Anatomy of a Traffic Jam
Oh it's about POV again
Toronto is icy lately, and the wind bites through my wool coat. Decidedly too cold for this California native. (Do I still get to claim special status after eight years of living in wintery places, or am I merely a weakling at this point?) Leaning in to the chill, I watched the alpine crime drama Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet. It begins (this is not a spoiler, as it is on the movie poster) when a husband falls to his death while the wife is the only one at home. We, the audience, don’t witness the fall. We don’t know if it was murder, accident, or suicide. I thought the film was good—not a particularly brave stance, when it has already won at Cannes! Maybe a shade or so too distant from the characters, but the story is unravelled well, and I particularly loved the way the camera moved through the scenes. You could use it to teach how point of view (POV) shapes the story. Also: somebody reads from the wife-character’s novel in court as evidence of homicidal intent. Because it is autofiction! Incredible stuff. I’m going to put Rachel Cusk on trial for taking strangers hostage and inducing them to talk about divorce.
From the chill of the alps to the freeze of deep space:
A few days ago, I finished listening to Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s space opera on human (and arthropod) faults and foibles. On the literary<—>genre spectrum, it is solidly genre. Half of the narrative is set on an ark ship, in which most of the remaining human population is in cyrosleep, awaiting colonization of a new, terraformed planet. They are the survivors after a previous empire destroyed the viability of Earth through pollution, and wrecked their other options by war, dooming the human race (#relatable).
My favorite bit was the plot thread of a relationship splintered by the two characters unevenly entering and exiting cyrosleep. At the start, the man is much older, but as the woman is an engineer, and thus more important to the function of the ship than him (a historian) she is frequently called upon to fix things while he remains in amber. As the timeline—actual time, and time as experienced in his stop-start perspective—hops forward, and both characters are woken up for varying periods and reasons, she catches up and then surpasses him in age. Somewhere in there they become lovers, briefly. It was a small element in the book, but it stuck with me as a great example of how science fiction can be both idea-driven and character-led, so long as the sf element is tied to personal stakes. Also a great example of sf as exploring unforeseen consequences, à la Frederik Pohl’s: “science fiction should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”
It would become a very different book, perhaps less sociological in scope, but I wanted it to explore the idea. For although Children of Time was an engaging read, I rarely found myself emotionally attached. For this reason I don’t think I’ll continue forward with the series. Has anyone out there read it? Am I mistaken to quit? (For what it’s worth, for a “similar but different” vibe, I enjoyed more Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, despite its rather forced action sequences in the final act.) What if Children of Time centered the strangeness of two characters attempting connect while they are whipped forward in time and eras? Age gaps can be complicated as it is, without adding the hurdle of saving humanity from its self-destructive tendencies. I can’t easily articulate how I feel about large age gaps (within limits), and the undecided is the source of most good writing. Tchaikovsky assiduously avoids any whiff of impropriety in the relationship, but I think that if there was more grey to their situation, it would be more interesting. He doesn’t even tease out the gender dynamics (although he does elsewhere, for the spider plot lines, which I’m not getting into, lol.)
The science fictional element of cyrosleep could have added a truly weird perspective to the ethical dilemma. In Children of Time, the POV on the ark ship is confined to the man’s POV, and the form of the perspective directs the content of the story. What if instead, Children of Time borrowed from the POV and structure of Normal People…? “Science fiction Sally Rooney” might not have been on your 2024 bingo card, but hey I’m into it. The reader could hop between the lovers’ heads and through the years, entering chapters not quite sure of how the lovers stand, what was missed, what century it was, how the other has aged and lived in the interstitial years…perhaps the societal gender dynamics shift around them, influencing one person in the relationship and not the other…imagine the untapped seams of misunderstandings, unknowns, ambiguities! Now that’s a traffic jam.
