Ben Marcus' THE FLAME ALPHABET

I have the great and mighty SJ, aka Popqueenie*, to thank for this one, and thank her I do. She's recommended many a good book to me over the course of our friendship, but this is the best one you guys. The very best one. At least so far.

It is also quite undeniably terrible, not in the sense of its being of low quality, but in the original sense of that word "terrible": exciting intense awe or fear. Those who describe The Flame Alphabet as an intellectual horror story hit the mark very well indeed. It should be shelved somewhere between Jose Saramago's Blindness and Tony Burgess' Pontypool Changes Everything.

As in the latter, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong with spoken language, but where in Pontypool language is a symptom of a disease/disorder/form of zombie-ism, in The Flame Alphabet language is the disease, but only, at least at first, as it is produced by children: a kid's simplest utterance is an assault; over time, exposure to children's speech produces a horrible degeneration of the very fabric of an adult human's being, hardening and drying out tissues, weakening or dissolving muscles, slowly killing the individual. Parents suffer this first and worst, but eventually everyone feels it, because it's almost impossible to completely avoid children, even if one is a happy spinster. And before the first act of the story is over, this language toxicity has spread to adult speech as well and we discover that children are merely immune.

And like in Blindness, the origin of this situation is somewhat mysterious, misunderstood, sudden. But Marcus locates his disorder squarely in the Judaic/Talmudic tradition, rather than Saramago's inchoate science fictional causelessness. Language, and in particular spoken language, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, created the world; as my beloved Diotallevi observes in Foucault's Pendulum, "god created the universe by speaking; he didn't send a telegram." And there are, apparently (I'm not much of a Biblical scholar, so this was news to me) lots of hints in scripture about speech becoming destructive or dangerous generally, and children's mouths producing poison specifically. Which all makes a certain amount of sense. If the world was created via speech, why would it not be destroyed the same way? But then how might that happen?**

We experience this devastating, horrific situation alongside a father, Sam, who along with wife Claire is barely clinging to life after clinging to their daughter Esther long past the time when most adults have abandoned their children out of self-preservation. Interestingly, Esther's speech is really kind of toxic even before this strange outbreak; she is a sharp, critical, demanding and altogether unpleasant girl, the kind only a mother or father could love but even the most loving parent probably, if he or she were being honest, couldn't really like that much, as shown in this passage that is really describing the situation before the epidemic of poisonous speech:

"What she said was bitter, and we sipped at it and sipped at it, her mother and I, just ever so politely sipped at it until we were sick, because this was the going air inside our house, our daughter talking and singing and shouting and writing... Whatever we thought we wanted, to hug our kiss our daughter, to sit near her, it was our bodies that recoiled first. We cowered and leaned away from her words, we kept our distance..."

This is something I don't often see in fiction (but then, I don't read a lot of fiction about parenthood), this honest admission that sometimes parents don't like their children, but I bet it's a fact of life more often than most of us think. Which makes The Flame Alphabet a very brave as well as a very terrible book.

Later acts in the book reveal Sam as a bit of a Jack Isidore-esque crap artist as he joins the effort to fight language toxicity and sets to work cooking up a lot of quacky remedies, palliatives and, later on, new writing systems. All, needless to say, to no avail. But while he's been faffing around in his play-laboratory, others are actually getting results, though via rather unpleasant and cruel means.

Slyly, this novel comments on -- indeed mocks -- the very hunger for stories that brings readers to novels, especially to speculative fiction novels, swamping us in gorgeous prose, vivid imagery and narrative self-loathing even as it drives home, oh so brilliantly, the point that language might actually be bad for us. We think in it. We preserve thoughts with it. We transmit those thoughts to future generations with it. We've accomplished so much with it. And most of those accomplishments have been as bad for the world as the symbolic salty residue of speech that is overtaking the soil and surface waters of Marcus' fictional world. It's as is we've talked ourselves into the worlds of The Sheep Look Up, of The Road.

This is not comfort reading, not even sort of. But it's very, very good reading, the kind that wins prizes and leaves readers breathless with awe and envy even as they want to take a mental shower to cleanse away its ideas. I'm impressed.

*Who had this book on her Definitive Top Ten All-Time Desert Island Works of Speculative Fiction - Novels list. And it might have to go on mine as well.

**Fascinatingly, the movement of Reconstructionist Judaism plays a huge role in Sam's and Claire's experience of this plague of language. Their religious practice is idiosyncratic and private, consisting of the pair of them retreating to a secret location to listen to radio sermons transmitted by what seems to amount to a form of carrier current radio, in complete privacy. "The rules of the hut were few but they were final. Claire and I were only to go together. We could neither of us attend this synagogue alone. The experience would not be rendered in speech, you could not repeat what you heard, or even that you heard anything... You would not know who else received worship in this manner, neighbors or otherwise... Curiosity about how others worshipped, even others in your family, even Esther, was not genuine curiosity; it was jealousy, weakness." Being a WASPY white girl from Wyoming, I have no way of knowing how much of this represents a genuine practice and how much might have been concocted for this novel -- it suggests so strongly a cause and remedy in one for the novel's overall problem that it almost feels too neat -- but even if it's all just a Borgesian concoction, it's an effing cool one.

100 Books #126 - Jose Saramago's SEEING

"...since the citizens of this country were not in the healthy habit of demanding the proper enforcement of the rights bestowed on them by the constitution, it was only logical, even natural, that those rights had been suspended."

Terrifying thought, isn't it? And an eternally fresh and topical one. And this is not some talking head pundit on one of the opinewz channels that infest American TV, but a Portuguese Nobel laureate describing the immediate aftermath of one of the most farcically awful political crises he could imagine for a proud Western democracy. And there's more, so much more, of this where that came from.

Last year, I twisted my mind into a pretzel taking in the odd but absorbing prose style of Jose Saramago's Blindness, and felt that I would never be the same again. And as I finish out this year, achieving my stated goal and then some in terms of number of books read in a year, I here prove that indeed, I am forever changed. Which is nice if you're going to read more Saramago.

Sing hosanna, my mind snapped right back into that pretzel shape. And good thing, too, because if I'd let myself get distracted by the difficulties posed by the prose style, I would have missed one of the most horrifyingly entertaining and terrifyingly funny reads of my life.

As the title might suggest, Seeing* is a sort of antithetical sequel to Blindness, though not strictly in the sense of the continuing adventures of a hero or heroine from the earlier novel. Indeed, the events and truths of Blindness are not even alluded to until rather far into Seeing; there is simply a strong sense that the early crisis here -- a general election held on a bizarrely stormy day not only has a disappointing voter turnout but also results in more than 80% of the cast ballots turning up completely blank -- is the aftermath of an earlier catastrophe, but the contemporary reader could substitute any recent disaster (Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy, say) for the plague of "white blindness."

Unlike the unremitting tragedy and squalor of Blindness, though, Seeing has a pretty wicked satirical bent, especially in the early chapters when the parties on the left, middle and right are squabbling over for which party/candidate all those blank votes are "really" for, and government ministers are trying to come up with a solution to this crisis. One feels in their deliberations, in which the suspension of every civil liberty that First World citizens cherish is at least considered, one by one, echoes of the kind of panicky calculation and hapless cruelty that led to all of the white blindness victims' being herded into a disused mental hospital and left to fend for their helpless selves in Blindness, but here it's all taken much further. And the reader learns an important thing: Saramago is funny.

And yes, it's all but impossible, as matters escalate, to read Seeing without thinking of the Arab Spring, as what started as simply a casting of blank ballots develops into full-scale Gandhiesque passive civil disobedience and the government, for its part, makes an un-Arab-Spring decision to simply withdraw its services. No confidence in us, the officials seem to say? Fine. We have no confidence in you, either. Enjoy your lack of services. As an alternative to mass slaughter, it makes me wistful, that decision. But then things get silly, in a scary way (or possibly scary, in a silly way) when the government-in-exile basically just comes around to treating the "rebel" populace of the capital city pretty much exactly the same way it treated the disease victims in Blindness; this subversion is an infection that must be quarantined, but it would be heartless not to poke food in at them once in a while, wouldn't it?

And again, all of these vicious and brilliant insights into the nature of government and the responsibilities of citizenship, into the way people generally treat each other and into the way they could if only they would keep to their principles (ah, me), are delivered in Saramago's crazy and yet perfectly lucid** prose style. I don't know how he does it, you guys. Again, no dialogue tags or quotation marks, hell, not even any proper names, but the reader still winds up with a perfect insight into who all the characters are as individuals (even though they are known by only the most generic of referents) to the point where she can tell who is speaking even from just a fragment of dialogue. The only other writer I've seen come close to pulling this off is Theodore "Godbody" Sturgeon. But he broke everybody off into point-of-view chapters.

So in the end, Seeing feels rather a lot like a lost J.G. Ballard apocalypse, one in which the world is poised to end, not with a rush of wind or water or a crystallization or a drought, but with a refusal to participate, with apathy. Which, given Ballard's style of apocalyptic heroes, is very Ballardian indeed!

And on a purely personal note, oh, could I sympathize with those elected officials who had this crisis dumped into their laps. "The biggest mistake I made in my political life was letting them sit me down in this chair," the president says at one point. When I was a member of my home town's town council in 2001-2004, I said the same thing. All the damned time. Less so his next remark "I didn't realize at the time that the arms of this chair had handcuffs on them." But sometimes I did. Sometimes, I did.

All in all, a  horribly fun read. If ever there is a film adaptation, I demand it be directed by the likes of Richard Lester.

*Ensaio sobre a Cegueira in the original Portuguese. Portuguese isn't my best language, but I muddle through okay (not for a whole novel yet!) and so I get "Essay Concerning Sight" as a more literal translation. I guess I can see how that "essay" might throw an English-speaking reader, mislead him or her into expecting non-fiction, but remember that the word "essay" originally meant something more tentative, an attempt, the thought conveyed being that someone is playing with an idea rather than making declarations about it. And since this book is, in part, exploring the consequences of the prior novel's "white blindness", I like the "what if" quality the original Portuguese title suggests to me. But, you know, marketing.

Also, check out this cover for the Portuguese Spanish language edition! I love it so much!

**This despite some of the most convoluted sets of mixed metaphors I've ever encountered. But people do talk that way, especially when they're excited. How mimetic. Or something. Also, I read this book via my Kindle, as part of a single file that contains the Collected Works of Jose Saramago. I thus never had any idea how close I was to the end of the book, as the "percent completed" indicator stayed at the same number for chapters and chapters. With a dead tree book (which is how I read Blindness) there was a physical cue that the end was approaching. With an ebook as one of a single file of collected works, the ending sneaks right up on one and there is trauma. Aaah! This is, though, my only quibble with ebook reading so far.