A woman in a mental hospital visits a Utopian future by means of telepathic time travel.
Connie (Consuela) is a poor Latino woman living in New York. Whilst trying to shelter her niece she breaks a pimp's nose, for which she is returned to mental hospital. Here she is selected for neurosurgery to have electrodes planted in her brain so that she can be controlled. This reminded me of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.
From time to time Connie visits, through some form of telepathy, a Utopian commune in rural Massachusetts, 160 years in the future. She meets the people and they explain their way of life. It's very communistic and, having liberated women from bearing children and breast-feeding, the genders have equal status. There has been and still is warfare against less enlightened society but her new friends look forward to the time when they will have solved their external problems.
Connie's problem, which drives the plot, is to avoid the impending neurosurgery. She attempts escape but in the end is forced to considered a more drastic solution.
For me, the very best examples of speculative fiction keep world-building to a minimum; for example classics such as Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro or The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham are set firmly in the everyday world we all know ... with one or two little tweaks that make all the difference. Woman on the Edge of Time is the opposite: it indulges in full-throttle world-building. In order that the reader can appreciate all the finer points of the depicted utopia (and an alternate dystopia) it uses a tour-guide approach whereby one of the characters explains all the features of the world to Connie. Not only was this rather wearisome, especially when we had a full chapter on the funeral rites of one of the characters, but also it meant a great deal of telling rather than showing. On the other hand, if you like world-building, it meant that a lot of world got built quickly.
The tour-guide approach reminded me of Virgil leading Dante through Hell in Dante's Inferno and that is referred to rather more explicitly. As Connie enters the mental hospital we are told “Here she was with her life half spent, Midway through her dark journey". This echoes the first line of the Inferno: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" ('When in the middle of the journey of our life').
At then end of the book we are left with the uncertainty about whether the time travel was real or fantasised by Connie; she is in a mental hospital and she is diagnosed with schizophrenia.
I found that the sheer unlikelihood of it all made it difficult for me to suspend my disbelief. I am always slightly suspicious of the idea that if we all went back to nature everyone would be nicer: people in rural areas often seem more fanatically prejudiced than those in more cosmopolitan places. The process of reaching Utopia also always seems underestimated: in the case of this novel there must have been savage depopulation over a relatively short space of time.
It very much reminded me of News From Nowhere by William Morris in which the protagonist falls asleep and wakes up in another rural paradise in the future. Both in the 'brooder' baby hatchery of Chapter 5 and in the children attempting to have sex in Chapter 7 there are clear echoes of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. However, WotEoT lacks the moral nuancing of BNW; this is very much a tale of goodies and baddies.
But there are some great characters. Many in the supporting cast felt real and Dolly was a delight, especially when she visits the mental hospital in Chapter 11 and is so befuddled by drugs that she keeps recycling though the same conversation. I enjoyed Jackrabbit as well, although most of the creation of his character came from what others said about him, again a matter of telling rather than showing.
There are some stunning descriptions too, especially of the mental hospital and Connie's attempted escape. The first scene is wonderfully dramatic. I also enjoyed the way the author gave the characters in the future their own words whose meanings the reader had to work out for themselves, a technique used with great effect in The Book of Dave by Will Self and, supremely, in The Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, another book with psychological personality manipulation as a theme.
Selected quotes:
- “She pitched forward, weak as string.” (Ch 1)
- “When blocked, manoeuvre to survive. the first rule of life inside.” (Ch 1)
- "Then the gates swallowed the ambulance-bus and swallowed her as she left the world and entered the underland where all who were not desired, who caught like rough teeth in the cogwheels, who had no place or fit crosswise the one they were hammered into, were carted to repent of their contrariness or to pursue their mad vision down to the pit of terror.” (Ch 1)
- “Houses filled with machines and lapped by grass.” (Ch 2)
- The modern world is described as “fat, wasteful, thing-filled times.” (Ch 3)
- “We are born screaming Ow and I! the gift is in growing to care, to connect, to cooperate.” (Ch 12)
- “Your drug companies labelled things side effects they didn't want as selling points. It's a funny way to look at things, like a horse in blinkers.” (Ch 14)
- “A factory makes a product. But that's not all. It makes there be less of whatever it uses up to make that product. ... A factory may also produce pollution - which takes away drinking water downstream. Dead fish we can't eat. Diseases or gene defects. These too are products of that factory. A factory uses up water, power, space. It uses up the time, the lives of those who work in it. If the work is boring and alienating, it produces bored, angry people.” (Ch 14)
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