Excessive Candour
Jungworld

The heart of the task of liking The Commons was learning how to. As Robert J. Sawyer says in his neat introduction to Matthew Hughes' new novel, The Commons is a fix-up; what he doesn't say is that it's an example of the very simplest form of fix-up: a set of stories (all in this case previously published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) laid down in a sequential row, with a few passages modified here or there to smooth over any cracks.

This kind of fix-up is sometimes called a suite. Its main problem is that it's more like a railroad flat than a labyrinth: just one thing after another another, and no speculum hidden somewhere deep inside by Daedalus to give new sight.

Unlike his fellow Canadian A.E. Van Vogt—who invented the term fix-up to describe the books he started publishing in the 1940s—Matthew Hughes seems content with the formal simplicities of the suite. The Commons is therefore free of the perils of the funhouse, the stomach-wrenching toroidal lunges through labyrinths of space and time of a novel like The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951), but if we escape Van Vogt Yaw in The Commons, we also lose any chance of experiencing those moments when a magic synergy can fuse some throw of stories into a flash of seeing: which is the fix-up's way of Making It New.

It is here that we began to have some difficulty with The Commons, as we began to try to like it. The problem with the book is that it is a story of radical change formatted to pass as a sequence of episodes sunk like jewels into the rich lassitudinous stasis of the Dying Earth garden-galaxy suburb known as the Archonate, where Hughes has set almost everything he's written, including this book. It is a dissonance not easily described, or endured comfortably as one "progresses" through the six stories here embraced.

Three reasons for this discomfort come immediately to mind. 1) A suite (as described) is clearly an appropriate format to illuminate a Dying Earth, certainly one so explicitly drawn from the later Jack Vance, memories of whose late-career circular-tour novels haunt the haw-haws and gazebos of the Archonate, but it does a much less convincing job of modeling a grammar of change, the sort of thing conventionally consecutive novels were designed to accomplish from the get-go, and which The Commons wants to do as well. 2) Even more problematical for a reading of the book is the fact that, like the cast of almost any Vance novel, its array of players in the Garden are all much simpler than the landscapes they inhabit, and, like Vance characters, they are essentially invariant once their roles have been described. Much of the allure of Vance lies in the crystalline simplicity of his players—they are histrions of Story, polished pieces on the Board they serve to illuminate, not protagonists whose inner selves might contaminate the fustian—a simplicity his readers depend upon, and whose immutability he does not violate; but Hughes seems to have created his simpletons as tools of change, not as windows through which we can glimpse the accomplished garden of the world. 3) Most of The Commons is set in a mythago-choked, mechanically fixed Jungian underwelt called The Commons, accessed by noonauts who fixatedly map the boundaries and bondages of this cauldron of the human story—also Vance-compatible. The cauldron of story for a garden is a pot. But Hughes wants to crack it all open.

A book both lonely and crowded

So maybe the way to like the book is to read it without believing its author meant to unfold a revel of the unchanging; to like The Commons we must ignore Jack Vance. The protagonist or leading player of the book is a heterodox noonaut named Guth Bandar at Old Earth's Institute for Historical Inquiry, which seems to have monopoly control over access to and travel within The Commons, the repository of all the memes and archetypes—Hughes calls them idiomats, and also "usual suspects"—that make up the genome of the human soul. The contents of this repository have not changed for hundreds of thousands of years, because the human race has already experienced all that it is going to experience. (Except for some scenes of battle between archetypal humans and an invading hive-mind, The Commons is completely void of any archetypal landscape or event or typology postdating our own time: We meet the Three Little Pigs, and Odysseus, and Beowulf, all unnamed but clearly signaled, but no astronauts, no uploads, no tragedies or triumphs of pantropy on Callisto; no Jovian abyss, no Fortress Unvanquishable Save for Sacnoth, no Death Star; no plunge into a Black Hole, no flight down the rainbow of stars from Heart Country.) But Guth Bandar seems to be fated to find novelties in The Commons, and thus hangs Hughes' tale of change.

Here are some of the new things. Bandar discovers routes from our Commons to the Commons of other species; he converses with primary archetypal idiomats without losing his marbles; he begins to understand that the collective unconscious of the human race has become conscious for some reason (Hughes calls the idiomatic embodiment of this principle the Multifacet), and wants to speak to him alone, and does so; Gunthar then becomes a Helper figure (Hughes tells us that noonauts cannot remember proper names but only roles, because there would be too many stories to remember if their protagonists were individualized in any fashion), and as the text climbs to a climax, by means of the last and by far the longest story in the book, he Helps a Hero fight off the alien hive-mind Dree, who have burrowed through the Commons (I think) to attack humans up above once again, and he founds a new Institute to explore the explosion of novelties he's discovered after hundreds of thousands of years.

Bandar is not exactly a Jack Vance hero, therefore. And The Commons is not a Vance book, despite the hotel stickers. Compared to a much more amplitudinously told embrace of Vancian worlds, like Hughes' The Farouche Assemblage (Payseur and Schmidt, 2007, $15), it is stripped for some kind of action. It is a series of magazine romps in book bondage. (It is barely a fix-up at all. But Sawyer's introduction, which concisely describes the fix-up, should be praised: unlike so many introductions written over the past couple of decades by authors more famous than the authors they're introducing, it is not a Celebrity Introduction, the first-person singular is entirely absent, the piece does nothing but its task, and it does it very well.) It was fun to read; it could be liked and was.

How close The Commons veers towards disaster, all the same, this review deposes backhandedly. Hughes' vision of the Genome of Human Story as being inhabited by noncommensal histrions, who panic if the story does not come exactly word for word as it has from the dawn of time, does seem almost blasphemously deprecatory of the nature of the story-shaped worlds within us, because the last thing that stories do is stay still: the last thing genuine protagonists (i.e., genuine humans) do in genuine novels of change is freeze shut. There are points when Hughes' portrayal of his idiomats, and a typical lay description of Asperger behavior in groups, do not differ. So it is a lonely book, despite its crowds. But that is fitting. The world Hughes takes from Vance is a lonely world.