Emptiness Gets Into You

pp267-271

review of Fremder, Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, Angelica’s Grotto and Amaryllis Night and Day by Russell Hoban, first published in The New York Review of Science Fiction, January 2002

Writing this now I have the sudden crazy notion that everybody at birth is issued a little box of images, music, words and a few other things that will appear and reappear in varying combinations all through life.

Amaryllis Night and Day

There are certain things that we know are going to be drawn from the box in each new Russell Hoban novel. The novel will be composed of short, staccato chapters (Hoban once explained to me that he would lay out all the manuscript pages of a novel across the floor of his room and run up and down to see if the rhythm was right). Ordinary, everyday objects will talk to us: ‘Sometimes a thing that I’ve seen comes up in my memory and wants to talk to me,’ as he puts it in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer. This is a device he used prominently in Kleinzeit (1974), so far the only one of his novels to deal directly with insanity, though all his fiction seems to have edged uncomfortably around obsession and skewed perspectives on the world; but it continues to some degree even into his most recent novel (‘the rails always cry, Wheats-yew! Wheats-yew! as the trains approach’). One suspects that Hoban does not inhabit a landscape so much as a soundscape. This suspicion is strengthened by the knowledge that Hoban tends to work at night, constantly retuning his short wave radio or listening to an eclectic selection of CDs whose titles keep emerging in his books (even Fremder, ostensibly set in 2052, is full of quotations from Dory Previn, Jagger and Richards, Rogers and Hart, Billie Holliday). Hoban’s is a very cultured world: the villainous Mr Rinyo-Clacton is an habitué of the opera, especially Pelléas et Mélisande, Harold Klein in Angelica’s Grotto is an art historian, Peter Diggs in Amaryllis Night and Day is a painter. In these novels there are constant references to other books (John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, Oliver Onions stories in Amaryllis Night and Day, and Orlando Furioso in practically everything Hoban has written); and especially to paintings. Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ goes from being the cover image in The Medusa Frequency (1987) to being a robot in Fremder, Durer’s Melencolia is the significant frontispiece in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, even his futuristic dystopia, Riddley Walker (1980), was directly inspired by and features the 15th century wall painting of the legend of St Eustace at Canterbury Cathedral. In particular Hoban, himself once a painter, seems fascinated by Odilon Redon who crops up in all four of the books under review, and in particular his illustration of a scene from Orlando Furioso, ‘Angelica and Ruggiero’, which provides the title of Angelica’s Grotto. The characters will often visit these works of art in London’s galleries and museums, because one of the other universal features about them is that they inhabit London. Harold Klein lives in a large Victorian terraced house overlooking that stretch of the District Line where it runs overground towards Wimbledon. This is identifiably Hoban’s own home, which crops up in several of his other books such as The Medusa Frequency and, slightly disguised, as Zoe’s place in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer. But beyond that his world is London, the underground lines and tube stations, the streets and public buildings are named with obsessive attention to detail. You can follow the peregrinations of his characters as easily as with a gazetteer. London is a character in his books as real and as vital as any of his human characters, whether it is in the realistic Turtle Diary (1975) or the space-operatic Fremder, which is, to all intents and purposes, a re-imagining of Alfred Bester’s Tiger! Tiger!.

Fremder, which is, chronologically if for no other reason, the place to start in this brief survey, was a novel that ended a strange silence in Hoban’s career. He had followed the critical success of Riddley Walker with Pilgermann (1983), but after that, at what might have been the peak of his career, came only The Medusa Frequency, a conflation of short pieces that barely cohered as a novel. Then nothing. In 1992 The Moment Under the Moment collected a libretto, and a handful of essays and short stories, and in 1994 his opera with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, The Second Mrs Kong, was premiered at Glyndebourne. But it was near-enough ten years without a novel when Fremder finally appeared. In his ‘Foreword’ to The Moment Under the Moment, Hoban had offered the following thought:

Reality is ungraspable… The real reality is something else – only the strangeness of it can be taken in and that’s what interests me: the strangeness of human consciousness; the strangeness of life and death; the strangeness of what the living and the dead are to one another; and the strangeness of ideas.

It was in Fremder that these strangenesses, ‘the flickering of seen and unseen actualities’, began to find a plot. As is the way with so much science fiction, the metaphor he had offered in The Moment Under the Moment is made concrete in Fremder, the flickering actualities become the flicker drive, a mode of instantaneous travel between the galaxies. And as the novel opens our hero, Fremder, (the name means stranger in German) is lost in space like Gully Foyle. He has flickered into actuality but the ship in which he travelled, and the rest of the crew, have not.

Hoban clearly cares little for the science fictional trappings of his novel. Set in 2052, this is nevertheless a world so transformed that there are no recognisable landmarks in London, the social structure he hints at is no conceivable continuation of the society of the 1990s, and mankind is out travelling between galaxies which seem to be little more than solar systems. It is not so much that this world is skimpy in comparison to, say, the post-apocalyptic landscape of Riddley Walker, as that it is really little more than a blank screen upon which he can project the strangeness of reality. ‘You can disappear as M-waves and reappear as supposedly the same person but after a while the deep-space emptiness gets into you’ he says at one point; it is a novel about emptiness. In fact, the ‘deep-space emptiness’ seems to have got into Hoban, because all his subsequent novels have explored the same barren emotional and psychological landscape, but Fremder is by far the most loveless and isolated of these landscapes. From the moment Fremder first appears, tumbling in the ‘black sparkle of deep space’ with no space suit, no helmet, no oxygen, it is clear that he has no real connection with his world, nor has he ever had. Father unknown, mother dead before he was born, raised artificially, the closest he comes to engagement is with a super-computer. He is ‘the most alone person I’ve ever met’, as the psychologist, Caroline, tells Fremder. Caroline herself, one of a string of confessor-figures who will appear throughout these novels (Katerina in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, Dr DeVere in Angelica’s Grotto), tries to fill the emptiness with sex, but despite the uneasy fascination with pornography that surfaces in all these books sex alone is never enough to do anything. Even Fremder’s interrogation by Pythia, the ‘23.7 billion-photoneuron Data Evaluator’ which also seems to contain the soul of his dead mother who was responsible for the invention of the flicker drive, turns out to be positively orgiastic, and discovers nothing.

In the end Fremder is too alone. He flickers out to the fourth galaxy once more as the novel ends, bringing the story full circle but not reaching any satisfactory conclusion. Too much of the emptiness has seeped into it. As Katerina tells Jonny in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer, quoting Schiller: ‘Only fullness leads to clarity / And in the abyss dwells the truth.’ Wherever Hoban’s characters are alone (Fremder, for instance, and Harold Klein in Angelica’s Grotto) they have nowhere to go but to their doom. Wherever they are connected by something other than sex, as Jonny in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer and Peter in Amaryllis Night and Day, there is hope of redemption. And more than that there is a sense of fullness, of completeness to the novel; Hoban my be fascinated by strangeness, but it would seem that it is the opposite, emotional engagement, that is the way out of the abyss.

Jonny Fitch begins Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer as cast-off and alone as Fremder. His girlfriend has walked out on him, within a very few pages he will lose his job, we meet him first adrift not in space but in Piccadilly Circus underground station. Here he is picked up by the enigmatic Mr T. Rinyo-Clacton. Again it is clear that we are not meant to take this too seriously. Rinyo-Clacton, as we are told, is a type of Neolithic pottery, while the story itself is a slight variation on the typical Faustian bargain, in this instance Jonny sells his death for £1,000,000. This potty Faust concentrates increasingly upon sex, as Hoban’s later novels have progressively done: Jonny finding his emptiness exacerbated by homosexual rape on the part of Mr Rinyo-Clacton, and his self-disgust eased by bedding the old concentration camp survivor, Katerina, who tells his fortune. But his lust and eventually his love are directed primarily at Serafina, the girlfriend who has just left him. Knowing that by selling his death he has but one year left to live (and convinced anyway that Mr Rinyo-Clacton must have infected him with AIDS) Jonny concentrates on winning Serafina back, realising along the way how much she fills his emptiness. Eventually Mr Rinyo-Clacton is killed in a freak accident occasioned by coming face-to-face with Katerina, who turns out to be his mother, and the Faustian bargain is broken. It turns out that Jonny does not have AIDS, and he and Serafina are able to live happily ever after. It is a contrived ending to a story that is altogether too flimsy to bear the weight – ‘the strangeness of what the living and the dead are to one another’ – that Hoban intends it to bear.

Both Fremder and Jonny are characters whose take on reality is not altogether secure, but Harold Klein in the next novel, Angelica’s Grotto, rushes at the madness of the world with an abandon ill befitting his age. But then, part of the madness of the novel is that Klein is aware throughout that he should not be behaving the way he does, but it is a way of filling the emptiness. He is lonely and old and his career as an art historian no longer seems enough. His particular interest is the work of Odilon Redon, and especially the painting ‘Angelica and Ruggiero’ inspired by Orlando Furioso. When he comes across a pornographic web site that draws on the same inspiration, ‘Angelica’s Grotto’, he finds himself drawn ever more obsessively into a series of humiliating and threatening sexual encounters orchestrated by the owner of the web site. Eventually, with a logic that leaves no other way out, Klein is led to murder and his own death.

Like Fremder before him, Klein is alone, and sex alone is not enough. The only one of these books with no element of the fantastic about it, Klein cannot flicker into another reality but only die in this one. It is a sad book which leaves a sour aftertaste. However, Hoban’s most recent novel, Amaryllis Night and Day, is clearly meant as a companion to that book, the other side of the same coin. The central image of the new book is, significantly, the klein bottle, and like that curious device Hoban turns the story inside out. A sad tale of sexual obsession that proves self destructive becomes a happy tale of sexual love that proves redemptive: one of Hoban’s weakest novels is converted into one of his strongest.

We are told, very deliberately, that this novel is set shortly after the events of Angelica’s Grotto: Harold Klein and Peter Diggs were colleagues, and Peter is still pondering the mystery of Klein’s disappearance. But Peter seems to be recapitulating Klein’s journey, not with a girl met through a pornographic web site, but with a girl met in a dream. Peter first sees Amaryllis at a bus-stop marked BALSAMIC waiting for a bamboo and rice-paper bus that will take her to FINSEY-OBAY. The second time he sees her it is in the Science Museum, looking at a klein bottle display (not just a reference to Angelica’s Grotto but also a representation of the narrative shape this plot will take), and they recognise each other. From this point on the story concerns their attempts to control their dreams so that they might get to the end of the bus route, to FINSEY-OBAY, which they feel will provide some revelation.

Along the way, the novel displays all the tricks and obsessions we have come to expect of Hoban’s work: the quoted song lyrics, the importance of paintings and books, the familiarity with London, though a London often seen through the distorting (or hyper-real) lens of fantasy, and the urgency of sex. But it does have one fairly surprising twist: America. Hoban began writing children’s fiction before he moved to London, but all his adult fictions from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973) onwards have been written in and imbued with London. He has apparently never felt the need to fictionalise America as he has fictionalised London, his characters do not visit that country and it receives no more than a passing mention. That America should appear in this new novel, therefore, even as a dreamscape, is curious, that it should in the end prove the origins of and the answer to most of the questions that plague our narrator’s psyche seems to indicate a looking backwards previously absent from Hoban’s work.

As with so much of Hoban’s recent work, this is a novel about the emptiness of reality and the ways we try to fill it. At one point our artist-narrator says:

[T]hose of us who think about the empty spaces tend to paint pictures, write books, or compose music. There are many talented people who will never become painters, writers, or composers; the talent is in them but not the empty spaces where art happens.

Peter is working on a picture he calls ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, a title taken from a story by Oliver Onions. It shows a mysterious woman leading the viewer towards the edge of a cliff, a not unfamiliar figure in Hoban’s work, in Fremder, for instance, he wrote of ‘Out There’ ‘whispering and beckoning like the Erl King’s daughters’. As Peter falls victim to his own temptress, the art student Amaryllis who comes to him in dreams, so the figure in the painting changes to become that of Amaryllis. The pair turn dreams and waking inside out, they tread mazes both real and symbolic, and the landscape of mystery and nightmare that they find themselves visiting again and again is not England but New England, a place that both know from childhood visits but which holds bad memories for them. There, in the dream New England, an old woman like Katerina from Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer waits for them, to offer advice and point the way if they can but understand it. Eventually, as they come to understand the reality of their dreams, the flickering ungraspable actuality of them, Peter discovers that Amaryllis is the one heading for the cliff and at the last minute he is able to save her. At the same time he is able to confront and disperse the dark shadow that has been hanging over him since his American upbringing. It results in the most unequivocally happy ending that Hoban has written for some time.