novel, The Hours, a Literary Figure--Walt Whitman, this time--links the three stories.
There was an interesting and, I think, perceptive review by Michel Faber in the Guardian earlier this month:Is Specimen Days a novel, or three novellas loosely threaded together? This is just one of the many genre disputes in which this book can become ensnared. The opening story tackles historical fiction, the second takes on the detective thriller genre, the third is science fiction. To many critics in Cunningham's native America, this represents a three-stage journey from the sublime to the ridiculous. "Science fiction will never be Literature with a capital L," the New York Times has loftily declared (apropos of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake), and Specimen Days is encountering similar flak.
[...]
Granted, Specimen Days declines in quality as it goes along. "In the Machine" is a pitch-perfect fusion of gothic melodrama, psychological realism and the mysterious spark that enlivens unforced visions. "The Children's Crusade" builds to a potent ending, but its marriage of profound compassion and cop-show clichés is unstable. "Like Beauty" handles Catareen's alienness with marvellous empathy but is bogged down by the usual demerits of mainstream science fiction: creaky expository monologues about how the future came to be, cringe-making references to people taking a "dermaslough" or hydraulicking their pods, and worship of concepts at the expense of narrative credibility. The wisecracking Luke seems derived from a Hollywood buddy movie, reciting impossibly adult repartee, and the somewhat kitsch finale fails to do justice to the book's overarching ambition.
And yet, while reading "Like Beauty" I was conscious that, had I read it in a sci-fi anthology when I was 15, I would have been awestruck by it, moved beyond tears, changed for ever. Today, I'm sufficiently sophisticated to notice the author wrestling with his material, struggling to beat it into a shape that looks natural, straining to make its hokeyness transcendent. If the aim of reading good books is to be transported, it would be better if we never developed this jaundiced analytical eye, but sadly we do. And perhaps the fiction Cunningham is attempting here is pitched at a reader who doesn't exist: an adolescent who can leap straight from Star Wars to Henry James, or an adult steeped in Woolf and Whitman who nevertheless retains a childlike capacity to be moved by X-Men 2.
It's particularly interesting to compare this review to Paul Witcover's review for SF Weekly, which declares that the book 'builds to a conclusion of mythic proportions, deeply poignant, mysterious, full of hope and longing amid devastation and despair, like Whitman's poetry, like America itself.' How unusual to see the newspaper reviewer criticising 'the usual demerits of mainstream science fiction' while the sf-mag reviewer hails the book as 'a masterpiece'.
Personally, I agree more with Faber than with Witcover--I think the sf is frankly shoddy, and I don't know that even 15-year-old-me would have enjoyed it much--but I'd probably go even further. Faber notes that Cunningham's characters are 'grieved by life's unaccountable refusal to measure up to ideals'; what stuck in my craw about the book was that it seemed to be suggesting that the failure of world is not unaccountable. Rather, that it is industrialisation and progress that have poisoned the well, and that the solution should be, in some unspecified fashion, to go back. Given that, and the fact that the central novella, 'The Children's Crusade', makes so much of terrorism as a symptom of our dystopian present, there is a temptation to read the book as a simplistic overreaction to 9/11. That may be unkind to Cunningham, however. Mostly, I just found it bizarre--and disappointing, because the first two stories are well worth reading.
There's also an interview with Cunningham here. Interesting quote:"The more I write, the more I also feel that in this vast and dangerous world, one story just isn't enough the way it was for Austen or Eliot. So in my last two books I've told three stories; in the next there'll be even more". It keeps multiplying? "It does. I think I'll have to keep going until every sentence is a different story and then I'll have to stop," he laughs.
There was an interesting and, I think, perceptive review by Michel Faber in the Guardian earlier this month:Is Specimen Days a novel, or three novellas loosely threaded together? This is just one of the many genre disputes in which this book can become ensnared. The opening story tackles historical fiction, the second takes on the detective thriller genre, the third is science fiction. To many critics in Cunningham's native America, this represents a three-stage journey from the sublime to the ridiculous. "Science fiction will never be Literature with a capital L," the New York Times has loftily declared (apropos of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake), and Specimen Days is encountering similar flak.
[...]
Granted, Specimen Days declines in quality as it goes along. "In the Machine" is a pitch-perfect fusion of gothic melodrama, psychological realism and the mysterious spark that enlivens unforced visions. "The Children's Crusade" builds to a potent ending, but its marriage of profound compassion and cop-show clichés is unstable. "Like Beauty" handles Catareen's alienness with marvellous empathy but is bogged down by the usual demerits of mainstream science fiction: creaky expository monologues about how the future came to be, cringe-making references to people taking a "dermaslough" or hydraulicking their pods, and worship of concepts at the expense of narrative credibility. The wisecracking Luke seems derived from a Hollywood buddy movie, reciting impossibly adult repartee, and the somewhat kitsch finale fails to do justice to the book's overarching ambition.
And yet, while reading "Like Beauty" I was conscious that, had I read it in a sci-fi anthology when I was 15, I would have been awestruck by it, moved beyond tears, changed for ever. Today, I'm sufficiently sophisticated to notice the author wrestling with his material, struggling to beat it into a shape that looks natural, straining to make its hokeyness transcendent. If the aim of reading good books is to be transported, it would be better if we never developed this jaundiced analytical eye, but sadly we do. And perhaps the fiction Cunningham is attempting here is pitched at a reader who doesn't exist: an adolescent who can leap straight from Star Wars to Henry James, or an adult steeped in Woolf and Whitman who nevertheless retains a childlike capacity to be moved by X-Men 2.
It's particularly interesting to compare this review to Paul Witcover's review for SF Weekly, which declares that the book 'builds to a conclusion of mythic proportions, deeply poignant, mysterious, full of hope and longing amid devastation and despair, like Whitman's poetry, like America itself.' How unusual to see the newspaper reviewer criticising 'the usual demerits of mainstream science fiction' while the sf-mag reviewer hails the book as 'a masterpiece'.
Personally, I agree more with Faber than with Witcover--I think the sf is frankly shoddy, and I don't know that even 15-year-old-me would have enjoyed it much--but I'd probably go even further. Faber notes that Cunningham's characters are 'grieved by life's unaccountable refusal to measure up to ideals'; what stuck in my craw about the book was that it seemed to be suggesting that the failure of world is not unaccountable. Rather, that it is industrialisation and progress that have poisoned the well, and that the solution should be, in some unspecified fashion, to go back. Given that, and the fact that the central novella, 'The Children's Crusade', makes so much of terrorism as a symptom of our dystopian present, there is a temptation to read the book as a simplistic overreaction to 9/11. That may be unkind to Cunningham, however. Mostly, I just found it bizarre--and disappointing, because the first two stories are well worth reading.
There's also an interview with Cunningham here. Interesting quote:"The more I write, the more I also feel that in this vast and dangerous world, one story just isn't enough the way it was for Austen or Eliot. So in my last two books I've told three stories; in the next there'll be even more". It keeps multiplying? "It does. I think I'll have to keep going until every sentence is a different story and then I'll have to stop," he laughs.