Book Review – 334 by Thomas M. Disch

Tom Disch is something of an enigma to me. He deploys a formidable vocabulary on one hand (which, if I had been more diligent, would have seen me reaching for the dictionary) and on the other hand writes coarse, even vulgar prose. The first novel of his that I read was also his first, The Genocides. I clearly remember being enthralled by it one summer’s night at a caravan park in the Swan Valley, many years ago. Camp Concentration and 334 are probably Disch’s most famous science fiction novels, but when I read them as an eighteen year-old they had little impact on me. Likewise On Wings of Song. And then I more or less forgot about Tom Disch for almost a decade.

Earlier this year, a friend of mine, Nathan Hobby, commented on Disch’s passing. It was suicide, and I spent a couple of hours looking through the wikipedia entry and Disch’s own website. And then I forgot about him again. And now, on re-reading 334, I have to say that my initial instincts regarding Disch (i.e. indifference) remain true. 334 is what was once known in the SF field as a ‘fix-up’ novel, in that it is taken from short stories previously published in magazines. Another SF writer of this era, Barry Malzberg (with whom I had a lengthy email correspondence with in 2000-01) explained that it was a way to make money out of work you had already done. And so 334 is ‘fixed-up,’ or perhaps cobbled together.

I responded best to the first two stories, ‘The Death of Socrates’ and ‘Bodies.’ 334 itself is an apartment building in a future New York, a world of overpopulation, political indifference and climatic disasters. Oh wait, that’s our world. And here Disch proves to be a reasonable prophet. Like almost all science fiction, however, there are glaring absences in Disch’s future. Most notably, the desktop computer revolution does not appear to have occurred by the 2020s in Disch’s universe. Furthermore, the state is much more paternal than is actually the case today. Disch seems to have an uneasy relationship with SF itself, and as such his book treads a line between ’straight’ SF and literary fiction, not always with complete success.

334 lacks drive. I have already mentioned that I liked the first two stories, and probably especially the second of these, which details a macabre situation in which morgue workers sell bodies destined for the crematorium to necrophiliacs on the black market. This is a haunting piece that does much to illustrate one of Disch’s central ideas: that the modern state, and the grinding poverty that it inflicts on most of its citizens, causes the people themselves to devalue human life. This is an important idea because it has been ignored in much speculative fiction concerning a proposed (or actual) tyrannical state. One character in ‘Bodies’ bullies another into turning off the life-support on an otherwise fully-functioning human being in order to cover up his earlier theft of a woman’s body. This is powerful, challenging work.

If I was expecting 334 to be a treatise on the nature of oppression in the twenty-first century, I was mostly disappointed. What unfolds instead is an family saga that charts the various schemes and setbacks of the Hanson family, inhabitants of building 334. The final story, “334,” charts much of this imagined history in short snippets, jumping backward and forward in time. I can’t say I cared much for most of this, but the ending, in which elderly Mrs Hanson is evicted from her apartment at last, was strong. Her daughter Lottie tries half-heartedly to kill herself on the pyre the mother creates of their belongings, but the fire is extinguished by a firefighter. But the final chapter is haunting and, as I began to realise, foreshadows Disch’s own demise. In it, Mrs Hanson articulates to a social worker the precise reasons for her wanting to end her life. Apparently the state will sanction (or even conduct) this action.

Life imitates art, or art life. Disch wrote of an elderly woman being evicted from her apartment and then deciding to commit suicide. If I have got my facts straight (which I may have not) Disch was in the process of being evicted from his apartment when he committed suicide, at a similar age to his Mrs Hanson. Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but it seems more than co-incidence. Do we write our own deaths as writers? I myself have been morbidly obsessed with death from an early age: from Hitler and Auschwitz through to the Cold War and Nuclear Winter and back again. Maybe somewhere in the pages of my own unpublished writings lies a passage from my own future, of my own death. It’s an unsettling thought.
This is a link to Disch’s Livejournal. The most recent entry (i.e. his last) is at the top:

http://tomsdisch.livejournal.com/

Three classic SF titles to read

I was sick off work today, so instead of looking at the computer screen for another x hours, I thought I’d find a few of my 600+ books to read or re-read, as the case may be. These are the three titles I picked up:

334 by Thomas Disch (published 1972)

Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg (also published 1972)

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin (published 1974)

Disch, Silverberg and Le Guin are all 70s SF stalwarts, with Silverberg probably having had the most ’successful’ career overall (Le Guin was also very highly regard for a period of decades). Disch was a successful writer too, and I was saddened to learn of his suicide just a few months ago. I read and enjoyed Dying Inside and The Dispossessed in my late teens, perhaps around eight years ago. It seems an eternity. I’m not sure I got through 334, but looking at it now it piqued my interest. So it will be a review of 334 first up, probably in a couple of days.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and Hello Summer Goodbye

I didn’t like either of these novels so I’ll be brief…

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

During the latter stages of the Second World War, nine year old Bruno moves with his family from their home in Berlin to ‘Out-With.’ A nasty man called ‘the Fury’ has recently come around for dinner, informing Bruno’s father that he is to be the new commander of Out-With camp.  At the camp, young Bruno sees a lot of people milling around outside wearing striped pajamas.

News flash. ‘Out-With’ is Auschwitz and ‘the Fury’ is the Fuhrer, i.e. Adolf Hitler. Perhaps a young adult wouldn’t get this straight away. What follows is a narrative that seems reasonable enough at the time, but perplexingly unrealistic on reflection. The linguistic gimmicks described above make some kind of sense in English, but none in German. Worse, Bruno is supposed to be entirely naive as to the nature of the war and the reality of Auschwitz, even when he has been living there for several weeks. The narrative, which sees Bruno befriend a Jewish boy named Schmuel on the other side of the fence, is poignant enough. The ending is devastating and (for me) unexpected. But this is a book that leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth, and it’s not due to the subject matter.

It seems to me that if you want to write a young adult novel about Auschwitz, you need to tread carefully. Boyne has trodden carefully all right – to the point where his novel bears very little resemblance to the realities of WWII, the Nazis and the Final Solution. Perhaps I’m being overly grumpy about this, but I see at as a supremely arrogant action to reduce these atrocities to a neat parable about a nice young boy named Bruno and his friend Schmuel.

Hello Summer, Goodbye by Michael Coney.

If Boyne’s novel has achieved a high profile in the two years since it was published, then Coney’s novel has close to zero profile. Hailed as a ‘minor classic’ when it was recently re-published by PS Publishing, I found this novel to be more minor than classic. This is a shame as I have had a high opinion of Hello Summer, Goodbye for about the past eight years, since I first read it. That line about never reading the same book twice or stepping into the same river springs to mind here.

I can’t be bothered summarising this novel’s plot, but suffice to say that is a routine (though quaint) science fiction tale concerning the rites of passage of young Alixa-Drove. Predictably, the fate of the entire (alien) world is at stake, mirroring the disruptions in Drove’s own psyche. Drove is our hero, and Pallahaxi-Browneyes is our love interest. This touched a chord with me at age 18 or 19, but I find it nauseating now. I also thought Hello Summer, Goodbye had a strong but sad ending, which it does. The ending is bitter and strong, like good coffee. But this author’s craft leaves much to be desired. If this seems dismissive, then I apologise, but it is because my expectations for this book did not match the reality.

Coney died a couple of years ago. Before he died, he released the unpublished sequel, I Remember Pallahaxi, on his website. Then PS Publishing stepped in and agreed to publish the sequel, which they have now done. So the sequel is no longer on Coney’s website. Luckily for me, the novel in its entirety is still on the now-defunct Infinity Plus website. It probably isn’t supposed to be.

If you are interested in these novels, the new PS Publishing editions are beautifully presented, though they are too expensive for me to consider:

http://news.pspublishing.co.uk/2007/11/27/finished-covers-hello-summer-goodbye-and-i-remember-pallahaxi-by-michael-coney/