|
A peer-reviewed
electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 17(1)
– March 2008 |
A review of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl
Milan M. Cirkovic, Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade
Journal
of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 17 Issue 1 –
March 2008- pgs 84-92
http://jetpress.org/v17/cirkovic.html
Brasyl. By Ian
McDonald. Pyr, Amherst, New York, 2007. 358 pp. ISBN:
978-1-59102-543-6.
Human
nature loses its most precious quality when it is robbed of its sense of things
beyond, unexplored and yet insistent.
Alfred North Whitehead (1936)
Brazil is a world
in its own right, different from all other places. That tourist-billboard
cliché follows one of the main characters of this book as soon as he steps down
from his transatlantic ship, but the lack of recognition passes quickly. From
coffee to futebol (soccer for the
uninitiated) to capoeira moves to DJ duels to biodiesel, McDonald has
meticulously researched his fictional milieu to the minutest details, fully
justifying the glossary to be found near the book’s end. A brilliant opening
vignette introduces us to a colorful world that is certainly not what it seems,
but the true question which looms is: how to maintain the focus on the plot and
ideas while surrounded by the phenomenal richness of the narrative?
This is a novel
as complex as they come, with three main story strands, symbolically set in the
past (1732 AD), present (2006 AD) and near-future (2032 AD). Simultaneously, it
covers three key geographical areas of Brazil, namely its two huge metropolises
(Rio de Janeiro in the present-day story and Sao Paulo in the future one) and
the vast, mysterious Amazonian jungle, where most of the eighteenth-century
story is set.
Each strand of
narrative revolves around a key protagonist. The novel starts with the
present-day story, featuring a thoroughly unlikeable TV producer
and part-time capoeirista, Marcelina Hoffman, in search of trashy media
cannon-fodder. In 2032, we encounter bisexual, streetwise Edson Jesus Oliveira
de Freitas, a self-proclaimed businessman in a tightly controlled society where
quantum computing technology has begun to surface outside of the government and
military labs. Edson's infatuation with manga-like quantum hacker Fia Kishida
eventually leads him to far-reaching and quite unexpected adventures. Finally,
the third story strand takes place mostly in the depths of the Amazonian
rainforest, where the Enlightenment-era Jesuit Luis Quinn is sent – in the
company of a somewhat eccentric French academic, Dr. Robert Falcon – to
admonish his misionary colleague who has set up himself as a tyrant in the
unexplored vastness of the Brazilian jungle.
The
relevant years are precise, but misleading, since – as the reader, especially
one versed in contemporary SF mores, will guess after about thirty pages – they
do not refer to the same history (or to the same Brazil/syl) in the quantum
multiverse envisaged by Hugh Everett and his successors. The three stories
converge together in the space of the novel, at first slowly and then at
increasing pace, producing a rather impressive, but slightly confusing,
kaleidoscopic sequence of images toward the end.
Much of the novel
is atmosphere-driven, similar to some of the best contemporary prose, evoking
the pages of an Eco (e.g. the texture of the descriptions in The Island of the Day Before) or a
Pynchon-esque foggy atmosphere in Crying
a Lot 49 or Vineland. Some concepts and tropes are repeated in an
almost fugue-like manner: the order (Jesuits and others); reality as illusion;
media; multiple identities; Borgesian recombination of old metaphors to create
a new picture. This pertains to great ideas, as well as mundane occurrences,
such as minor emotional infidelities:
There is no bitch or bitterness in his voice.
It’s not that kind of affair; it’s not that kind of city. Here you can lead
many lives, be many selves. (p. 71)
McDonald’s
excellent writing is occasionally irritating because of the positive and
life-enjoying spin he puts on everything he touches: from the ubiquitous
poverty (likely to persist in 2032 as well), to media predators, to drug-dealing.
For the future-oriented thinker, among of the most valuable parts of the
narrative are those describing unpleasant (at the very best) aspects of the
near-future “age of perpetual surveillance” and almost complete loss of
privacy, as well as the chilling implementation of “security markets,” where
private (para)militias are legally entitled to execute criminals via electronic
bidding. But even these dystopian moments fade into the background when
contrasted with the sheer colorfulness of living in McDonald’s fictional
Brasyl.
No novel exists
in a perfect vacuum (to borrow Stanislaw Lem’s warning
title). Brasyl has similarities with Greg Egan's Teranesia (1999) and with McDonald’s own Chaga/Kyrinia diptych (1995/1998 – two parts of an intended trilogy) and The River of Gods (2004). Both Teranesia and Brasyl explore the fictional limits of
many-worlds quantum mechanics against an exotic tropical background (Brazilian
rainforest in McDonald's novel, Indian/Indonesian in Egan's), both posit a
subtle distinction between “natural” and “artificial,” and both use memorable,
topographic neologisms for their titles. In the eighteenth-century subplot, the
lush, colorful outdoors is similar to Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia (1998), but the similarity here
actually runs deeper; both novels have an underlying theme of reality as
simulation (in what seems to be well on the way to becoming new SF cliché).
Without disclosing too much, both use the eschatological speculations of
Freeman Dyson and Frank Tipler to weave the plot; both
invoke the cosmological “end times,” as well as portraying a particular
group of “initiates.”
McDonald’s novel,
however, is much richer, both stylistically and topically; and to this
reviewer, this is, paradoxically, a major weakness in his literary architecture
– like the bad guy’s sailing cathedral in the novel, the narrative is too
top-heavy and prone to capsizing. The Grand Eschatological Idea revealed near
the end is treated in a simplistic, off-handed way that doesn’t allow for the
protagonists to hold their breaths for more than a second. In addition, the
plot becomes increasingly confusing toward the end, and the occasional deus ex machina becomes a necessity,
rather than an “ornament.”
The story of the
“quantum toad” and the related book-within-a-book pastiche is somewhat
inconsistent (for instance, had the “French explorer” returned from the
Amazonian interior or hadn’t he?) and quite undeveloped, and there are some
other minor inconsistencies throughout the novel. Father Diego Goncalves, the
“bad guy” of the eighteenth-century subplot is distinctly anachronistic in his Gauleiter or commissar bearing, and it was obvious enough for the author to
invoke a little bit of “extemporal” help for him. Still, with his Toledo
swordsmanship, his genocidal impulses and his floating cathedral, father Diego
is way better off, reader-wise, than the adversaries in the contemporary and
future subplots who remain at the level of “phantom menaces.” In addition, the
closure is somewhat of a non-closure, opening wide doors to a possible sequel,
which is usually bad news (for belles
lettres, that is, not for the
publishing industry).
McDonald draws
heavily upon Oxford physicist David Deutsch’s popular book The Fabric of Reality (1997), which, in turn, draws upon the
research work of Deutsch, Aharonov, Greenberger, Svozil, Vaidman – and others
in the last two decades – dealing with quantum time travel. This research
activity has shown that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is
indeed capable of resolving the long-standing causality paradoxes invoking
grandfathers, although the price to be paid for it is rather steep. (Another
good SF novel employing this form of time-travel as a plot device is Stephen
Baxter’s Wellsian pastiche, The Time
Ships (1995).) It would be superfluous to elaborate how speculative and
amorphous such ideas still are, although they have motivated a lot of very
interesting work in physics and philosophy. In contrast to his meticulous study
of Brazilian culture, here McDonald’s erudition seems slightly slimmer, even
apart from the physiological fact – perhaps ironically overlooked – that the
human eye can, under particular circumstances, detect individual photons as
well as the eye of a frog. In particular, the question of identity of objects
and persons in the many-worlds interpretation is a tricky and unresolved one,
which McDonald actually abuses in many places, especially when it overlaps with
the psychological and emotional drama. Whether a significantly different wavefunction
branch could produce a “copy” of the person similar enough for a deep emotion
like love to be smoothly transferred from the “original” is a question worthy
of an entire novel; but that novel is yet to be written, since Brasyl simply sails over it toward the
Next Colorful Scene, with just occasional sitcom-like remarks.
A special mention
should be made of the “additional content,” quite appropriate to this digital
age: the glossary of Portuguese terms and slang used in the book; a charming
playlist – it is easy to notice how the music plays a huge role in this book –
including wonderful Brazilian artists, such as Suba and Bebel Gilberto; and
balanced suggestions for further reading about the “real” Brazil. The latter
are annotated, one may presume, in the Enlightenment spirit of Dr. Falcon
himself. The book is robustly and prettily made, with graphic vignettes
separating sub-chapters and indicating the appropriate storyline. It ends
(following the references, the playlist, and even the short author bio) with
the disparaging quotation “Brazil is not a serious country,” ascribed to
General Charles De Gaulle inscribed on a soccer ball. But is its use here
really disparaging? Following the key thought of Lem from his aforementioned
anthology A Perfect Vacuum (1971), if
the entire physics of the universe is the product of a game, do we need to
treat so much smaller things as the nations and countries of the Earth more
seriously?
This form of
transcendent subtlety is McDonald’s hidden (and, perhaps, hideous) strength; in
an epoch where the exotic is often construed as commonplace, he fresco-paints a
believable and thought-provoking world which restores the sense of wonder
accompanying a great, wide-traveling adventure. This novel is a fine work,
great at moments, although McDonald clearly has yet to reach his apogee; maybe
the final volume of the Chaga saga (tentatively dubbed Ananda) will be it. In the meantime, we should enjoy the relaxing
and beautiful music (in all senses) of Brazil/syl.[1]
[1] It is a pleasure
to acknowledge invaluable help of James Hughes, as well as useful discussions
with Irena Diklić, Mark A. Walker, Sunčica Zdravković, Robert J.
Bradbury and Slobodan Popović.