Karen Tidbeck's AMATKA (Tr Karen Tidbeck)

Do you like the art style known as Socialist Realism, but wish that maybe it was a little less realistic? Alternatively, do you like fantasy, but wish it could sometimes be a little more socialist?

Do you believe in the magic of language?

Boy have I got a book for you!

Karen Tidbeck's Amatka might be a portal fantasy of sorts, but it's hard to say, just as it's hard to say a lot of things about the world in which the title town sits, to which its inhabitants came generations ago as colonists of a sort, from what sounds like it might have been our ordinary everyday world, but could also have been the dystopian hellscape our best writers still feel coming despite how smugly we once regarded books like The Sheep Look Up as "self-denying prophecies.*" But I don't think they came in a spaceship, or in any kind of craft at all. 

I ginned up as many theories about what was really going on in Tidbeck's strange world as there are pages in this short volume, and I trashed nearly all of them, resurrected some of them, trashed them again, chanted nonsense words over them to see what they would do (but only if no one was about to hear me blaspheming/threatening the very stability of reality by so speaking), babbled to my book bestie (the mad book snob formerly but sometimes still known as Popqueenie), who originally turned me on to this book, that I had suspicions that there was some weird kind of "slavery with extra steps" kind of nightmare scenario at work here... cheered that the rather hapless heroine was finally taking on some agency and acting on her suspicions, only to grind my teeth to see her chicken out or dampen it down for the sake of her budding relationship with her love interest... you know. All the things great fiction makes us do in our heads while in reality we're sitting in a comfy chair with a cup of tea and one or more mammals using us as furniture and a book or some other kind of reading device spread open before us...

Anyway, let's talk about that heroine, whose name is Vanja and who isn't super thrilled with her job, but it could be worse -- and suddenly it's giving her the opportunity to travel and see more of her strange world. We meet her busily reminding all of her possessions of what they are by softly naming them off, one by one, working overtime to make sure that none of her words become rote; she learned long ago when assigned to do this with her childhood classroom's supply of pencils that saying "pencil" over and over again gets, first really dull, then kind of meditative, and then maybe nonsensical until you might as well, instead of saying "pencil pencil pencil" start saying "pencilpencilpencil" until you're kind of half-consciously saying "cilpen cilpen cil--" and oops, suddenly all of those pencils start losing their form and essential nature and then collapse into... something else... and everybody around you starts losing their minds with worry and panic and yelling at you for your carelessness and calling in the Cleaners to stop a chain reaction of form-losing from happening and taking everything in the colony, or at least in the classroom, with it.

You know. How everybody rides a slow, somewhat ill-maintained train from one town to another on an ordinary day.

Some reviewers of this book have complained quite a lot about our heroine, whose advent on the cold, chilly and mysteriously depopulated Amatka settlement touches off a whole series of calamities, being a badly written or unbelievable character. It would not surprise me at all that none of those reviewers have grown up in a truly small town, a really rural and underpopulated by most of the 21st century's standards, and don't know just how different life is in such places from even the cities most consider to be small towns in this day and age. In a truly small town (as long-time readers of this blog know, I grew up in southern Wyoming, in a town with fewer than 1600 people, over 20 empty miles (as in no rest stops, no convenience stores, no gas stations, just big sprawling cattle ranches populated by cattle and haystacks and maybe one guy on a 4-wheeler or, yes, horse) from the nearest town, which boasted a population of maybe 300. We didn't have professional firefighters; we had volunteers, people from the community who had other full-time jobs and families and responsibilities who nonetheless also took on the role of responding to structure fires, wild land fires and many other dangerous accidents that professional firefighters in larger cities probably would never dream of being expected to deal with (a large proportion of these volunteers were also our emergency medical responders, paid a token amount and subject to brutal on-call schedules 24/7/365). Newcomers to our area were always kind of shocked and disbelieving about this at first, charmed by it for a while, and then sooner or later often pretty resentful when they realized that there weren't a lot of resources to go around and it's really better for everybody if they learn to manage some small issues themselves and take prevention very, very seriously.

And some of them never get it. Sigh.

Anyway, I bring this up because, for whatever mysterious reason that it's great fun to theorize about (myself I came up with a truly horrifying interpretation that still haunts me as a possible - Tidbeck has given us a truly awesome -- in the old-fashioned sense of that word -- thought experiment of an allegory of a horror scenario in the pages of this novel) because in Amatka and the larger world in which it's situated, reality itself is what everybody is responsible for maintaining, very deliberately, very consciously, every day. Because with the exception of the original stuffs -- paper, fabric, metal, wood, food organisms (I think?) -- that the original settlers brought with them to this weird and alien world, all matter is profoundly protean and malleable and uniquely responsive to human language to a rather shocking degree. Imagine if you'd forgotten to remind your clothing that it is clothing for a few days and it suddenly just dissolved into weird and possibly hazardous goo while you were wearing it at work! What if you hadn't declared that your bed was a bed for a few days, clearly and distinctly and unambiguously (and, importantly, without using metaphors -- no calling it "my sleepy sack" or "slumberland'; you have to address it, as it were, in the second person, and call it a bed), and forgetfully went to sleep in it one night, only to have it turn to slop in the night?

So, okay, life is hard, and a lot of your conscious thought (which is not an inexhaustible supply; ask any chronically ill person you know about what happens when they've spent too much of their energy in a day "playing through the pain" and then suddenly have to do some real cognitive labor like reading a page in a foreign language or updating a home budget spreadsheet or remembering to call the appliance repairman because the stove is more broken than you and YouTube can figure out how to fix which is maybe how you spent too much of that energy in the first place. You get me?) has to go into just maintaining the physical integrity of your clothes and tools and furniture and transportation and even, say, the documents that your company-or-co-operative keeps its records on. But that's true everywhere, right?

Ah, but the more people there are on the ground to maintain stuff, the easier the work of maintenance is, right? For this reason, for example, nobody in Amatka lives alone. One tired person could never maintain the furniture, the kitchen equipment, the household chattels like curtains and blankets and bath towels and the walls and floor and ceiling and plumbing and heating ducts. By the time you'd got all that done you'd be overdue to start all over again.

And there's a whole town to maintain here. With factories and offices and city administration and water and sewer plants and greenhouses to grow the food in and... get me?

But so, Vanja is from a much bigger settlement, where there are lots more people to pay attention and name things and keep everything going at the basic level, and thus there can also be people who specialize in weird and kind of pointless Golgarfrincham B Ark things like marketing, which is what Vanja does for a company who is maybe going to expand its service area if she can find a way to persuade residents of other settlements, such as Amatka, to buy their products instead of relying on their own homegrown soap and detergent and medicines and band-aids. She's grown up with only a little bit being asked of her by her community, and now she's come to an area that is unaccustomed to visitors overall but still expects them to do their part while they're there and...

And, oh, by the way; the ruling powers of this society have deemed it not that important to educate much of the populace about the actual nature of reality. So lots of people like Vanja have grown up with the habit of naming things -- it's drilled into them from earliest days and everybody probably has an incident like hers with the schoolroom pencils haunting their memories -- but seem to think it's a weird cultural thing and maybe out of date and really kind of fascist if you think about it because there's so much control over your behavior and how you use language and what about things like poetry, man?

So no, Vanja is not a poorly written or unbelievable character. She is a totally convincing and terrifyingly plausible product of her admittedly weird and kind of allegorical but compelling and mysterious environment. I know I've gone off about this at tedious length, but it's really important that you understand this going into the book because -- look, I wouldn't go to all of this effort, to any effort at all, really,** if I didn't think Amatka was something special. And if the reviewers bitching about it having top tier ideas but being a shitty novel didn't really piss me off. Heh.

Anyway, so Vanja has come to Amatka to do her market research and of course is immediately put off by the impossibility of her task. And the shoddiness of her accommodations for her stay: she is assigned to an ordinary workers' house, which she will share with several strangers, including an old lady who needs extra care and help with maintaining her stuff because she's old and deteriorating but Amatka society still at least theoretically values her enough to keep her alive even though she can't work anymore; a greenhouse worker, Ivan, and Vanja's hostess and eventual love interest, Nina. And, on the odd weekend, Ivan and Nina's two daughters, who visit now and then to maintain basic ties with their parents but since their parents' work (everybody's work) is too important to also have to spend the mental and physical energy raising their kids and maintaining their stuff, kids in Amatka live and are educated communally, by teachers who live communally with them and thus aren't expecting to maintain individual households and chattels and whatnot. 

Make no mistake: if nothing else, Tidbeck has created perhaps the perfect scenario in which socialism is the only way for humans to exist. Feel about that however you like; you can't deny that this is interesting.

So, anyway, here comes Vanja, ready to convince the good people of Amatka that the hygiene products they've been using are inferior to what can be gotten from elsewhere (and never mind that in order to get them from Vanja's city to Amatka, someone would probably have to ride on the train with the shipment to keep telling everything what it is so it doesn't collapse into goo on the way, and of course someone has to maintain the train itself for the shipment, and goodness me, what would happen if something went wrong en route and suddenly there were no hygiene products to be had in Amatka because market forces had driven the local stuff out of production in favor of the fancier stuff from abroad? This is just my personal speculation; these arguments don't exactly come up in the novel, but it's part of the array of forces lined up against Vanja's mission before she even arrives, and she's primed to resent it before she even meets anybody), and not really prepared to pull her weight within the town while she's there; some of her own personal belongings denature themselves on her very first night, throwing the whole neighborhood into panic and forcing other town citizens out of their beds to come and contain the problem she created through her carelessness. You can see where this has the potential to go. Several wheres, several ways.

And then, Vanja falls in love with Nina, who seems to kind of return her feelings. And Vanja, from a big impersonal city that is full of people who, while not as individuals quite so slavishly bound to the round of mentally and verbally maintaining everything around them as Amatkans, still have to devote a fair amount of mental energy to keeping everything together and so don't have as much to spare for emotional attachments as we do in our ordinary world where the kitchen table remains a kitchen table forever unless it's smashed or burned, so, again, I argue that it's entirely plausible that "kind of" returning Vanja's feelings is enough to make Vanja, whose life back home was pretty dull even for a functionary like her, to decide she'll chuck it all and stay in Amatka with Nina. Who, for her part, seems glad to have another set of hands and brain cells to keep it all going, even if she's not, like, writing love songs and greeting Vanja with flowers at the end of the day.

But Vanja is still the city girl, and while she knows intellectually that she's got to step up and change her ways, still has that core of skepticism and resentment that won't go away no matter how much daily evidence she has that telling her file folders that they are file folders matters and has some outdated but very human ideas about freedom and expression and literally counter-productive things like that, and is nosy enough, as she starts imperfectly adjusting to her new life, to start connecting with other locals who might have some of the same notions, and to notice that some things like books of poetry in the town library that the authorities keep redacting and then suppressing, point to the possibility of another way of living if only, if only...!

So, look, this is an incredible book. Incredible science fiction, incredible social fiction, incredible weird fiction, just incredible. It's one of the best novels I read last year (look, it takes a while to generate these screeds of mine) and one I think that everybody should have a look at, and not just for its ideas.

Anybody who tells you it's a great novel trapped in a shitty one is just plain wrong. And if I don't tell you that, market forces might stop us from seeing what else Tidbeck has under their sleeve. And I very much want to find out what that is.

Karen Tidbeck. Author. Novel. Weird Fiction. Book. Treasure.

*But apparently at least 1/3 of the active voters in the United States in 2024 were regarding as a statement of goals, if not an instruction manual.

**If you haven't noticed, I don't review books that I don't at least like. I read a lot more books than I write about on here, and I am a ruthless did-not-finisher these days; my lifespan is in its second "half" (if you can say that about its uncertain length especially in this horrible century) and there are still so many books I want to read yet, so if I'm not feeling it on one, I move on. So if you see a book on this blog, it's because I think it's good enough or interesting enough or important enough to hurt myself to tell you about. Amatka is all of the above.