Radiant Terminus has cemented my interest in the work of Antoine Volodine/Manuela Draeger/Elli Kronauer/Lutz Bassman/Infernus Johannes. And damn it, I may have actually to learn French at some point because only some of his books have made it to English translation.
It's also very much an exploration of what life would have been like in post-nuclear Marin County in Dr. Bloodmoney if [REDACTED] hadn't [REDACTED] [REDACTED].** Except instead of the remains of luxurious and affluent northern California, we're in what's left of an old collective farm from the heyday of the world-encircling Second Soviet Union, and instead of the aftermath of a nuclear war, we have a world slowly devastated by Chernobyl-type accidents as the Second Soviet Union, under constant attack by pockets of fascists, slowly receded from its high water mark, leaving collective farm/village complexes like Radiant Terminus to fend for themselves without regular and competent maintenance of their neighborhood nuclear power plants.
Oops!
We begin our story following the desperate retreat of a trio of survivors of the battle that lost the fictional territory of the Orbise. Slowly dying of radiation sickness and out of food and water, the three have one hope left: if the most able-bodied among them can make it to the next settlement and bring back some water and food.
Unfortunately for this barely-survivor, Kronauer (yes, one of the author's heteronyms), the next settlement is Radiant Terminus, where the nuclear plant has not only failed catastrophically but its core has completely melted down and later sank deep into the earth. The residents now use it as a sort of all-purpose garbage disposal, which they can only do thanks to the heroic efforts of "one of the most valiant figures of the second Soviet union, a legendary survivor, sagging under medals and highlighted in various enlightening stories," the Gramma Ugdal. The Gramma Ugdal, who is only ever referred to this way, has mutated into an immortal woman who cannot be harmed by radiation and thus has become famous for rushing in to help after countless nuclear accidents. Since this is so, she can safely handle contaminated carcasses, bits of furniture and farm equipment, whatever needs disposed of, and push it down into the melted-down core to its destruction. She has found, furthermore, a way to, at least partially, heal radiation damage in some others by the use of various altered waters. And that's not all. Sometimes she can bring them back from the dead. And if she can't with her waters, there's someone else around who probably can.
For the Gramma Ugdal is not the only immortal in Radiant Terminus! Her former husband from her long-ago (like 100 years long ago) youth, Solovyei, is also immortal and their reunion was unexpected and consequential, for he has powers even greater than hers*** for all that he has lived in obscurity where she became an international hero. But see, Solovyei is this novel's Hoppy Harrington, a figure of menace and bizarre psychic powers, who absolutely dominates Radiant Terminus and its environs by dominating the minds and bodies of its people. None of whom has the first idea of how to revolt against their god-king, all of whom have at least been led to believe that they literally owe him their lives, and many of whom are pretty sure that they only even exist because Solovyei has, Borges-like, dreamed them.
Solovyei also has a special hell set aside for any man dumb enough to involve himself, even in the most innocent way, with one of his three weirdly beautiful mutant daughters by "unknown mothers." Take poor Schulhoff, who legally married one of them and seemed genuinely to love her, but whom Solovyei has made to forget her utterly and roam the earth, as he explains upon meeting our veteran, Kronauer:
Solovyei has made sure it will never pass. He makes me walk from forest to forest, from lake to lake, and when the absence of the woman I love seems a little less unbearable, when the loss makes me suffer a little less, he reintroduces himself in my head and he revives my urge to remember. He whistles in my head until I collapse. He keeps whistling, he sings his sorts of poems. It lasts for days and nights. I can't escape it. I can't die. I'm stuck within his clutches. Within his dreams. No death is available to me. I also wonder if maybe I'm actually inside one of his dreams. It won't pass and I can't escape.
Thus while we might have been expecting a tender reunion between the Gramma Ugdal and her Solovyei, and a nice autumn twilight love story, what we get instead is a Twilight Zone episode. The one with Billy Mumy as a terrifying and omnipotent child. Except this time he's a gigantic full-grown man with yellow eyes and an axe in his belt and three beautiful mutant daughters and a conviction that no male human being ever born has ever meant anything but harm to the female of the species and must be punished for his bad intentions. And if a man Solovyei encounters actually doesn't have bad intentions towards those daughters, well, not only does Solovyei not believe it but he'll actually warp reality to make his preconceptions true. And then administer "appropriate" punishments.
Yikes.
So, half Hoppy Harrington and half Palmer Eldritch, let's say. Or maybe, the malevolent supercomputer I AM. And a little bit of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz - Solovyei loves to inflict his poetry on the entire village via a loudspeaker system.
But come to think if it, what Solovyei reminds me of the most is Dr. Haber, the subtly-terrifying-until-he-abandons-subtlety villain of Ursula K. Leguin's The Lathe of Heaven, who parlays his hypnotic control and medical/psychiatric power imbalance over poor George Orr to dream his way to world domination. Like Haber, Solovyei appears to have swollen his physical dimensions to match his massive self-conception; the first thing everybody notices upon meeting him is that he is simply huge, with a big axe shoved through his belt for extra intimidation. It's a classic diversion on both characters' parts, minimizing their actual threat by distracting their victims with the display of a quite different one. Few are guarding against a psychic attack when the likelihood appears to be that the opponent is going to just step up and tear one to pieces with his bare hands.
For all this, though, what Radiant Terminus seems most concerned with is the impact of literature, of Volodine's imagined post-exotic canon, on the people who have read it. The literary star of this novel is one Maria Kwoll, a post-exotic feminist whom even Andrea Dworkin might consider extreme. Because one of Solovyei's daughters is the village librarian and grew up on Kwoll's works, she has made sure that nothing written is left to be read except those works and things like machinery repair manuals and agronomy pamphlets. The result is a village of people, not only utterly under Solovyei's control, but also under Kwoll's influence: to them, sex is inherently aggressive and gross, it's impossible for a male human to think about anything else anyway, and everything such a creature says or does is in "the cock's language."
Which means that yes, even Solovyei is a Kwollite. Kwollian?
There's another element of Radiant Terminus that I can't help but single or for praise: its inventiveness in dealing with the altered landscape of a world that has suffered a thousand nuclear accidents. Volodine conjures up a whole alternate herbarium for his world. It's as if he decided that the Voynich manuscript was an accurate rendering that had just come unstuck in time. We get to learn a bit about them through the character of Kronauer, whose wife was busy on a project to identify all the weird new flora before the fascists murdered her, and about whom he thinks as he mentally catalogs what he sees on his journey to Radiant Terminus:
Molle-guillotes, malveinés, ashrangs, smallglory captives, willow benaises. Damsels-in-flight, masquerats, four-o’clock beauties, pituitaines, sweetbalers, or midnight Jeannes.****
Like I said, I might have to start working on my French, which I can already kind of parse because of years farting around with Portuguese, Latin and Spanish, just so I can explore the rest of Volodine et al's works set in this bizarre world.
I hope there are lots more Crones in it.
*My first being Manuela Draeger's Eleven Sooty Dreams, another book with a prominent and formidable grandmother-who-isn't-a-grandmother figure -- which I simply love. As for what "post-exoticism" is, it's a sort of Marvel Cinematic Universe but for a group of imaginary and revolutionary writers who form the cultural milieu of a worldwide Marxist-Leninist society, the Second Soviet Union, that was hugely successful and utopian until it wasn't. The post-exotic works of Volodine et al are now its autopsy in print, melancholy and lovely and weird as hell. So, you know, pretty close to being my ideal reading material.
**If you know, you know. If you don't, go read Dr. Bloodmoney.
***Oddly, this gives an author the best excuse ever to use an omniscient narrator, for Solovyei can read minds even at infinite distances in addition to his other uncanny abilities, as is made plain when, almost exactly halfway through the novel, he is revealed to be possessing a crow that has been following some of his banished citizens around. These passages are written in the first person omniscient, but most of the rest of the book is in a very traditional third, which seems like a missed opportunity to have one of the best bastard narrators of all time. Le sigh.
****Those "Jeannes" have a longer name, by the way; they are Jeanne-of-the-Communists. Volodine is nothing if not committed to the Second Soviet but.
