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Someone Comes to Town, | ||||||||||||||||||
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n first glance, if you met him socially, you might think that the hero of Cory Doctorow's third novel—a nice young man named Alan, somewhere in his mid-30s—is a tad eccentric and unconventional. He lives in a house that's oddly decorated and absolutely jam-packed with books. He pals around with a hacker-punk named Kurt, whose revolutionary goal is to "unwire" the entire city of Toronto, where the contemporary action of the book occurs. Alan doesn't have to work, having earned a tidy sum over the past 20 years through a variety of odd enterprises. He wants to be a writer, but he never writes. In short, he seems like a typical human being with a few quirks and rough edges, strange attractors that mildly misalign him with his fellows.
But what you don't know is that just the reverse is true. Alan is decidedly unhuman by nature and birth. He's a monster, a freak, an aberration who has worked hard to tone down his more absurd and outrageous behaviors just so as to appear this normal. Alan is masquerading as human, and he still finds the world a baffling place.
Alan and his six younger brothers were born to a mountain in northern Canada and a washing machine. Yes, that's right. Alan's father is a sentient mountain, in toto. His mother is a conventional laundry appliance. Alan and his brothers spent their earliest years in a cave on their father, tended by the resident golems of the mountain. Eventually, they managed, under Alan's supervision, to enter grade school. Because they were all decanted from a washing machine, they have no navels. They heal with unnatural resilience. Alan and Brad, the next oldest boy (the names of their brothers shift continually through an alphabetical system during the narrative) are fairly human-looking, as is fourth brother, Davey. But third brother Caleb takes after Papa and is a literal island. Brothers E through G are a tripartite being that fits together like Russian nesting dolls. And there you have it: just one big happy family.
Or the family would be happy, if not for the madness of Davey. A kind of Caliban figure, Davey is malign and vicious. When he kills Alan's first adolescent love, a human girl named Marci, the brothers in turn kill Davey and bury him inside Caleb. But Davey doesn't stay dead, and returns as a warped demon to plague the family many years later.
We learn Alan's outre backstory in bits and pieces, while simultaneously following his real-time adventures in Toronto, as he and Kurt try to create a network that will allow information to run free. Next door to Alan live four young people: the cold-souled Krishna and his girlfriend Mimi (herself a freak); and the brother-and-sister pair of Natalie and Link. The foursome quickly become swept up in Alan's odd life.
But no one realizes how dangerous things will become once Davey comes to town.
Some families you make
God bless Cory Doctorow. He neither thinks nor writes like any other SF author, and he is never content to repeat himself. This book is as different from his first two novels as each of those was from the other. If we had to lump him into a class, just on the basis of this one novel, it would probably be most productive and fair to put him into that grouping of Generation X/Y magical-realists-cum-postmodern-fabulists: Jonathan Lethem, Sean Stewart, Kelly Link, Will Shetterly. But even so, this ignores Doctorow's cyberpunk underpinnings, his nerd apocalypso vibe and his cutting-edge hipster realism. Truly, there's too much substance to the lad to confine him to any one corral. (And to think he has a real day job and also runs one of the most famous blogs in the world in his spare time!)
This book dazzles by walking a dangerous high tightrope pulled taut between the widely separated poles of the story. The fairy-tale childhood, with its startling yet archetypically resonant improbabilities, has to consort with the hacker realities of the Kurt-based story, which in itself is not overtly unlikely, but still slightly gonzo. But, like the best mashup tunes, Doctorow's narrative wedges the most consensually disparate elements together into a brilliant whole.
What probably carries the whole project is Doctorow's deft, deep depiction of his characters. I have to say that he's never done a better job of limning real people. However weird they are, they are certainly not cardboard or one-dimensional. They all contain the essential pressure points, drives, caprices and emotions that power the folks we encounter every day. Damaged yet striving to survive and do good, Alan and his cohorts demand that we empathize with their human foibles. This essential believability pulls us in, easing our acceptance of any grotesqueries.
Doctorow's prose has never been sharper either. He's really honed his use of vivid, crisp, wry figures of speech and streamlined his narrative thrust. Consider, for instance, how, on page 135 (there are no chapters here to handily refer to, lending the narrative an organic feel that also makes Alan's life a whole, not a thing of parts), Doctorow gleefully nails the portrait of a egocentric paranoid anarchist in just a few sentences.
Like some blend of Delany's The Einstein Intersection (1967) with a Bruce Sterling thriller and a James Blaylock fantasy, this book is a shining, hopeful chimera.
Alan's backstory made me recall with a whimsical smile the work of no older writer so much as that of R.A. Lafferty. Most of Lafferty's genius shaggy-dog stories are out of print these days, but why not search some out secondhand? You won't regret it. —Paul
Also in this issue: Gravity Wells: Speculative Fiction Stories, by James Alan Gardner
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