Chronocules by D. G. Compton

In a recent blog post, tarbandu described a stack of vintage SF paperbacks he'd picked up at an antiques store, and among them was the 1970 printing of D. G. Compton's Chronocules with the cover by the Dillons.  This reminded me that I owned a 1980 copy of Chronocules, acquired on one of my trips to the Carolinas to visit in-laws.  I decided that now was the time to read the novel, even if its apparent length (my copy has about 200 pages of text, and quite small print) was a little daunting.

(After drafting this blog post I looked at Joachim Boaz's 2013 post on Chronocules, to find that Joachim and I are basically on the same page on this one; often we have different opinions of works, or engage them from different angles, but not so much this time.  So, you should feel free to read his post and skip mine, which just goes into more detail and includes far more spoilers.)

I was immediately disappointed to find that the first pages of Chronocules, a "Prolog," were written in a jokey, sarcastic, smart-alecky style.  I don't need any more sarcasm or any more unfunny jokes in my life; everybody I know, and I am the worst of them, talks like he thinks he is a comedian, so in fiction I hope to find sincerity, counterfeit or otherwise.  But I persevered.  

The prolog is about a low-IQ hermit, Roses Varco, a man born of a broken home who in 1968 is living alone like a wretched squatter in an abandoned English village on the coast, Penheniot.  One day Roses is by the water reading some kind of comic book or children's adventure story and hears a loud noise from inside his dilapidated cottage.  A high tech book has teleported into his home, its materialization causing what amounts to an explosion.  (The appearance of the book has also left an odd smell that serves as the title for at least one edition of Chronocules.)  The book glows with a cool light, stimulates the pleasure center of the imbecilic brain of the imbecilic Roses when he touches it, and is constructed of indestructible materials.  The text is too challenging for this uneducated pea-brain to read, so he throws the book in the water. 

An "Author's Note" follows the "Prolog;" the author tells us he found the indestructible book and that the lion's share of this book we are reading is an attempt to "reconstruct" the challenging glowing book, which the author admits is "quite intolerable."  The preceding prolog, he tells us, is based on his interview of Roses Varco.

The text proper returns us to the somewhat jokey and ironical third-person narration of the prolog and depicts events two decades after Roses's encounter with the book.  It is the future world of 1988, a world of laser weapons and public nudity, of worries about overpopulation and pollution as well as widespread drug use and mob violence, of concern that sexual freedom has killed the beauty and excitement of sexual relationships and fears of the possible drawbacks of feminism for women who want to build lives around children and not careers; it is a time of neologisms like the use of "sex" as a verb in place of the phrase we still today generally use: "have sex."  

Roses is still in Penheniot, kept around to serve as village idiot by the people who have taken over the now bustling village and filled it with laboratories as well as spiffy shops and housing.  The Penheniot Experimental Research Village (P.E.R.V for short) is the brainchild of Immanuel ("Manny") Littlejohn.  The raison d'etre of P.E.R.V. is the development of an apparatus that will make an object disappear and then reappear at a specific time; during the period of its absence the object will not age.  The senior of the two scientists working on the project, Igor Kravchensky, explains via an analogy I found somewhat slippery that all objects are in the stream of time, which itself is moving, and typically such objects are moving at a different rate than the stream, moving through time like a boat in a river that is propelled by a motor is moving at a differentrate than the water; Kravchensky hopes to be able to make objects temporarily match the movement of the stream of time, which means they will, temporarily, be like a boat adrift with its motor off, moving at the same speed as the river.  Such objects will no longer be in contact with our, moving, universe, and no longer suffer the decay caused by the time particles he calls "chronocules."  In this way, in theory, a person could be sent on (what amounts to him or her) an instantaneous one-way trip to the future.  The eccentric Kravchensky bristles at the phrase "time travel," insisting he is working on a means of achieving and controlling "chronomic unity." In Chapter One, however, the process is far from perfected, and only metals can be reliably made to disappear and reappear on schedule; organic objects (wooden chairs, for example) have failed to reappear and those that do return are catastrophically damaged, falling to ash upon reappearance.  

Our main characters also include P.E.R.V.'s 46-year-old Operations Supervisor ("O. S."), David Silberstein, who is in direct command of everything, answering only to Littlejohn, and 26-year-old scientist Liza Simmons, assistant to head scientist Kravchensky.  Silberstein is attracted to Simmons, but they are from different generations and on totally different wavelengths; Liza is promiscuous like most people of her generation and directly suggests to Silberstein that they have sex, but while she thinks of sex as just a fun trifle, David is shy and nervous and apparently thinks sex is, or should be, meaningful--Liza considers him crippled by "hang-ups" and thinks he talks like a "caricature of the fifties."  

Chapter One focuses on Silberstein, Chapter Two on Simmons, Chapter Three on Immanuel Littlejohn, founder, financial backer and dictator of P.E.R.V.  In this third chapter it is made plain that P.E.R.V. is meant to be a self-sufficient community and that its inhabitants have been enjoined (on pain of death!) to cut all ties to the outside because Littlejohn envisages moving the entire village to the future!  Littlejohn's aim is to escape the problems of the current time and to access future high tech medical care that he, a man in his eighties, can take advantage of to prolong his life.  Littlejohn is presented as calculating, callous, ruthless, selfish and self-indulgent, an amoral man with bad taste devoted to his own pleasures no matter the expense and indifferent to the fates of others.  

The climax of Chapter Three contrasts the clever and selfish Littlejohn and the scientists in his employ with the stupid but empathic Roses Varco.  Littlejohn arrives at P.E.R.V. on a surprise inspection.  Compton, at great length, shows how contemptuous of and alienated from everybody Littlejohn is, with one exception--Littlejohn is friendly with fellow old geezer Kravchensky, the two having much in common.  Expecting a demonstration of time travel chronomic unity achieved by a living thing, the unprepared scientist sees Roses playing with a dog, and demands the canine.  As we readers expect, the canine is killed in the experiment, leading Roses to weep--in contrast to the moron's empathic human rection, Kravchensky the scientist is curious and cold, and Littlejohn the self-absorbed businessman selfishly is consumed by fears he himself may be killed one day by the still-unreliable chronomic apparatus.

When I wrote about Compton's Synthajoy some years ago I made some remarks about Compton's treatment of Jewish characters, how he portrayed them as an exotic community distinct from the English or British community and associated them with business and capitalism.  The portrayal of Jews in this book is also of interest, and seems similar.  On page 25 Compton (or should we say the nameless author of this book, or the author of the high-tech future book he seeks to interpret?) details Silberstein's thoughts on how difficult the chronomic unity project is, taking the opportunity to hint that Silberstein thinks Jews are smarter than gentiles:

After all, even the Americans, with the help of the best Jewish brains in the world and a budget equal to the combined GNPs of all the emergent nations, had taken God knows how long to ship their puny little space station up onto the moon.  Two years for a project such as P.E.R.V. was engaged upon was next to nothing. 

I have pointed out that in Chapter Three that Compton offers an abundance of evidence demonstrating Littlejohn's distance from the people around him, his contempt for them and alienation from them.  Is this a portrayal of the Jew as an outsider who uses his cleverness and wealth to manipulate others, as a creature who uses his gifts to improve his own lot and enjoy himself and cares not a whit about the mass of gentiles among whom he lives?  After all, Littlejohn isn't bending his vast resources to the task of solving the problems of the late 20th century (pollution, overpopulation, exhaustion of natural resources) but rather to escaping them.  

One of these pieces of evidence of Littlejohn's alienation from Chapter Three seems to emphasize the wealthy man's ethnic/religious identity--Littlejohn says of David Silberstein on page 82 that the O.S. is "so British," hinting that, compared to the Jew Littlejohn, his fellow Jew Silberstein is assimilated into English culture (even though in Chapter Two we saw that Silberstein is not at all in sync with the current casual sex culture exemplified by twenty-something Simmons.)  Perhaps we should see the episode of the dog as another way of contrasting Jewish Littlejohn with English Roses Varco--there is the stereotype, remember, that English people love love love animals.  

In Chapter Four we learn the true mission of P.E.R.V. is kept secret from the government when a woman from the "Committee for Moral Responsibility in Science" comes by to aggressively investigate the place.  David Silberstein and his colleagues lie to her outrageously, including about the murders they have committed in their quest to sever the ties of the P.E.R.V. staff and residents to the outside world.  

Chronocules is full of skepticism of science, a skepticism the Committee woman makes explicit:  "...you, in common with most scientists, are socially and environmentally irresponsible.  Criminally so."  Compton is not employing her as a mouthpiece, however, at least not solely--she is about as much a victim of Compton's satire as any of the other characters.  While Manny Littlejohn is a caricature of the gauche nouveau riche Jewish businessman, she is a caricature of the absurdly openminded liberal who excuses the behavior of murderous rioters and considers all forms of sexual license and drug use to be "healthy experimentation" and, when late in the novel she achieves prominence in the British government, she becomes the avatar of extreme and self-destructive government incompetence.   

More subtle presentations of Compton's themes of skepticism of science--or at least scientists--as well as skepticism of modern methods that stress efficiency and skepticism of modern notions about what constitutes freedom, are offered by a decorative clock in the lab where Kravchensky and Liza work on the unreliable chronomic unity device, and by the novel's touchstone and moral center, Roses Varco.  The elaborate clock, I guess some sort of hip novelty or art installation, deliberately tells the wrong time, and offers useless trivia to the scientists, like the arrival and departure times of trains in India.  Roses initially fascinates Liza Simmons and David Silberstein, who cultivate relationships with him and (in the first half of the novel) suspect the low-I.Q. man, an adult virgin in a world of casual sex who sits by the river and fishes with a line when he could catch fish much more easily with a net, is some kind of wise man in touch with nature.  Of him, Liza thinks,

One of Roses' great qualities was that he was always occupied, but never busy....She could think of no better way of living.

While Manny Littlejohn grasps at money and power and Liza Simmons pursues knowledge and career, Roses, like a classical stoic or a Christian embodying the serenity prayer, is satisfied with what he has and doesn't push himself to acquire more.

The chapter with the Committee lady, Chapter Four, is followed by an "Interjection" in the voice of the writer of the prolog that sits at the halfway point of the novel and gives us more info about the glowing book that the text we are reading in the numbered chapters is meant to reproduce.  The glowing book is apparently an interactive work somewhat like one of those Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks which have brought me so much pleasure over the decades--its plot adapts to reader predilections or is largely determined by reader choices.  The author of the prolog and interjection is, it seems, rewriting the book in a linear fashion, relating to us the plot his own choices produced, not a definitive version of the narrative of the high-tech volume.

Chapter Five continues with the animal business.  Roses likes to go look at rabbits and swans, and takes Liza on some of these little expeditions.  In Chapter Four they found rabbits that are mutants with only three legs, and in Chapter Five they find some swans that have died from pollution.  The plot advances quite a bit in Chapter Five, as Kravchensky (on his own, without Liza's help, while she was hanging around Roses) has achieved a breakthrough, figuring out how to send living things into the future, and David orders an end to all intercourse between P.E.R.V. and the rest of the world because a mutant disease, maybe born of pollution, maybe having escaped a government lab, has struck England.  Liza admits to herself that she is in love with Roses when they (having come in contact with outsiders on their ill-fated swan-watching jaunt) are quarantined together in the same hospital room.  

In Chapter Six a group of outsiders invades P.E.R.V. and is easily neutralized.  David figures out that a minor character of whom we have seen little, Sir Edwin Solomons, is a traitor and passed to this crew of interlopers a description of P.E.R.V.'s defenses.  David interviews this Solomons, who says he was disillusioned by the project once he realized that there can be no free will if time travel is real, and then has Solomons summarily executed.  

Meanwhile, the sound of the firefights outside has scared the dimwitted Roses, and Liza gets into bed with him, ostensibly to comfort him, but really because she lusts after him--she has had sex with many men in her life, but she wants Roses more than she has wanted any man, perhaps because he, having had the morality of an earlier time impressed upon him in his youth, has been rejecting her advances.  (Maybe Liza, who has chosen career over children, also feels motherly towards the dim-witted comic-book reader who is scared of thunder.)  The climax of Chapter Six is when Liza tells Roses she loves him and finally succeeds in seducing him, but he takes her so roughly, bruising her and cutting her lips and her breast, that she is nauseated and ashamed--later she will think of their coupling as a rape.  (Sexual relationships in this novel are always between incompatible partners and always a disappointment for at least one of the participants.)  From loving Roses, Liza turns to hating him, and in Chapter Seven we find David Silberstein hating Roses as well, he out of jealousy over Liza.

Most of Chapter Seven is about attacks on P.E.R.V. by riotous outsiders and efforts of the hapless government to investigate the place (government officials claim to suspect it is the source of the plague); employing high tech weapons, David and his security apparatus repel these incompetent interventions. 

Chapter Eight finds David, his thinking influenced by Solomons's philosophical talk back in Chapter Six, beginning to doubt the whole "time travel" chronomic unity plan, just as Kravchensky and Liza are achieving success in sending mammals safely into the future--or so they think!  Rushed by events, as more criminal attacks and more government interventions threaten P.E.R.V., Kravchensky and Liza run their first test on a human, a woman chosen by lot, Rachel Moser.  Moser returns from chronomic unity precisely on schedule after fifteen minutes, but has suffered terrible brain damage--the sort of damage it has been impossible to easily detect in the quadrupeds who were the earlier, apparently unharmed, test subjects.

In Chapter Nine, Roses Varco is selected to be sent to the future, Kravchensky and Liza using a different technique which, it is hoped, will not scramble his already inferior brain, but which is not quite as reliable when it comes to scheduling the moment when a subject will emerge from chronomic unity.  David Silberstein strongly supports sending Roses, showing himself to be as selfish and ruthless as Littlejohn--David is under the misapprehension that Liza is still in love with the dolt and that Roses's death or disappearance will clear the way for a relationship with her, the only woman David has ever loved.

Chapter Ten, the final proper chapter, the author tells us, is not based on the glowing book, but is pure speculation.  (Chronocules not only warns us against trusting scientists, but against trusting authors, who will just make stuff up and present it as fact.)  This brief chapter of speculation suggests that Roses, undamaged, reappeared 57 years later, within the lifetime of Liza Simmons.  Simmons is the ruthless dictator of a new world, a world she and her armies have pacified through merciless violence.  She co-wrote with a minor character whom I have not mentioned that glowing book which was somehow sent back to 1968.  Liza shows Roses the book.  Liza has a son, now in his late fifties, whom she has told was the product of a coupling with Kravchensky, but when the son sees Varco he realizes Varco is his father.  It is Liza's son who uses the advanced version of the chronomic unity device to send book and Varco back to '68; after he does so, his mother murders him.  Adding to these melodramatic speculations are the author's speculations that soon after the events depicted in Chapter Nine that David Silberstein will commit suicide, Manny Littlejohn will be murdered by the wife he mistreated, and Kravchensky will be killed by a mob.

In the "Epilog" we are told that when Roses Varco reappeared in 1968, with the book, because two versions of a man cannot coexist in the same time period, he vanished, leaving only the indestructible book for his younger self to find.           

So, can I recommend the pessimistic bundle of late '60s/early '70s anxieties about the perils of sexual liberation and recreational drug use, environmental degradation, violent crime and revolutionary political violence, government incompetence and the indifference or malevolence of economic and intellectual elites that is Chronocules?  Personally, I found Chronocules a little boring; when I would sit at the desk or lay down in bed to read it, it was all too easy to get distracted by 1970s issues of Vampirella or that manga about a sad office lady.  Compton is long-winded, making his points again and again via jokes that, while not bad, are not funny enough to laugh at, either.  The characters are bland or over the top, so you don't care about them.  The scenes of violence and sex aren't designed to excite you, but, I guess, to depress you.  The plot grinds forward logically enough, but slowly.  And I suppose the novel's gender politics and portrayal of a vulgar predatory rich Jew may offend some.

On the plus side, Chronocules has a kind of Gene Wolfe-like unreliable narrator thing going as well as the sort of mind-blowing ending in which everything comes full circle that I associate with A. E. van Vogt's work as well as some of Wolfe's novels.   

Chronocules is OK; I can see people who actually want a pessimistic satire that attacks science and progress and social change and authority and expertise enjoying Chronocules, but if you aren't one of those people you are likely to find it underwhelming.

Synthajoy by D. G. Compton

"What you're doing to Tony there--can you justify that as satisfying a need?"

"Of course I can.  The need for innovation.  It's as potent as the need for sex, or for power."

Against his rationalizations I could only range a deep, instinctive repugnance.

As a kid growing up in Northern New Jersey I spent lots of time riding in the car on Route 80, travelling between home and my maternal grandmother's house. Nana, as we called her, had lots of cool old toys that I now see in antique stores, a round tin box full of like 12 pounds of fascinating buttons for us to sift through, and a bookcase full of hardcover books, including an encyclopedia published during World War II that, among other things, had black and white reproductions of Charles R. Knight paintings under the dinosaur entries, and a lot of those Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I bring this up not just because I like reminiscing about my prosaic childhood, but because it appears (according to this page at the New York Review of Books website) that critically acclaimed SF author D. G. Compton has done work for Reader's Digest Condensed Books as an editor and as a condenser!

Compton's first science fiction book published in America was 1968's Synthajoy, and this week I read my copy, the Ace Science Fiction Special edition with the cover by the Dillons.  I liked Compton's Steel Crocodile when I read it in July, so I expected to like this one as well, and I was not disappointed.  Joachim Boaz read Synthajoy in 2011 (check out his review here) and on this topic we are in close agreement--he also quite liked it.

Synthajoy is presented in the form of a first-person narrative from Thea Cadence, a nurse and the wife of Edward Cadence, a doctor and the co-inventor of Sensitape. The text switches back and forth between a day to day narrative of her confinement in a mental hospital, and flashbacks to what I think of as "the main plot," the story of the development of Sensitape and of Thea's relationships with Edward and with electronics expert Tony Stech, the other half of the Sensitape development team. The irony is that Thea is now receiving the very Sensitape treatment she helped devise with her husband Edward and his partner Tony!

Synthajoy sees use of literary or "New Wavey" techniques, like a sentence typed in undulating curves instead of on a level line, passages written in the form of a film script or a play, and sections and chapters that end in the middle of a sentence--many of these sentences are never completed.  Most importantly, the main plot is not related in strict chronological order.

The main plot: An increasing number of people in overcrowded England have come to feel life is not worth living, and they just lay down and, after a few weeks, even though their bodies are perfectly healthy, die. The medical professionals call this "Uncompensated Death Wish," or UDW, and over a million people a year are dying of it!  Edward and Thea Cadence treat UDW cases, one of whom is the Jewish owner of an electronics shop, Jacob Stech. Jacob's death inspires his son, Tony, to devote his electronics expertise to curing the disease, and together Edward and Tony invent a machine that cures UDW, Sensitape. Sensitape is a system by which people's thoughts and feelings are recorded and can be played back for others via a headset; the first tape, called Relaxatape, plays a recording of the brain waves of a person at peace, and the brainwaves of those who "listen" to the tape conform to the recording, forcing them to relax. Millions of lives are saved from UDW through use of such therapeutic tapes and Edward becomes a national hero, but the Sensitape team doesn't stop there.  Soon Edward and Tony are at the head of a major commercial enterprise, recording tapes of all kinds of experiences, from artistic creation to sexual intercourse, and selling the tapes and the machines needed to play them not only to medical institutions for therapeutic use, but also on the retail market for entertainment purposes.

While not a scientist herself, Thea is instrumental in the development of Sensitape; for one thing, she introduces Tony to Edward, suggesting that Tony ("the electronics king of West London") could be of assistance in overcoming apparently insuperable technical challenges faced by Edward.  As Thea begins to doubt the morality of Senistape, her essential role in its development burdens her with tremendous guilt. ("All this, the whole hellish structure, is my fault....I could have altered the fate of the human race.")  As she sits at the machinery with Edward and Tony while they record the brain waves of a couple having sex, she becomes vomitously ill.  She is in physical contact with a dying priest as his last thoughts are recorded and is a witness to Edward convincing musicians and artists to have their acts of performance and creation recorded.  And then there is a scene which explicitly tells us Sensitape is something like drug abuse, when gangsters who control the European heroin and cocaine trade knock on the Cadences' door and, guns drawn, demand they be given a cut of the profits of Sensitapes sold as a narcotic substitute because this product is driving the drug dealers out of business.

We've seen this sort of thing, artificial dreams or recorded thoughts used as therapy or entertainment/pornography/addictive substance more than once over the course of this blog's life, in numerous early '70s Barry Malzberg stories, in Lin Carter's 1968 "The Thief of Thoth", and Evelyn Lief's 1972 "Every Fourth House."  New Jersey's own Malzberg, one of the premier critics and historians of science fiction, in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, cites Peter Phillips as being the first to do this sort of thing back in 1948.

The human part of the plot concerns how Edward's and Thea's marriage is a cold sham, how Edward starts having an affair with the woman known as Mrs. X (the woman who was recorded for the sex tape--she has perhaps the highest sex drive in Britain!) and then Thea starts an affair with Tony.  Everything comes to a head after Tony dies in an experiment in which he "listens to" an experimental tape which Edward has prepared, Synthajoy, a tape which synthesizes various pleasurable and ecstatic experiences to create the ultimate pleasure, and Thea has a bad reaction to a recording of the emotions of a genius conductor leading his orchestra--she can feel the love of the genius for Brahms, and it makes her feel like an abominable interloper. ("To experience the tape was to trespass on that love....")  Edward is murdered; Thea tells us that Mrs. X, wanting to renegotiate her sex tape contract for a bigger share of the profits, killed Edward so she could steal the contract, but Thea herself is convicted of the crime. (All this adultery, murder, and murder trial jazz perhaps reflects Compton's career as a mystery novelist.)  Thea is sentenced to confinement in the very hospital for which she did interior design and subjected to the very sort of therapy she helped develop, compelled to experience tapes designed to induce contrition...or is it guilt?

In the last pages of the novel we realize how mentally unstable and how unreliable a narrator Thea may really be when she provides a different version of the story of the murder, we learn the truth(?) about her alleged frigidity, and, after spending the whole book talking about how she hates Sensitape and what it has done to British society ("hellish structure") and how she looks down on profit seekers ("To buy (with money) what Beldik had recorded (for money) was to compound a moral felony"), she declares she will perfect Synthajoy--the ultimate Sensitape!--and make a bazillion pounds selling it, apparently to get revenge on Mrs. X.  (Shades of Winston Smith!) To what extent has Thea always been flawed, and to what extent has the Sensitape therapy/punishment/brainwashing turned her into the troubled person we have spent this book with?

Synthajoy is a good novel and I enjoyed it.  The characters and their relationships are all believable and interesting, and all the literary touches (the somewhat experimental stuff I've mentioned, and also more conventional things like detailed descriptions of rooms and landscapes) aren't just showoffy frippery that obscure the narrative, but actually make the book more engaging.

Back of my copy

The science fiction elements are alright, but are secondary to the human drama.  The obvious novels to compare Synthajoy to are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, but while those novels create rich fictional worlds and address, head on, important political and philosophical debates, in Synthajoy Compton doesn't really describe a world much different than our own or make a very direct or convincing moral or political argument.  The reviews from UK periodicals quoted on the back of my copy claim the novel is "horrifying" and "hair-raising," but I didn't feel that it was all that "horrifying" myself.  The England depicted by Compton isn't some kind of totalitarian nightmare; it seems like everybody whose brainwaves are recorded on Sensitapes, and most everybody who uses Sensitapes, is doing so voluntarily.  (As a convicted murderer, Thea is the exception.)

Compton's gripe seems to be that the people who produce the tapes are doing so for money, and that those using them are decadent sheep, the prey of manipulative sleaze merchants; Compton's complaints about Sensitape are reminiscent of the evergreen complaints we hear about drugs, pornography, television, rock and roll, comic books, etc., that these are shallow forms of addictive entertainment that turn their consumers into soulless zombies, or at least fail to elevate them the way high brow or wholesome art is reputed to by the intellectual elite or moral arbiters.  Synthajoy is an attack on capitalism and on innovation for innovation's sake, on business and science run amuck, and Compton's case is not based on logic or evidence or historical analogy--it is based on irrational emotion, the "instinctive repugnance" expressed by Thea in the lines I chose as an epigraph for this blog post.

A clue that the book is taking a conservative stand based on tradition or prejudice or some kind of "precautionary principle" is that the book's villains, those who keep promoting Sensitape and keep pushing the envelope, accuse Thea, our heroine, of being a prude, a puritan, or a reactionary, while calling themselves "progressive" and trumpeting how they are serving mankind even as they claw and scrape for money and fame.  

There are lots of thought-provoking things going on in Compton's book that are worth talking about.  As a man, the author takes a risk in writing a first-person narrative in the voice of a woman; and when I say "risk" I basically mean a risk that women will find his depiction of a woman unconvincing and that feminists in particular might consider it an outrageous act of misrepresentation or cultural appropriation.  (Let me repeat that from my perspective the character of Thea is convincing and compelling.) On the one hand, Compton does things with Thea that feminists may appreciate: her husband uses her to advance his career, he can be dismissive of her, and he can fail to recognize her contributions.  There's a good scene in which Thea enters the room where Edward and Tony are working on their invention; the men just met this very day, but Thea finds she is already treated as an outsider by them--among men she is "the other" despite her essential contributions and her previous relationships with them.  On the other hand, Thea says stuff like "No more or less than men, women judge you, dominate you, flatter you, compete with you.  But unlike men, their motives are unfathomable," her frigidity is a major plot point, she is a victim, she acts kind of hysterical, and much of what she tells us may be a self-serving lie.

While relationships between the sexes are at the center of the novel, there are also issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural difference presented in Synthajoy, and I have to admit I am not sure why these issues were presented (though I have a theory!).  The Steches, Jacob and Tony, are Jewish, and Thea's attitude about Jews is to see them as a sort of exotic species.  "I'd seen him [Tony] and his father together--there was a feeling between them my hospital experience had already shown me to be peculiarly Jewish."  After Jacob's death, Thea goes to visit Tony's shop: "I was there because I was cold, and already dead, and I wanted to see how Jews kept warm and alive."

There is also a minor black character, Dr. Mbleble, the giant ("six feet seven, with neck and shoulders like a big black bull") Nigerian sexologist who diagnoses Thea as being sexually dysfunctional because of what he calls "the repressive puritanism Mrs. Cadence was brought up under."  I probably don't have to tell you that the oversexed Negro is a sort of cliche.

My aforementioned theory is that a minor subtext of Synthajoy is of non-Christian, non-English people changing English society, and not changing it for the better.  Tony basically invented the Sensitape that changes English society in ways Thea finds so objectionable, and Mbleble spars with Thea's lawyer at her murder trial--he not only represents sexual license, but is a threat to her freedom.  The idea of the Jew as influencer is highlighted by this line: "'No strings,' he [Edward] said, spreading his hands in Tony's Jewish way."  Tony's "Jewish ways" are infecting English Edward!

I've already told you I see Synthajoy as an attack on capitalism and the profit motive, and I probably don't have to tell you that for centuries a standard trope among anti-Semites has been the image of the Jew as the cunning and ruthless businessman. Well, late in the novel we realize Jews aren't the only category of people Thea finds exotic and fascinating:

I occupied my time observing the other members of the board, businessmen, a phenomenon I had only recently come into contact with.  Everything about them fascinated me, the way they worked, what they thought, the faces they made.  Merchants, with merchants' eyes.

Here I will note that Mrs. X, another threat to Thea, is also a foreigner, though not a particularly exotic one; she is an American.  The United States, of course, is seen by many people as a sort of archetypal capitalist country, and it is common for people to characterize the U. S. A. as a place where the only thing that matters is money. According to my theory, the Jew, the American, and the black represent a new English culture, one based on technology, profit-seeking and sensuality that is killing the old English culture based on things like Christianity and classical music (over the course of the book a priest dies and a musician has a stroke in Thea's presence) and the heroism of people like Horatio Nelson, whose column is mentioned a few times. Maybe we should see this as a bourgeois or popular revolution against society's traditional elites?

As I have suggested, to me these (perhaps unsavory) elements of Thea's personality and/or Compton's beliefs serve to make her and the book more interesting, but it seems possible that other residents of our early 21st century might find them, as the kids say, "problematic."  Your humble blogger does not hesitate to recommend Synthajoy; it is a smooth and entertaining read without any fat or fluff that is also thought-provoking and rewards close attention.  Worth the time of anybody at all interested in "literary" SF or SF that touches on psychological or gender or race issues.

The Steel Crocodile by D. G. Compton

"Why are you keeping an eye on me?"

"Orders."

"And that's all you know?"

"More than that'd only be trouble to me."

"Do you often have to watch perfectly innocent people?"

"Innocent's a big word."  He scratched his cheek.  "But I expect so."

"And that's the way you serve society?"

"I hadn't thought about it.  I don't see why not.  It's a job in a growth profession--aren't many of them left."

In our last episode I read, for the first time, one of Joachim Boaz's fave authors who perhaps is nowadays underappreciated, Langdon Jones.  Let's repeat that experiment today, this time with Boaz-approved D. G. Compton's The Steel Crocodile.  Joachim wrote about the 1970 novel back in 2011, so my memory of his review has had time to fade and I can attack this work without many preconceptions.  I own the Ace paperback, Ace 78575, with the cover by the Dillons.  I love the title--is there any hope this novel is about a tremendous mechanical war machine, like the ones in Jack Vance's  The Killing Machine and Michael Moorcock's Land Leviathan?  Let's see!

(It seems that the original British title was Electric Crocodile, which sounds like a disco dance move. Writers always complain that editors change their titles, but sometimes the revised title is an improvement!)

The people of Europe, united under a single heavy-handed and surveillance-obsessed government, live uneasily in a world characterized by unemployment and political murder.  Ripped from today's headlines, eh? Well, at least the members of the British elite (i.e., government workers) in this world enjoy such luxuries as laser pistols, force fields, carcinogen-free cigarettes and electric cars.

Matthew Oliver is one of these elites of post-industrial Europe, a sociologist who works for the government and thus enjoys the selfless generosity (ha ha) of the taxpayers. He's got two electric cars, and, before the book is a quarter of the way through, is temporarily moving out of his fine London demesne into a second beautiful house! You see, he just got a cushy job at a government research center in the country, the Colindale Institute, and is provided housing on the fortified campus.  He also is provided his own bodyguard! (Wait, that guy seems as much like a jailer, or "gaoler" as our English friends might put it, as a bodyguard.)  Maybe Matthew needs that bodyguard--his predecessor as director of the sociology department at Colindale was assassinated!  Quite the coincidence--just this week one of Matthew's old college chums, Edward Gryphon, also got himself assassinated! And Matthew was one of the last people to see him alive!

Gryphon was one of those people who thought the government was too oppressive, what with all that spying and censorship and all that bother, and was a big wig in the underground, illegal but somewhat tolerated, Civil Liberties Committee. When Gryphon found out Matthew was going to become a department head at Colindale, he wanted to ask his old buddy to act as a sort of spy in there, to uncover what the government was up to behind that force field.  Being something of a civil libertarian himself, Matthew had, albeit reluctantly, agreed.

Around page 100 Matthew is told the secret of Colindale--they have the world's most powerful computer, the Bohn 507!  This machine can, through extrapolation after reading all the latest scholarly periodicals, predict future scientific and technological developments!  Sounds awesome, right?  But it presents Matthew with a moral dilemma. The scientists, who of course think they are smarter than everybody else and have contempt for democracy, are keeping their predictive ability a secret and using their influence to stifle research they disapprove of.  For example, when a young student figured out a way to make organ transplants more widely available, the boffins at Colindale fallaciously discredited her research and ruined her career because more transplants would mean an economically undesirable increase in population!  Matthew has to choose whether to wholeheartedly join this team of egghead manipulators, or to expose them the way his late pal Gryphon and the Civil Liberties Committee would want.

Steel Crocodile has some of the structure and tone of a noirish detective story and/or a cynical spy novel.  There are many characters and we wonder which are murderers, which are spies, which are working for the European Federation and which are working against it, and Compton tosses out little clues here and there to fuel our speculations.  I often complain that a book has too many characters, but not this time: I was pleasantly surprised at how well-written the book was, and Compton, who spends a lot of time on the characters and their relationships and emotions, makes all these people distinctive and interesting.  (Anne McCaffrey, in her blurb on the back of my copy, appropriately highlights this welcome facet of the novel.) 

The most important and compelling character in the book may be Matthew's wife, Abigail.  A dedicated Roman Catholic from a poor family, Abigail has her own attitudes and beliefs about Gryphon and about the Colindale Institute, and is at the center of moving subplots that involve her aged grandfather and her younger brother. Through these male blood relations of Abigail's we get an idea of how unfulfilling life is for many people in post-industrial big-government Europe--both Grandpa and her brother Paul are totally alienated from modern society.  In a great scene at the nursing home Gramps denounces all the available television programmes (including a documentary extolling the virtues of post-industrial European life that he thinks is full of "rubbish") and declares he wishes he was dead.  Meanwhile, Abigail loans Paul a packet of dough for some ostensibly benign purpose, only to later realize he is going to use the money to finance revolutionary violence!

Abigail and Matthew's marriage is at the center of the novel--while Matthew has some sympathy with the elitist technocracy of Colindale, Abigail is dead set against it from the moment she hears about it. Is this because of her staunch beliefs in democracy and free will, informed by her Catholic faith? Or because she is a passive person who naively trusts things will work out for the best and is unwilling to take any risks or responsibilities to make change happen?

In the final chapters of the book Matthew is told by the Colindale Center director, Bollin, that the Institute's double-super-secret self-appointed mission is to repair the malaise suffered by European society by producing a messianic leader!  They input all the sociological data they can find into the Bohn 507, and ask it what sort of messiah the European people are in the mood to embrace, and then ask it to identify just the person to lead the masses to tranquility.  To the shock and amazement of everybody, Bohn 507 calculates that the people of Europe are ripe for spiritual leadership from none other than Bohn 507 itself!  

(When we and Matthew first hear about the Bohn 507, the Colindale staff call it "Boney," presumably Compton's sly reference to that pan-European tyrant of the climax of the 18th century, Napoleon Bonaparte.  Is Compton suggesting that at the climax of the 20th century we will see arise from the crises brought about by the welfare state and the technological age a computerized technocratic tyranny, the way Bonaparte arose from the conditions created by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution?)

Bollin decides to scrap the whole project, and seconds later the bomb set by Paul and his group explodes, killing "Boney," Bollin and poor Matthew.  Paul dies in a laser shootout with the authorities, and Abigail is dragged off to a lifetime of confinement. When she asks for a lawyer she is told the government is not pressing legal charges, but putting her in a mental institution--there are no due process mechanisms to hinder the state from imprisoning those deemed mentally unstable. 

Steel Crocodile is one of those novels that reminds you that life is pointless and meaningless.  Habitually passive Abigail takes action, and her actions are a series of blunders and she ends up imprisoned in a mental institution.  Matthew vacillates between individualist libertarianism and paternalistic elitism, does nothing to further either of them, ruins his marriage and gets killed.  Director Bollin works himself to the bone, and then realizes his big project is a total failure, a dangerous menace that has to be abandoned.  Paul and his fellow saboteurs commit terrible sins--theft, deception, vandalism, murder--for nothing, as the director was going to shut down the computer anyway, and their sabotage campaign merely serves to kill people needlessly.  (When I mentioned cynical spy novels above I had in mind John Le Carre's Looking Glass War, in which naive people try to fight for freedom against tyranny and blunder stupidly, causing innocent people to suffer.) 

Compton's novel is also about how difficult human relationships are, how we are all truly and terribly alone.  Again and again characters, most prominently Abigail, reach out to other people in hopes of making physical or emotional contact, of achieving some kind of intimacy or sharing some kind of support.  These people reach out only to be rebuffed, or, perhaps worse, grudgingly tolerated.  In one sad scene Matthew and Abigail have sex out of a sense of duty rather than love or lust, and then Matthew lays awake in bed beside her as she sleeps, regretting their "lovemaking."

I don't think there are any positive, fulfilling relationships in this book.  Matthew and Abigail's marriage collapses under the weight of their differences over Colindale; Bollin's marriage is shown to be cold, even abusive; Paul exploits his relationship with his sister; Matthew and Abigail both have bad relationships with their parents.  Steel Crocodile reminds us that, even if we say and even believe relationships with family and friends are the most important things in our lives, we don't necessarily act that way, and when we do, we often find ourselves disappointed.  Several times in the book Matthew tells himself that his marriage to Abigail is the most important thing in his life, but he risks it all pursuing the Institute's schemes and his own career; other times he regrets all the accommodations he has made for her in his efforts to make their marriage work.  Is this book trying to turn you into a hermit?

I'm not exactly sure what attitude towards government and religion Compton is putting forward in Steel Crocdile.  Obviously the European Federation is oppressive and corrupt, but Compton offers no ringing endorsement of representative government or the liberty of the individual or social equality or anything like that.  The people in the book who do talk up such things turn out to be liars or fuckups.  I'm afraid Compton is hinting that people get the government they deserve, that government is a reflection of the people's morals, and since we are bad, our government will be bad.  Similarly, while it seems possible that the book is lamenting the collapse of religious faith, Abigail's faith doesn't seem to do her much good--it seems to make her naive and passive.  It is perhaps noteworthy that Paul and the other saboteurs are at least nominally Christians, but spend the book lying, murdering, starting gunfights, etc.  If religion is supposed to make life more bearable and make society more stable it doesn't seem to be fulfilling its purpose in this book.  Is this book trying to tell us life sucks and there is nothing we can do about it?

Well, there's no gigantic war machine, but Steel Crocodile is very good and I strongly recommend it.  Compton masters all that technical stuff I sometimes talk about on this blog, pacing and economy and structure and tone and all that, and he addresses fascinating issues like government, religion, and human relationships.  The little SF touches, like high tech means of shaving and packing boxes for a move, and how a society might respond to a dearth of work for ordinary people, are also good.  Joachim has been promoting Compton for years--maybe I should have listened to his advice sooner!