"Woman on the Edge of Time" by Marge Piercy

 

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)

An interesting book but too heavy on the exposition and too light on making the future believable. 

November 2024; 417 pages

Originally published in the US by Knopf in 1976

I read the DelRey edition published in the UK in 2016.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"News from Nowhere" by William Morris

The original uploader was VAwebteam at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

The narrator of this story, who calls himself William Guest, goes to sleep and wakes up in the future. If that reminds you of Rip van Winkle by Washington Irving, it's not the only model. There is the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus which was included in the mediaeval Golden Legend and - as the Companions of the Cave - the Quran; their legend is mentioned in The Grey King by Susan Cooper. There's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, which was published the year before News from Nowhere was first serialised, although in this book the time travel is backwards and caused by a blow to the head. And, perhaps most obviously, there is Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, a novel which Morris reviewed, in which the protagonist falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in a socialist world in 2000; it was a best-seller in its day. Morris had a lot of possible models for his fiction.

But News from Nowhere is only tangentially a novel. For a start, the plot is really just a chronicle of things happening, with very little novelistic shape to it: it's no more than a frame on which to hang philosophical speculations. Fundamentally, there is a lack of conflict, and conflict is what drives most novel narratives. The characters surrounding the protagonist, are fundamentally nice, including the grumpy granddad. The only real tension is that the narrator is worried that he will let slip that he is from the past; he pretends to be from another country. 

It's poorly written. None of the characters have any depth, in fact they are so flat they are scarcely even two-dimensional. Of the principals:

• Dick is Mr Marvellous. Not only is he incredibly nice - he happily forgives his girlfriend after she has had an affair with another man - and eternally cheerful and immensely generous with his time but also he is a wonderful rower and, as he himself modestly says, “a pretty good mower”. I disliked him from the start.
• His grandfather, Hammond, is nice and kind and very wise.
• There is a grumpy old man who is grumpy about everything.
• The women are delightfully kind and delightfully pretty.

The first chapter is a third person narrative describing things happening to “a friend”; this then morphs in the second chapter and subsequently into a first person narrative. This narrative shift could be seen as the creation of a frame narrative in order to distance the ‘I’ of the narrator from the author, despite the many hints in the text that these are, in fact, one and the same (for example, they end up at Kelmscott Manor, the house where Morris lived, and this is described by the narrator as being familiar). In fact it just feels clumsily inconsistent.

There are poorly written sentences. For example:

• “As he sat in that vapour-bath of hurried and discontented humanity, a carriage of the underground railway, he, like others, stewed discontentedly.” (Ch 1) The repetition of discontented/ discontentedly does not seem deliberate (as it would be if this was an example of anaphora) and therefore, although the image is compelling, this is a poorly constructed sentence.
• “To her quoth Dick, ‘ Maiden, would you kindly hold our horse while we go in for a little while?’” (Ch 6) The use of ‘quoth’, archaic even then and used mainly in fiction set in the mediaeval period, and the strange word order, and the use of ‘Maiden’ as a title to address a young girl by, all suggest that Morris is trying to evoke Merrie England in the way that typically hack Victorian writers such as Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake and Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter did.
• “All work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant, or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit.” (Ch 15) Lots of pleasure! Is this anaphora? Or carelessness?

But it isn't really intended to be a novel. Like the central part of 1984, it is basically a platform for Morris's utopian socialist political ideas. The basis of it is that the Industrial Revolution was a Bad Thing and that the perfect future is a return to the rural paradise that Morris thinks was England in the Middle Ages. It was fashionable at the time (for example, Oscar Wilde with his aestheticism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with which Morris was associated, being a lifelong friend of Edward Burne-Jones and sharing his wife with Dante Gabriel Rossetti) to romanticise the mediaeval period. Morris is aware is wasn't all great back then: “Have you not read of the Mediaeval period, and the ferocity of its criminal laws; and how in those days men fairly seemed to have enjoyed tormenting their fellow-men? - nay, for the matter of that, they made their God a tormentor and a jailer rather than anything else.” (Ch 7) 

He seems to believe that all was parasidical back then as a matter of taste. He loves the Gothic aesthetic, being an enormous fan of that architecture and adoring Mallory's Morte D'Arthur. Mediaeval good, Victorian bad is a dogma with him and anything made of metal, such as “the beastly iron bridge” (C 14), is horrid and bad. 'Chacun a son gout', or 'one man's meat is another man's poison', or 'de gustibus non est disputandum' are not precepts which sway Morris. 

Fundamentally, his socialist utopia is achieved by clearing the slums of London and sending the population back into the countryside (sounds a bit like what Mao did in the Cultural Revolution, or what Pol Pot did in Cambodia) where they will be housed in the stately homes on the grand estates (plenty of room?) and will produce the necessities of life by farming. He suggests that much of what is produced in the Victorian factories is unnecessary, cheap and shoddy wares which are only wanted because people have been brainwashed into thinking they are necessary. True necessities (presumably including the pipe and tobacco that the narrator buys) can be hand produced. And Morris believes that hand-production is inherently pleasurable for the labourer. Therefore people will not need to be incentivised or forced to work, they will do it because they enjoy it, whether it is the outside work of ferrying or haymaking or digging up the road which they do because it makes them feel fit, or the more artisan work such as making beautiful pipes. 

This obviously reflects Morris’s own life. He set up a craft co-operative producing furniture and interior decoration such as wallpaper. The irony was that despite it being backed by Morris’s personal fortune (inherited shareholdings in, among other things, copper mines) the company made things that only well-off people could afford. Even nowadays, Morris designs and artisan products are more expensive that mass-produced goods and there are many people who have no chance of affording them. Perhaps this dream of a utopia was Morris trying the reconcile the realities of his life (inherited money, crafts produced for the wealthy) with his socialist ideals. 

Dick's forgiving nature when his girlfriend asks to return to him following her affair is an opportunity for Morris to set out his views of marriage. He doesn't believe in it, or at least not in the way that, in the Victorian era, women were often treated as property, belonging to father or brother before being sold to a husband. In this respect, the novel matches reality. Morris married Jane Burden, who had been one of the models (and possibly one of the lovers) of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Jane was available because Rossetti married another model, Lizzie Siddal. But when Siddal died, Rossetti returned to 'claim' Jane, and for a while Morris, Rossetti and Jane lived in a threesome where it seems likely that Jane, still married to Morris and mother to his two daughters, slept exclusively with Rossetti. The utopian ideal of free love in the pages of News from Nowehere, matches this situation (although there are suggestions that Morris wasn't particularly happy with the arrangements). But in other respects, Morris isn't quite as enlightened: “Don't you know that it is a great pleasure to a clever woman to manage a house skilfully, and to do it so that all the house-mates about her look pleased and are grateful to her?” (Ch 9) Not a lot of liberation! And, since he has abolished parliamentary democracy, he fudges the issue of women’s suffrage.

On the other hand, as an ex-teacher who was once a pupil at Eton College, I thought he made some valid points about education:

• “You expected to see children thrust into schools when they had reached an age conventionally supposed to be the due age, whatever their varying faculties and dispositions might be” (Ch 10)
• “In the nineteenth century, society was so miserably poor, owing to the systematised robbery on which it was founded, that real education was impossible for anybody.” (Ch 10)
• “In the nineteenth century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cambridge ... were the breeding places a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people.” (Ch 10)
• Eton College is “a place for the ‘aristocracy’ ... to get rid of the company of their male children for a great part of the year.” (Ch 24)

Other selected quotes:

• “They were clothed like women, not upholstered like arm-chairs.” (Ch 3)
• “A big mastiff, who was as happily lazy as if the summer-day had been made for him alone.” (Ch 7)
• “His face, dried-apple-like as it was seemed strangely familiar to me; as if I had seen it before - in a looking glass it might be, said I to myself.” (Ch 9)
• “Was not the Parliament on the one side a kind of watch-committee sitting to see that the interests of the Upper Classes took no hurt; and on the other side a sort of blind to delude the people into supposing that they had some share in the management of their own affairs?” (Ch 11)
• “It was a current jest of the time that the wares were made to sell and not to use.” (Ch 15)
• “Their raiment, apart from its colour, was both beautiful and reasonable - veiling the form, without either muffling or caricaturing it.” (Ch 19)
• “As for your books, they were well enough for times when intelligent people had but little else in which they could take pleasure, and when they must needs supplement the sordid miseries of their own lives with imaginations of the lives of other people.” (Ch 22)

An interesting, rather than a fun read. It's a dream of an ideal society. It didn't convince me, although there is very little argument expended in order to try and convince me.

May 2024; 182 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God