Hearts, Hands and Voices reviewed by John Clute

Review of Hearts, Hands and Voices by John Clute. Originally published in Interzone #59 (May 1992), page 63. © Interzone 1992. Reprinted in Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews, Serconia Press 1995, pages 367-370. Reprinted with permission.

The trouble with the end of the world, and the trouble with the novels of Ian McDonald, is one trouble: we have been there before. This does not make the end of the world less terrible, or the novels of Ian McDonald less mobile on the lip, but it surely modifies the shock of anticipating the one, or of opening the other. The end of the world in sf, for instance, has been assembled from apocalyptic millennial images generated by the tight-sphinctered desert sect which gave birth to Judaism and Christianity and Muslim and Gradgrind and Strangelove, and which gloats through its avatars, as it gloated in the beginning, over the death of the Mother [from the "techno-occultism" that runs from Blavatsky through Von Däniken, according to David Morris, who coined the term in The Masks of Lucifer: Technology and the Occult in Twentieth-Century Popular Literature (1992) 1995]; from the military and ecological scenarios which say one thing always; and from our own "pastoral" longings for a Golden Age after the holocaust. This end-of-the-world has become part of the base architecture of the genre, one of the structuring icons whose presence in a text spells (pun) the litanies of recognition which we depend on for comfort and orientation. We have in other words domesticated, in our minds' eyes, in order to tell stories after our wont, the death of the planet: we have been there before. Which is why any 1992 sf novel which fails to incorporate some iconic reverence to the end-of-the-world tends to irritate us, because our genre expectations are being violated - I doubt I'm alone in actively enjoying the end-of-the-world in fiction, while simultaneously dreading the increasing signs of the end of the world in fact.

But it is one thing to recognize the blessed analgesias of sf, and another to read Ian McDonald. It is one thing to recognize an icon, and another to know exactly how it is going to be spelled. The first is a comfort; the second is a shock. The first allows us to continue trucking through the tale; the second awakens us to the raw artefactuality of the game of reading, the velleity of the dream of story. By quoting the icon, McDonald estranges us, curses the tit, debriefs the reader into the nada and the day. His first novel, Desolation Road (1988), gazes so closely at us through the eyes of Ray Bradbury and Gabriel García Márquez that we can no longer pretend we are alone with the story, which may be the most savage alienation he could inflict upon his readers: for he kills the autonomy of the dream in which we read; by staring at us through the words of others, he turns those words - those icons at the heart of the genre, at the heart of reading - into devices on the page. And we lose it. We go down to day. We open the next book, Out On Blue Six (1989), and it is the same; and the next, King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), and it is similar; and we open Hearts, Hands and Voices (Gollancz, 1992), and the nightmare continues.

Here are the first three paragraphs of the novel, plus the first sentence of the fourth:

Grandfather was a tree.
Father grew trux, in fifteen colours.
Mother could sing the double-helix song, sing it right into the hearts of living things and change them. Around we go, and round ...
A house ran amok in Fifteen Street the day the soldiers of the Emperor Across the River came to Mathembe's township.

The book continues in this vein for some time. It is very well written. The strategy deployed in these first lines - that of conveying, through a rushing patter of staccato sentences, a kind of epiphany-through-précis of the novum to be unfolded - is adroitly conceived and handled. Grandfather (it turns out) really is a tree; trux are biological analogues of trucks, and can be grown; mother (and the daughter, Mathembe, who is the protagonist of the tale) are indeed capable of massaging into various outcomes the tropical biotechnologies that dominate the Land. And houses indeed have vestigal brains, are easily panicked, and are mobile. In its way, it's all superb. At the same time, however, it is a deeply estranging sequence of words, a murder weapon, a quote that kills.

This time the figure whose icons it stares through is, of course, Geoff Ryman. By rendering the tone and matter of the opening paragraphs of his second and third novels with such unerring exactitude, the first sentences of Hearts, Hands and Voices tell us that Geoff Ryman, in The Unconquered Country (1986) and The Child Garden (1988), was making up a story, and that here is the story, flayed. It does not matter that we know very well that Geoff Ryman was making up stories - for our knowledge of that essential circumstance was part of our compact with the stories being told - what matters now is that the knowledge has been read into the record. It is no longer between the words and us. The words have been exposed to the dayglare of McDonald's dissecting re-assembly, and so have we. This it gives us.

I do not know if I think it is a good thing. I do not know if I think it bad.) What I do know is that Hearts, Hands and Voices is an extraordinary text, borrower and lender, cuckoo and phoenix. The Unconquered Country begins: "Third Child had nothing to sell but parts of her body" and continues, as does The Child Garden, to convey, through a rushing patter of staccato sentences, a kind of epiphany-through-précis of the novum to be unfolded (exactly). McDonald's Mathembe and Ryman's Third Child both live in a rural village in a provincial land tied to a nearby empire that seems Asian; biotechnologies provide both children with a living. When imperial forces - by air in both novels - attack their villages in each respective novel, the animate mobile houses common to each novel panic and die. After Mathembe and Third Child find themselves homeless and deracinated, they both end up in a large festeringly tropical city, where both attempt to survive.

In Hearts, Hands and Voices this city closely resembles the London of The Child Garden, with echoes of the world of Gwyneth Jones's Divine Endurance (1984), just as the Ancestor Tree which contains the consciousness of dead elders more closely resembles the Consensus of The Child Garden than anything in the earlier story (though the stadium in McDonald's book more closely resembles the amphitheatre-like square in The Unconquered Country). From this point the plot of Hearts, Hands and Voices - what plot there is - diverges increasingly from direct inhabitation of the plots of either parent book, but assonances flicker throughout the pages like small deadly whips of disenchantment. There is never any chance of forgetting the obdurate central fact of the book: that it is a tale which says No to the innoncense of Story.

Perhaps consequentially, McDonald finds it very difficult to pretend to tell a story of his own. Mathembe and her family, once driven out of their home village, have trekked painfully to the big city dominated by the imperial power. Her father is disappeared. She looks for him. Her mother festers and dwindles. She tries to find her (and discovers, in a passage which dissectingly samples both Ryman books, that her mother's been selling her body as a hatchery for viral products). Her younger brother cannot be found. She looks for him. He has become a terrorist. There are eventual discoveries and rediscoveries, and a kind of reconciliation. Mathembe's land - which is ravaged not only by imperial soldiery but by religious disputes - is a bit like Ireland, a bit like Viet Nam, a lot like India/Pakistan. But none of this amounts to much of an engine of a plot. Imagery is profuse throughout, and eloquent; the style of the book, after we slide from staccato, is knobbly with nutrients, though occasionally stagnant; and the tone of the thing is the tone of uninnocence self-revealed: remote, knowing, haunted by that which becomes it. Hearts, Hands and Voices is a bad thing; and a good thing.

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