A metafictional time-travelling romp.
But this plot is just the framework on which to hang an exploration of the novel. The chapters are themselves a countdown, from 'Fifteen centuries to go' which is followed by 'Fifteen decades to go' all the way until 'Fifteen years after' (which is subversively followed by 'Fifteen years after': it seems that the end of the novel is also the end of time). The first few chapters are a lecture on chronology and the making of calendars; the reader soon becomes aware that this is a presentation for a job interview. As the book continues, and the end of 1999 gets closer and closer, we learn how good the new employee is at his job. The pressure's on. His behaviour becomes stranger. As does the book itself.
Hood is playing with different forms of narrative, as James Joyce did in Ulysses. There is the lecture on history in chapter 1, an email dialogue in chapter 7, an homage to a classic of time-travelling sci-fi in chapter 8, and a conversation between two authors in chapter 9. As time becomes compressed the words are printed on top of one another creating a black rectangle or, with still further compression, a white space, reminding me of Tristram Shandy. The penultimate chapter is made of quatrains of repeated headlines, merging; the final chapter is a string of hashtags.
The author references his own work. At the millennial party in Edinburgh in chapter eight the narrator of this book meets characters from Hood's other novels: This Good Book (the main characters also being mentioned in chapter 5 as "those famous artists, whatshername and whatshisname") and Every Trick in the Book (as the narrator, merging himself into the author, says in chapter 3: “Love a book with ‘Book’ in the title, me.”). And one of the characters at the party in chapter 8 is, like the author, a Scot who lives in Cambridge.
Time becomes muddled. Chapter 7 is written in the form of a dialogue of emails straddling time zones (and thus the millennium event), except that they are in reverse chronology so that to make sense of them you have to read them in reverse order, except that one of the computers seems to stick in a certain time setting, and even when you correct for this there are some which seem to be out of order. In chapter eight time stands still as the narrator does the "Billy Pilgrim" thing (Billy Pilgrim being the time-travelling unreliable narrator of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five) during a 1999 New Year's Eve party in Edinburgh. As one of the characters at the party points out: “What the greatest art, the greatest song or painting or film does, right, is stop time. ... You’re not in time anymore, you're in the song, or the painting, or the film. You're in the film's time, not in the time around you.” (Ch 8)
Still at the millennial party, things get ever weirder in chapter nine. The narrator encounters Muriel Spark ("famed for her omniscient narrators") and a sporadically Scottish-speaking Jean Cocteau in dialogue, although Cocteau died in 1963 and seems to have the ability to shape-shift, assuming the form of whichever famous person he is referencing, including Alasdair Gray, a Scottish author who is clearly an inspiration for Iain Hood. The point is made that this is fiction, or metafiction, and predictions from the point of view of the characters are history to the author: "A new character says, because I want her to, I don't know. Terrorists will start flying planes into buildings. The climate going nuts. Financial collapse. A virus, a new pox. A war." (Ch 9)
This is the climax and the author is now subverting the form as hard as he possibly can. It's not just Alasdair Gray we're referencing, it's also William Burroughs (specifically his Naked Lunch but it could refer to any other of his shuffled-narrative novels). This is where the author reveals his theme: “Well, let me tell you. Character is a fiction. Identity is a fiction. Chronology is a fiction. In here. Even fiction is a fiction. And a tautology is a tautology is a tautology is a tautology and smells of nothing. Ah, but a rose! A rose still smells sweet!” (And still the games continue; we seem to be merging Gertrude Stein’s ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’ with Shakespeare’s ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’.)
Like the society it is satirising, it's utterly chaotic and endlessly creative: Surrealism meets Monty Python. It's not a conventional novel by any means. But it's great fun.
Selected quotes:
- “Everyone knows the theory of memes now, that ideas or thoughts, rituals or practices, images or sounds follow evolutionary pathways down through time. They proliferate by replication, come about through mutation, experience natural selection to determine their survival or death. Eventually, there is variation which does not stop evolving, and there is no perfect meme, just as there is no perfect set of genes.” (Ch 4)
- “One day, God was going around, you know, being omnipotent, moving in a mysterious way and all that, when he fell into an existential crisis - God's second-biggest existential crisis after the I’M LONELY!!!!! cri de coeur of, you know, creating everything. ... He realised, with the number of miscarriages that occur in the natural course of things for all animals and in the human population, which was particularly on His mind, them being made in His image in all, meant that He, the maker all things, the prime mover, all that is, He was the greatest abortionist of all time.” (Ch 6)
- “Smiting sounded good, nice work if He could get it.” (Ch 6)
- “The moment caught in the camera's light’s flash. ... The freeze-frame. except with everything moving within the frame. The Brownian motion of the mad moment.” (Ch 8) Brown was a botanist who studied at the University of Edinburgh.
- “History, ye see, is a bunch ay truths which eventually turn oot to be lies, whilst the old mythology is a bunch ay lies that eventually come out true, become truths.” (Ch 9)
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