Excessive Candour
Reality is somewhere else

There are some writers, Robert Charles Wilson is one, who seem to have no choice. They may think they're going to do something completely different next time. They may call their next novel anything they want--they might, for instance, call it Darwinia--but what they will end up writing is what they have to write.

For their daemon takes their life. Their life is their daemon.

Robert Charles Wilson was born in the United States but has lived in Canada since about the age of nine. His daemon is being Canadian. He is perhaps the most profoundly Canadian writer of SF since the great days of the great, contortuplicated, out-of-his-skull A.E. van Vogt.

One of the secrets of the weirdness of van Vogt is that he was a great creator of Canadas. His worlds only seem blank--but once you get trapped in one of them, you begin to realize that you have begun to inhabit a terrain as surreally indecipherable as muskeg, or tundra, in a blizzard, in November.

And his supermen--his Slans and Gosseyns--only seem to be canny absolute rulers of great empires. In truth, they're numbed solitaries who leap into ultimate power not by organizing other Competent Men to shake things up a little, but through magically incomprehensible moments of utter transcendence.

Locked into a mapless belljar world run by numbing bureaucrats who actually seem faceless, Canadians do think of the world that way: as surreal, mapless, governed by unseen forces.

On the other side of the divide lies reality, maybe.

Escaping worlds

One of Robert Charles Wilson's novels is actually called The Divide (1990), and almost all of his work can be understood as attempts at tackling the ontological poverty of being a Canadian, as attempts to escape worlds which are only defectively real. At least two--The Harvest (1993) and Mysterium (1994)--come close to treating escapes from metaphorical Canadas as forms of Rapture. Others, like Gypsies (1989), forge complex tracks of transition. But the estrangement of his default world is pretty well fixed, at source: it is an estrangement from full reality.

Darwinia starts off like an entirely different book.

It is 1912. Guilford Law, an American teenager from Boston in love with science, seems fully ensconced in a world whose ontological security--whose density of being--seems unquestionable. But suddenly the world is transformed utterly. A great portion of the eastern hemisphere changes, in the twinkling of an eye, into what is soon known as Darwinia: the civilizations of Europe, and every human being there, disappear; archaic new flora and fauna are substituted.

There is no explanation.

After a few years, humans from America have begun tentatively to recolonize Darwinia--the title being peculiarly ironic, as a fundamentalist understanding of what has happened dominates what intellectual life remains in the United States--and Guilford Law, now a young married man, takes his wife and child to "England," leaving them there when the expedition he joins departs for the Continent.

It looks, for quite a few pages, as though Darwinia is going to resemble a typical American SF novel--that it will devote itself to the exploring, explaining and ultimately the conquering of a brave new world.

Everything seems perfectly in order

But this is a Robert Charles Wilson novel. For 100 pages, everything (a few cleverly embedded clues excepted) seems perfectly in order. Guilford is going to penetrate the new, and he's going to come back to his faithful wife (she doesn't sleep with anyone new until she's quite reasonably persuaded he's dead in the new jungle), and he will bear trophies of knowledge and power with him.

Nope.

After 100 pages, we begin to learn that the entire planet--old world and Darwinia both--are no longer quite real; the event of 1912 was no "simple" incursion into our substantial reality of another reality that Yankees could treat as a challenge.

It is hard to avoid revealing too much of the denouement at this point; but perhaps it wouldn't be unfair to say that the entire world, including Guilford Law, turn out to have become hand puppets of the Real.

Immeasurably deep within the defective, fragile, mutable geography of the world of post-1912, something else subsides and conducts its grave affairs. Immeasurably deep within Guilford Law is the true Guilford Law.

A lot of story to tell

From this point on, Wilson has a lot of story to tell, but he has not managed to create any single character capable either of understanding that story, or effecting it in his own person. As a result, Wilson is forced to insert "Interludes" whose scope might please Olaf Stapleton, but which consort uneasily with the expectations of SF readers today.

These Interludes tend to bleed the surface narrative a little dry, too. Which is a shame. Darwinia has some of the same intensity of pathos and interaction and longing that make John Crowley's Engine Summer (1979) the definitive rendering of what one might call the belljar novel: the novel whose mise en scene exists, and its characters act, within a frame others can view.

In Crowley's hands, the ironies intrinsicate to the belljar novel are almost unendurably intense. Wilson, on the other hand, tends to treat his post-1912 cast as though they had suddenly become Canadians. They do their best, they love and die and breed and kill and make their gardens grow, on their side of the divide. Wilson brilliantly conducts their lives for us.

But of course he knows the truth of his tale.

Reality is somewhere else.