Slow River, by Nicola Griffith
Title: Slow River
Author: Nicola Griffith
Publisher: Del Rey
Format: Trade Paperback
Year: 1995
Pages: 343
Genre: Science Fiction
Challenge Information: Science Fiction Challenge category "Nebula Award Winner"
Jacket Description
She awoke in an alley to the splash of rain. She was naked, a foot-long gash in her back was still bleeding, and her identity implant was gone. Lore van de oest was the daughter of one of the world's most powerful families. . . and now she was nobody.
Then out of the rain walked Spanner, an expert data pirate who took her in, cared for her wounds, and gave her the freedom to reinvent herself again and again. No one could find Lore if she didn't want to be found; not the police, not her family, and not the kidnappers who had left her in that alley to die. She had escaped. . . but she paid for her newfound freedom in crime, deception, and degradation -- over and over again.
Lore had a choice: she could stay in the shadows, stay with Spanner. . . and risk losing herself forever. Or she could leave Spanner and find herself again by becoming someone else: stealing the identity implant of a dead woman, taking over her life, and inventing her future.
Yet only by confronting her past, her family, and her own demons could Lore meld together who she had once been, who she had become, and the person she intended to be. . .
My Review
This is a deeply impressive novel. It is exquisitely crafted: the pace is measured, but sure; the metaphors are used delicately; and the control over perspective (shifting between first person, tight third person, and loose present-tense third person for the three different timelines) is both absolute and absolutely necessary to the emotional arc being told. It is a novel to mull over, savor.
It is also an incredibly intense experience, or at least it was for me. I read it slowly partly so that I could admire Griffith's work, but mostly because reading it for more than half an hour at a time left me introspective and melancholy. There is a great deal of pain in the novel, and the carefully distanced prose makes it all the easier for the reader to fill in the blanks. For all the science fiction trappings (and they are many, from the cyberpunk-ish (but mostly irrelevant) identity hacking to the bioremediation science that furnishes much of the plot and much of the imagery) this story is about trauma, and surviving trauma, and then surviving your survival tactics. It's about ethics, and class, and identity, and monsters that come in human shape. It's vaguely dystopian without being political, and it's about corporate espionage while refusing to forget that corporations are anything but faceless.
I can't say I loved the book; it was far too emotionally hard for that. It left me unsettled and totally drained, and I don't know that I would ever read it again. But I will certainly be picking up everything else Griffith ever writes.