8.26.05Don't Forget About Cunningham
By Steve Finbow
-------------------------------------
Specimen Days
by Michael Cunningham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
I haven’t read The Hours. Just never got round to it. But I went out and bought it yesterday – cover sans Kidman – on the strength of reading Specimen Days. The narrative is tripartite and consists of In the Machine, set in the late 19th century; The Children’s Crusade set in the present; and Like Beauty, set in the late 21st century. It’s about time, space, and memory. It involves three main characters: Catherine (Cat, Catareen) Simon (Simon, Simon) and Lucas, (Luke, Luke). Walt Whitman trisects the novel – he appears in and is quoted by Lucas in In the Machine; the suicide bombers were raised on Leaves of Grass in The Children’s Crusade; and Simon the simulo in Like Beauty is programmed with Whitman’s poem as a kind of poetic Prozac – humans “tended to sorrow and to the drugs that make sorrow more enjoyable.” The one slightly annoying trope is the use of poets’ names as characters. I counted, Ashber(r)y, Heaney, Dryden, O’Hara, Lowell, Clare, and Walsh (Catherine?). But this is a minor complaint.
The writing, particularly In the Machine is taut, meaty, and poetic, the characters fully sketched, and the narratives interweave with an intelligence and expertise most writers would not attempt. In the Machine’s temporal dissonance is eerie and unsettling. The idea behind it, that machines are inhabited by the ghosts of people they kill – this is set in the new industrial revolution and Whitman presides over it as the champion of all things new and old but also as a Blake-like prophet raging against the coming of the machine – is a postmodern and almost Buddhist take on the soulless drudgery of working in factories and the despiritualization of the working classes alongside their increasing existential angst and alienation.
Simon was imprisoned in the machine. It made sudden, dreadful sense. He was not in heaven or in the pillow; he was not in the grass or in the locket. His ghost had snagged on the machine’s inner workings; the machine held it as a dog might hold a man’s coat in its jaws after the man himself had escaped. Simon’s flesh stamped and expelled, but his invisible part remained, trapped among the gears and teeth.
Apart from some coy Oirishisms, the narrative describes the almost Sartrean possibility of facing the nothingness of (post)modern life. There is a separation of body and mind. Humans become more psychic than somatic. Machines are adjuncts and prostheses. There is an almost sentimental melancholy to the prose, which made me think at once of a hypothetical story written by Frank McCourt and reworked by Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King. 9/11 is summoned up with bravado and the connections are not overworked. The novel as a whole is a superb analysis of events since that date and is an equal to, or even surpasses, Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog, Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday; not to mention Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Frederic Beigbeder’s excellent Windows on the World. This novel is about technology and people and the things people do with technology like build buildings and build planes and then use those planes to bring down buildings. There are ghosts in the air of New York and they, through the World Trade Center dust that New Yorker’s breathed in, are now ghosts in the human machine.
In the second part, The Children’s Crusade, child terrorists attempt to return the city (New York is the backdrop) to the bucolic. A woman called Walt Whitman has raised the children reading Leaves of Grass. Children are strapped with pipe bombs and ignite them by hugging people. This, in the wake of the London bombings, is prescient and disturbing.
And yet, Luke wasn’t gone. She had an idea where he might be. He wasn’t in heaven, and he wasn’t a ghost, but he was somewhere. He had not evaporated. She knew it with gut-level certainty. It was her only belief. That, and the workings of justice in a dangerous world.
Cat, the main character, a policewoman who talks to would-be terrorists/murderers on the phone, comes to agree with the point of view of the last of the children – do we really live in a society so awful as to want to destroy it? This reminded me of Martin Amis’s Night Train, and the dialogue is as spot on as anything by Elmore Leonard. The Children’s Crusade is hardboiled poetry.
The final novella, Like Beauty, is a straight sci-fi chase across America. The android Simon meets Catareen, an alien sent to earth as punishment for crimes against her government. This is Philip K Dick – and to a certain extent Jonathan Lethem – territory. It questions what it is to be human. What makes us the way we are? Nurture? Nature? And can we escape not only our somatic confines but also the earth itself?
And yet she was diminishing. Simon could see it. No. He could comprehend it. Her flesh was unaffected, but she was drawing in, as if some animating force were retreating inward from the skin’s surface. Her skin was darker now, more deeply emerald. It put out a slick, mineral shine. She was becoming not alive.
Can we create beings that will function as us? Can we accept other beings that are not human? What is it to be human? It is an ontological masterpiece, scary and philosophical. It reminded me of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Living in the 21st century with terrorism, illegal wars, famine, and Tofutti Cuties, we always have to remember, “harm comes anyway”. There are also funny moments – I loved “radioactive groundhog breath.”
Specimen Days is a very important novel and comes just before a swathe of books by some big hitters: JM Coetzee’s Slow Man, Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, and Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island. It will easily hold its own. After 9/11, Andrew O’Hagan wrote: “Language is something else now, and so is imagery, and so is originality.” That just about describes Specimen Days. Read it.
-------------------------------------
Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.
© 2005 Me Three