2022 in review - part 1

This last year has been, at least on the global and national scale, something of a shitshow. An omnishambles. A permacrisis. It would be easy to dwell on the political incompetence, corruption, and out-and-out evil that has permeated the year. But I am instead going to cast my eye over the books, TV and films that have caught my mind, heart and imagination over the last twelve months.

Books

Several books caught my mind this year. First, let me start with a couple novel series that have occupied a lot of my time - one contemporary, one dating back to the eighties.

The Expanse

The nine novels of the Expanse came to their conclusion in November 2021 with Leviathan Falls. Filmed as a first-rate TV series, the novels naturally follow a somewhat different trajectory. After finishing the last four novels over the course of the year, I could appreciate the value of the original material afresh. The characters have more room to breathe. The realities of the differing cultures of Mars, the Belt and Earth in the twenty-third century have more room to be explored. The realpolitik of a solar system on the brink of war has a subsequent heft and logic. 

The nine books fall into three trilogies (roughly), but only the first two have been turned into TV. The last trilogy, which dwarfs in scale and consequences the previous two, now looks unlikely to get the adaptation it deserves.

While it is far from original - the Expanse borrows heavily from nearly a century of American and British space opera, from the Golden Age to the New Wave and the modern reinvention of the genre - it uses the tropes and cliches of the genre to great effect. It also has structural similarities to George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels. Both use multiple narrative third-person viewpoints. Both tell a tale of complex politics with multiple powers and personalities striving to control a chaotic, factionalised world. They introduce an initially low-key outside threat that soon grows into something that becomes the centre of the narrative while never fully explained. Above all else, both do some impressive world-building that immerses you in a believable world with diverse cultures and languages.

But it is still an artisan's work compared to the other sequence I stumbled upon this year.

Hyperion Cantos

Taking its titles from two of Joh Keat's poems, Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion, are something remarkable. The first novel is structured like the Canterbury Tales but also draws on the poetry of Keats, Christian and Jewish theology and Scripture, the works of Shusako Endo (especially Silence), hard-boiled detective fiction, and the wildest edges of modern space opera, to create something unique. It is a narrative about the emergence of sentient AI (and what comes beyond that), deity, and the purpose of humanity, suffering, life, and death. At times, I found the individual stories of the core protagonists profoundly moving and almost too painful to finish. 

All this and a cracking good yarn to boot!

I felt the second novel finished perfectly. The two sequels (Endymion and The Rise of Endymion - also from Keats) seemed unnecessary and are, by all accounts, inferior works. So I have not (yet) ventured to read them. 

While The Expanse sequence is a great, rip-roaring adventure, Hyperion Cantos are something more complex and need a slower read and re-read.

Faith, Hope and Carnage

I knew I had finally given in to my inner grumpy old white man when I began to immerse myself in the music of Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, and, most recently, Nick Cave. They all have something that speaks to my lived experience as a white man entering his seventh decade and a spirituality born of hard lives, love, losses, hope, and pain.

However, Nick Cave, the human being rather than the artist and performance persona, was a revelation to me. In a series of recorded, transcribed interviews, he and journalist Seán O'Hagan, explore his songwriting process, his relationship to fame, and the highs and lows of being in a band (including stories of drinking and drug excesses and run-ins with the police). All somewhat familiar, standard rock journalism and storytelling.

But the book veers off quite early in unexpected directions. Not least, into Cave's growing Christian faith and how he and his wife have come to terms with the loss of his fifteen-year-old son, Arthur, in a tragic accident in 2015. His reflections on faith and grief are profound, raw, hopeful, and eloquent. 

This was probably the most moving book I have 'read' in years. Actually, I listened - the audiobook is Cave and O'Hagan reading, and their voices give the whole weight of Cave's self-disclosure some extra heft. His eloquence in writing and speaking the unwritable and unspeakable are pretty remarkable. And to see a man in his mid-sixties still growing, learning, creating, and working like a trojan to produce work of remarkable quality, is heartening and inspiring to me as I look at turning sixty in the next two or three years. His output is both prodigious and diverse, from his rock albums to film soundtracks, to novels, to films.

As Cave says at one point, 'life is too damned short not to be awed'. This is from a man at an age that, in the recent past, would have seen him retiring and stepping back from all this creative energy to look back on his long life. Here instead, is someone whose pain and loss have reshaped him into a more richly human, spiritually questing individual. Maybe that is a source of hope for anyone as they enter this third act of life.

How to Inhabit Time

This brings me to my favourite book of the year! In many ways, this book gives the theological and philosophical underpinnings of what Nick Cave was writing about in the previous book. James K A Smith has written several books in recent years that seem to have resonated in Christian and possibly secular circles. From exploring the liturgies of culture and how they shape our beliefs and lives. to unpacking the dense philosophy of Charles Taylor into an engaging book about faith in the secular world, Smith has tackled complex ideas with passion and insight.

I first got turned on to his writing by his previous book, On the Road with St Augustine, turning the great early medieval theologian and philosopher into a travelling companion on a Kerouacian pilgrimage across Europe and modern-day life. Along the way, they pick up other hitchhikers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Satre, seeing the journey from their perspectives but finding a more satisfying point of view in Augustine. It is a book I keep re-reading for its depth of insight.

How to Inhabit time may be his most intimate book yet, exploring the travails of family life and loss to illustrate how faith engages with our temporal and fleeting existence as human beings. You can already see how it links back to Faith, Hope and Carnage! 

How do we understand our past and anticipate our future while living firmly grounded in the present? How do we live in the moment while recognising the past as the 'compost' out of which we are growing? How do we remain grounded in the here and now while anticipating a future steeped in biblical eschatology? Well, he does not have all the answers, but Smith's engaging, passionate, culturally rich writing will take you on a journey to discover the answers for yourself. A journey that is probably worth taking with Augustine as a travelling companion.

It's another book to read and re-read.

In my next blogs, I'll look at some of the films and TV that have shaped my year.

The 'Other'

My preferred genre of literature has, since my youth, been science fiction, in cinema, television, but above all in literature. Spy thrillers, crime, literary fiction, all have their merits, and I have enjoyed many of them, but the genre that seems to constantly challenge our knowledge of the world and of ourselves for me is science fiction.

There are many tropes that recur in the genre. The advent of artificial intelligence, the end of the world, invasions by aliens, and first contact with aliens in a less confrontational context.

It is the first contact stories that fascinate me the most. When Cervantes 'discovered' Mexico or Polo travelled to the court of the Chinese Emperor, or Xavier sent missions into Japan, all presented the West with the challenge of understanding alien cultures and societies very distant and different from our own. Now that experience of the other is best explored in fiction, as most of the world is now explored and its cultures and languages catalogued and studied endlessly. And our culture is itself under the scrutiny of these cultures, as they hold up uncomfortable but revealing mirrors to us.

While your average TV and cinema first contact story usually involves essentially human-like aliens, it is usually an exploration of these earlier, colonial encounters with other cultures that are being revisited and explored.

More challenging are those stories that present us with an encounter with something beyond our understanding, beyond our experience, and which cannot be mapped, discussed or catalogued by our senses or language.

The most fascinating recent example of this is Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy. The first book, Anhiliation has been filmed and goes on general release in the US in January and worldwide on Netflix in February. By the looks of the trailer, Alex Garland has taken a particular direction with the story that the original studiously eschews, which is disappointing.

In the trilogy, a series of characters struggle with understanding Area X, a region of the southern US coastline that has been sealed off from the outside world by an enigmatic and invisible barrier. It is only penetrable through one, distressing doorway. On the other side is a pristine ecosystem, the signs of the previous human habitation all but decayed to nothing in a few decades, save for an old Lighthouse. But is the landscape and the wildlife that inhabit it what they seem to be? And why do all those who enter come back mad, dead or changed? Something is going on in Area X that defies human measurement and understanding.

Area X is reminiscent of another, inscrutable alien environment, the enigmatic, eponymous planet Solaris in Stanislaw Lem's classic. Solaris is a world covered by an ocean that seems to create structures and forms of great complexity, but whose purpose and function is totally inscrutable. Yet the planet (or its ocean) react to human probes and the presence of scientists hovering above the surface. The most dramatic form of this reaction is the visitors that the scientists are afflicted by - manifestations of people from their past about whom they feel and a profound sense of guilt or grief. What is the purpose of these visitors? Are they probes, lab experiments or an attempt at contact? Or are they just an unconscious response from an entity too alien to truly interact with us?

Area X similarly seems to create copies of the humans who visit - but to what end is totally unclear. And there are other things moving in Area X that do not conform to any known terrestrial form. It becomes more and more clear as time goes by that a particular form of observer effect is going on. Everything, down the cellular level appears totally normal when observed, but there is a palpable sense that the rest of the time, Area X is not at all as it appears to be.

Both the Southern Reach trilogy and Solaris do not give any final answers to the nature of the other that is being encountered. What is clear is that both Area X and Solaris are not knowable. There is a limit to human understanding, there is a boundary to our knowledge.

Martin Luther challenged the scholastic tradition of his day, which believed that all we need to know can be accessed through reason and study, arguing that reason and study can only get us so far, but to apprehend God, we need him to reveal himself. The ultimate expression of that revelation came in the person of Jesus - making that which was unknowable and unapproachable both visible and touchable.

While neither Solaris nor Area X are divine - the are finite, space and time-bound entities that still elude our understanding - they remind us that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophies. However, it is in the encounter with that which is beyond us, the 'other' that we see a mirror into our own selves. It's not always a comfortable reflection to behold.

Ancillary Justice

Every now and again I get interested in a book just because of a random review I stumble upon. But now I have a Kindle, it is also easy to just download a few sample chapters to see if it really is worth reading.

What I found here was the debut novel of Anne Leckie, Ancillary Justice which was getting a lot of buzz last autumn when it first came out.  The story opens with its (probably female) protagonist, Breq, on a wintery and brutal world acting with impulsive kindness to a former officer that she had served with in the armed forces of the aggressively expansionist Radchaai empire. It soon becomes apparent that Breq has hair trigger killer instincts, some interesting enhancements, and a lot of anger.  Thus far she is similar to the tough female killers that have populated science fiction novels from William Gibson to Iain M Banks for decades.

But Breq is rather unique - she is not what she once was. Literally. She was Justice of Toren, a massive troop carrying starship, most of whose soldiers were ancillaries, mind wiped prisoners of war, now slaved to the ship's Artificial Intelligence.  As a result, Justice of Toren sees the world through multiple eyes in multiple locations, and can speak (and indeed, sing) with literally thousands of voices. Only all that is now left of her is one, lone ancillary, Justice of Toren One Esk Nineteen, out to avenge the death of all she once was and all she had once cared for. She is an AI in a human body trying fit into human society, with a quest for vengeance.

The multiple conversations and observations that her multiple self shared with her human officers and the citizens of a world recently 'annexed' by the Radchaai makes for fascinating reading, and when this is broken down in one particularly traumatic event about of a third of the way into the novel, we get a real sense of the loss, disorientation and fear that ensues for her/it.

All of this is interesting science fiction, set in a standard space operatic format and happily playing with all the usual tropes of the genre (vast empires, massive spaceships run by AIs, special weapons, exotic worlds, epic battles). But actually the novel is a lot more than this precis suggests. Exploring the nature of empire, imperial expansionism and the war crimes that are committed in the name of protecting that empire, it does what the best science fiction does and holds a mirror up to our own world. Lecke is American, but as a Brit I got at once the sense of an empire reaching the end of its expansion and the yearning for the glory days of old amongst the officer class (and their obsession with drinking tea!). One telling quote summarises the realisation that some of the Radchaai were coming to about the nature of their empire:

luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn't generally have to see that, if one doesn't wish.

Some amongst the Radchaai (a word that means 'civilised') are questioning the empire, and this hinges around two, appalling war crimes to which the Justice of Toren is both witness and contributor.  The tension between the conservative and progressive streams amongst the Radchaai are at the centre of the story.

Another interesting quirk of the narrative, and one that most reviewers (especially male reviewers) hone in on first is the use of gender. Radchaai culture and language make no apparent distinction between genders, using a single pronoun for either sex and no apparent differences in dress or social roles between male and female.  As a result, the non-human Breq struggles conceptually with languages and cultures that do make such distinctions. All characters are referred to in the feminine, except rarely where she must speak in other languages and to other cultures that do not make such distinctions, where we learn she regularly gets genders the wrong way round, causing much confusion and occasionally, offence! What this achieves is initially a sharp sense of confusion and dislocation in the reader, although by the end of the novel I had ceased to notice and was going with the flow.  It does ask the reader where her/his presuppositions about how we assume behaviour and social role will fall along gender lines, and how culturally prescribed these presuppositions are.

All this is done in a narrative that avoids too many space opera cliches that pander to the inner thirteen year old male of so many of the genre's fans. There is little violence (and when it does happen it is mostly 'off screen' and all the more disturbing for it), no sex or sexual tension (although Breq's underlying lack of humanity means she misses the cues that may be there).  Like Iain M Banks and Ken McLeod, Leckie is subverting the genre to look at political themes that this most politically conservative and masculine of all science fiction sub-genres generally eschews.

The book does end on an apparent anti-climax, but as it is the first book of a trilogy this is forgivable, leaving you at least wanting to know where it goes next. A strong start to a trilogy and an impressive debut novel. I look forward to the second volume out later this year.