On Stranger Tides
Jane Rawson, From the Wreck
Picador, 272pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781529006544
reviewed by John Phipps
It's often claimed that the only people who recognise a real difference between science fiction and literary fiction are those who only read the latter. I'm inclined to argue the opposite. I came of age in an era when science fiction was well-regarded, its authors were published by Penguin Modern Classics, and sci-fi was 'acceptable reading' for someone with an interest in books. But it became clear to me as soon as I started reading science fiction that you could not be a fan of the genre unless you recognised the difference, and forgave it.
The difference is bad writing. Picking almost at random from my SF Masterworks edition of Dan Simmons' classic The Fall of Hyperion, I find: 'Senator Kolchev slapped the table with the palm of his hand'; 'He screams for the thousandth time, a ragged sound, empty of content, free of language, even obscenities'; 'There was a path: cutting its way through the bodies as if some machine with blades had munched its way through'. Redundant words, hyperbolic phrasing, tone-deaf similes: you will find them on every page. If you approached Simmons' book the same way you approached one by James Salter, you would simply get too annoyed to go on. Genre is a famously slippery thing, and it may well be nothing more concrete than the set of expectations a reader brings to a text. But those expectations are useful. Ask yourself honestly: how far would you have made it through Ulysses if you hadn't been told it belonged to the genre of 'masterpiece'?
If you read sci-fi and fantasy alongside literary fiction you unconsciously develop two different modes of reading. It's with this in mind that I recommend Jane Rawson's From the Wreck, which won Australia's leading science fiction prize and was shortlisted for a half dozen others. Reading it as a literary novel, I found myself irritated by the prose, which felt flat and full of unearned emotion. But the second I altered my expectations, I began to enjoy it. It's an intelligent, subtle book, that wears its thematic material lightly and occasionally lets itself down with clunky writing. If you're the kind of reader that can forgive that, the way you maybe forgive Dickens his mawkishness, or Woolf her snobbery, then From the Wreck is well worth the price of purchase.
The novel begins on the evening of August 6th 1859. George Hills is below deck on the steamship Admella, walking amongst the horses as the ship approaches Carpenter's Reef, off the coast of South Australia. Down in the dark, he catches sight of a strange-looking woman. She doesn't look like any of the passengers who came on board the day before, but another crew member tells him her name is Bridget Ledwith. The next morning the ship is wrecked on the reef. Much later, after the official inquiry, George reflects:
George clings to the wreck of the Admella for eight days and eight nights spent clutching the mysterious woman he knows as Bridget Ledwith. As we learn shortly, Bridget Ledwith is not a woman. She, or rather it, is an intelligent shapeshifting cephalod from another planet, one that has been destroyed by alien invaders. World-wrecked on earth, this creature latches onto George and sustains him through his ordeal, entering his innermost thoughts in the process. When George is saved, she transforms into something else: 'a smaller form, closer to the ground, four-legged and fine-whiskered, soft-pawed, sharp-clawed'. As a cat, she follows George home.
Back on the dry land of Port Adelaide, George searches for the strange woman who he believes helped him survive the wreck of the Admella. Distressed, enraged, and haunted by memories of his cannibalism, his search turns up a slew of dead ends. 'Bridget', meanwhile, is pawing around his back garden. When George's wife gives birth to a son, the creature slips onto the baby's back in the form of a birthmark.
What emerges from this situation is a domestic body-horror set in Victorian South Australia, told from several different perspectives. George's life is increasingly governed by what we would now recognise as PTSD, and while he can't find Bridget Ledwith, he has dark intuitions about the mark on his son's back. His son Henry grows up with a double consciousness, half his own, and half the alien lifeform’s. He collects the dead bodies of animals and lets them rot in a cupboard; he goes to the butcher seeking out offal and animal heads. We see this behaviour both from his own, divided perspective, and that of his increasingly deranged father, who mutters darkly about having the mark 'removed'. Some people have compared From the Wreck to the films of David Cronenberg; I thought of Shylock's pound of flesh.
In 2015, Rawson published The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change, and throughout From the Wreck one can sense a humming anxiety about the impending climate catastrophe. The alien creature has travelled to our planet from one that was destroyed by a superior intelligence; 60% of the earth's animals have been wiped out by humans since 1970. The town's inhabitants sweat and stifle in their Victorian costumes – costumes that come from a cooler world. I suspect there's a glance to Australia's current skin cancer epidemic here, as well as to the future of our species. Ingeniously, Rawson points out that the Australian settlers' lives foreshadow our future: they live in a world that is simply too hot.
This novel's imaginative plotting is its greatest attribute. Shifting between the perspectives of Henry, his son, and the alien intelligence, she makes her reader hope for a series of mutually exclusive outcomes, and arrives at an unusual but satisfying resolution. It's a genuinely original story that runs two paces ahead of one's expectations. Her other two novels, Formaldehyde and A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, have been praised for their plotting too, but so far neither have British distribution. With any luck, the publication of From the Wreck will change that.
The difference is bad writing. Picking almost at random from my SF Masterworks edition of Dan Simmons' classic The Fall of Hyperion, I find: 'Senator Kolchev slapped the table with the palm of his hand'; 'He screams for the thousandth time, a ragged sound, empty of content, free of language, even obscenities'; 'There was a path: cutting its way through the bodies as if some machine with blades had munched its way through'. Redundant words, hyperbolic phrasing, tone-deaf similes: you will find them on every page. If you approached Simmons' book the same way you approached one by James Salter, you would simply get too annoyed to go on. Genre is a famously slippery thing, and it may well be nothing more concrete than the set of expectations a reader brings to a text. But those expectations are useful. Ask yourself honestly: how far would you have made it through Ulysses if you hadn't been told it belonged to the genre of 'masterpiece'?
If you read sci-fi and fantasy alongside literary fiction you unconsciously develop two different modes of reading. It's with this in mind that I recommend Jane Rawson's From the Wreck, which won Australia's leading science fiction prize and was shortlisted for a half dozen others. Reading it as a literary novel, I found myself irritated by the prose, which felt flat and full of unearned emotion. But the second I altered my expectations, I began to enjoy it. It's an intelligent, subtle book, that wears its thematic material lightly and occasionally lets itself down with clunky writing. If you're the kind of reader that can forgive that, the way you maybe forgive Dickens his mawkishness, or Woolf her snobbery, then From the Wreck is well worth the price of purchase.
The novel begins on the evening of August 6th 1859. George Hills is below deck on the steamship Admella, walking amongst the horses as the ship approaches Carpenter's Reef, off the coast of South Australia. Down in the dark, he catches sight of a strange-looking woman. She doesn't look like any of the passengers who came on board the day before, but another crew member tells him her name is Bridget Ledwith. The next morning the ship is wrecked on the reef. Much later, after the official inquiry, George reflects:
‘[H]ow did such a little wreck, such a gentle wreck, break, ruin and drown the lives of so many? He had not even noticed when the ship first lifted and dropped onto the reef. One drop of coffee had spilled from the pot he was carrying to the ladies' cabins for breakfast service [.]’
George clings to the wreck of the Admella for eight days and eight nights spent clutching the mysterious woman he knows as Bridget Ledwith. As we learn shortly, Bridget Ledwith is not a woman. She, or rather it, is an intelligent shapeshifting cephalod from another planet, one that has been destroyed by alien invaders. World-wrecked on earth, this creature latches onto George and sustains him through his ordeal, entering his innermost thoughts in the process. When George is saved, she transforms into something else: 'a smaller form, closer to the ground, four-legged and fine-whiskered, soft-pawed, sharp-clawed'. As a cat, she follows George home.
Back on the dry land of Port Adelaide, George searches for the strange woman who he believes helped him survive the wreck of the Admella. Distressed, enraged, and haunted by memories of his cannibalism, his search turns up a slew of dead ends. 'Bridget', meanwhile, is pawing around his back garden. When George's wife gives birth to a son, the creature slips onto the baby's back in the form of a birthmark.
What emerges from this situation is a domestic body-horror set in Victorian South Australia, told from several different perspectives. George's life is increasingly governed by what we would now recognise as PTSD, and while he can't find Bridget Ledwith, he has dark intuitions about the mark on his son's back. His son Henry grows up with a double consciousness, half his own, and half the alien lifeform’s. He collects the dead bodies of animals and lets them rot in a cupboard; he goes to the butcher seeking out offal and animal heads. We see this behaviour both from his own, divided perspective, and that of his increasingly deranged father, who mutters darkly about having the mark 'removed'. Some people have compared From the Wreck to the films of David Cronenberg; I thought of Shylock's pound of flesh.
In 2015, Rawson published The Handbook: Surviving and Living with Climate Change, and throughout From the Wreck one can sense a humming anxiety about the impending climate catastrophe. The alien creature has travelled to our planet from one that was destroyed by a superior intelligence; 60% of the earth's animals have been wiped out by humans since 1970. The town's inhabitants sweat and stifle in their Victorian costumes – costumes that come from a cooler world. I suspect there's a glance to Australia's current skin cancer epidemic here, as well as to the future of our species. Ingeniously, Rawson points out that the Australian settlers' lives foreshadow our future: they live in a world that is simply too hot.
This novel's imaginative plotting is its greatest attribute. Shifting between the perspectives of Henry, his son, and the alien intelligence, she makes her reader hope for a series of mutually exclusive outcomes, and arrives at an unusual but satisfying resolution. It's a genuinely original story that runs two paces ahead of one's expectations. Her other two novels, Formaldehyde and A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists, have been praised for their plotting too, but so far neither have British distribution. With any luck, the publication of From the Wreck will change that.