am at an annual conference in southern Florida. The guests this year are Rudy Rucker and Damien Broderick. They have spent much of their time in public reinventing a critical tag first used by Rucker in a manifesto he issued in 1983. According to Rucker in this year's guest-of-honor speech, "transrealism" is a kind of portmanteau way of describing the creative interaction, in science fiction, between the grist and archetypes that particularize the author's real life and the SF tropes—what Rucker calls "power chords"—that express that grist, those archetypes.
But that's not enough, he goes on to say (there is no written crib to his talk; I am paraphrasing him throughout); for any story to work properly, it must embody an element he calls "gnarl," a problematic, a tough complexity, a degree of chaos that may come close to transforming that story into what one might call weather, but which never fully mirrors "the seething dog barf" of primal reality. (Seething dog barf—which seems to me a good description of undescribed reality—is a phrase Rucker credits to the mathematician Bill Gosper.)
I am thinking, this is all OK stuff. Transrealism may be a fancy name for what any author has to do anyway, but it points the issue, and gnarl (more interestingly perhaps) focuses the mind on a necessary, but difficult to describe, characteristic of most successful works of art. Morse Peckham (whom Rucker did not mention) said it most clearly for me: that there is a rage for chaos in all great works of art, a wrestling against the hard-wired human need to habituate the perceptual world. For human beings, in the end, seething dog barf always turns to biscuits.
While listening to Rucker, I am also thinking about Lisa Tuttle's new novel, The Mysteries, which (I should say immediately) I enjoyed a lot, but which troubled me, too. And suddenly I think I know what it is that bothered me. The Mysteries is a novel that turns out to tell us too sanely and accurately what it is all about. In Rucker's slang typology, it is a tale that is "too cold," i.e., too controlled, to be gnarly. The turbulences of telling of its first 100 pages or so never lead us into territories more mysterious than the map of plot, never lead us to the brink of chaos where creative rage blossoms in great books. Quite beautifully at times, for it is extremely well thought through and crafted, The Mysteries declines to risk much.
Magical mysteries tour
That's the bad part. The good part is the experience of reading Tuttle's new novel, her first in almost a decade (during which she wrote other things). There is a phrase book reviewers use too often perhaps, but which, I think, exactly fits a tale like this. The Mysteries is a page-turner. There is hardly an extra word anywhere. Every scene builds like a Swiss clock to the hour it strikes in the scheme of things. You forget what page you're on (from any book reviewer on deadline, this is very high praise) for pages on end. Everything pertinent is knit together by the end. The book echoes to the common sense of professional craft.
The time is now. The venues are England and Scotland. The protagonist tells his tale in the first person. We begin with what seems to portend a gnarly problematic, but which in the event resolves sensibly: The protagonist, Ian Kennedy, recollects his father's disappearance when he was a young boy. His father is walking across a field, and blinks out of existence. The mystery is never solved. But Ian then tells us that there was in fact no mystery—this "memory" of his father's disappearance is from a book about mysterious disappearances. What really happened is that his father disappeared in a more usual way, by leaving home one day and never returning. The mystery Ian is talking about is not the mystery he thinks he's talking about.
The true mystery, in retrospect, is obvious: Even in the forgiving no-place of a first-person narrative unlocated within any actual frame of telling, why does Ian retell a confabulation he knows is untrue? Even for a page? The answer to this true mystery is also fairly obvious: Ian is a personality prone to abandonment. He has shaped his life around this core of anguish; he has left the America where his greatest losses (his father and his lover) occurred, and lives in England where the vacuums within his life do not burn as badly; and, bravely but maybe foolishly, he has become a private detective who specializes in mysterious disappearances, usually young women who vanish, sometimes for ever.
It is only well into the book that we discover the reason for this specialization. Tuttle's narrative at this point is a coup of plot-mapping: It makes sense of Ian's obsessions, and of the chronic state of desiderium—of longing for a past which maybe never existed, but which should have—that afflicts his nights and sours his social life, and (not incidentally) rather bewilders the readers of The Mysteries, because he has not yet been given any real clue as to the mysteries of the occluded self of the protagonist.
Ian's lover Jenny (we now learn) has left him mysteriously when he's about 30, years before the period of the main story we are only now really beginning to enter (and which is now due to become all too clearly understandable). On the rebound, Ian goes to Scotland on vacation, where he agrees to look for Amy, the daughter of a friend of his mother's, who has gone missing. As we learn, her disappearance does not merely echo but literally reiterates the gist of many tales told in British folklore, for she has been seduced/abducted into Faerie. Initially skeptical of the evidence that hints of Faerie, Ian is soon converted by a woman he meets at the site in Scotland (she also abandons him soon enough); and he rescues the girl, who has already appeared to him magically in order to beg for help, by holding on to her all Hallowe'en night, the one night she is allowed back from the Otherland. Amy then returns to America and Ian never sees her again; it is yet another abandonment.
Magnificent obsession
So we have now learned why Ian is obsessed by missing girls; and we also begin to understand why (early in the book) he has undertaken to find yet another daughter, named Peri (short for Peregrine), who has also disappeared in a fashion evocative of traditional folklore. Up to this point in The Mysteries, Tuttle has interposed several short chapters recounting famous disappearances, some fictional, some "real." Up to this point, therefore, we have been led to believe that Peri's disappearance constitutes part of what one might call a gnarly turbulence of mysteries, an articulation of the world as dangerously porous, an understanding of the story of any one human life as a problematic never fully to be solved. What we have now learned, through the interposition of the flashback sequence featuring Amy, is that the main story of Peri is no longer a mystery.
The interpolated mysterious-disappearance chapters turn out to to have very little to do with the specific story that The Mysteries now concentrates upon, and the novel simplifies drastically. Peri's disappearance is, we gradually learn, an integral long fore-ordained re-enactment of the long Gaelic tale, "The Wooing of Etain," in which a princess of Faerie, after radical metamorphosis, is blown into the womb of a mortal woman in this world, and is born again into this world, and marries here a man she loves, but never fully loses some form of knowledge that she is an inhabitant of Faerie. (In other words, unlike any of the story fragments that have been deceptively gnarling the overall complexion of the tale up to now, her story is not one of abduction but return.) Very engrossingly, we follow Ian as he gradually comes to understand the full implications of the epic tale he has encountered, and as he reluctantly gives over to Peri's earthly lover the task of persuading her to return (there is a mild feminist input here—Peri's husband in Faerie cannot return her, because she is not a chattel to be traded; she must decide herself).
Except for one pretty bad moment when Peri's husband in Faerie turns up in London as an elf rocker, the tale is immaculate. The Peri story resolves properly, and we do begin to half-like Ian Kennedy, a man whom people abandon in some part because he is a deeply humorless victim of what one might call bell-jar desiderium, the dreaded Self-Dwell that afflicts so many losers.
Tuttle's gradual uncovering of Kennedy's nature is more than competently achieved; and her story as a whole ties itself together with a calm sureness that forbids cavil. But the cavil continues to nag. The Mysteries seemed to promise to carry us to the edge, and maybe even to leave us hanging there by an unbreakable thread. Great works of art (as I have been saying) leave you hanging, but leave you hanging unbreakable. Unfortunately, The Mysteries never threatens to break.
