Simon & Schuster, 2005, 317pp, $24.00

reviewed in New York Review of Science Fiction 204, August 2005

Steve Erickson writes obsessively about Los Angeles, it has been the focus of practically all his novels. But this is not a postmodern version of ‘local colour’ writing, no one could use his fiction as any sort of guide to the city. This is primarily because that most unnatural of cities is constantly subject to the transforming power of chaotic nature. In his first novel, Days Between Stations, it was buried in sand, from which emerged mysterious and strangely beautiful moon bridges. In Rubicon Beach, the released criminal Cale returns to a city undercut by caverns that emit a weird music. Cale’s America has also been transfigured, split inexplicably into America 1 and America 2, and in Amnesiascope not only is Los Angeles surrounded by fires, it is displaced in time from the rest of America. And now, in Our Ecstatic Days, Los Angeles has been drowned under a lake that emerged from a tiny hole in the ground, and in one of those hauntingly beautiful inventions that Erickson seems to toss effortlessly into the complex mix of his fiction the lake is swarming with music snakes

pythons of melancholy English verse from before she was born, and Debussy melodies but only if Debussy had been a bossa nova guitarist in a heroin haze, brooding aquatic chamber quartets rising in the background like autumn glimpsed for the first time on the horizon of midsummer. Boas – gorgeous and dangerous – of static bursts and swoons of strings drape themselves along her window sill and slither through her house like women’s voices, dusky, jazz-depraved, desperate. (p. 58)

The woman living here by the LA waters is Kristin, the heroine of Erickson’s previous novel, The Sea Came In At Midnight. This is, in a sense, a sequel to that novel, in that certain characters recur and consequences are felt of decisions taken earlier. But Erickson’s novels do not conventionally move from incident to incident, event to event, rather they move by perception and interpretation, by symbol and suggestion. We very rarely see what actually happens, and if we are granted a glimpse (very much later in the story if at all) it is often surprisingly mundane. Instead we see things exclusively through the perceptions of the characters according to some rich and allusive personal iconography that is part of what defines them as characters. At its worst, for instance in Amnesiascope, his weakest novel which stuck too closely to real-life events involving Erickson and his friend and colleague, the journalist Michael Venturi, this can lead to rather clunky and conventional postmodernist tricks and tropes. At its best, in Tours Of The Black Clock or here in the novel under review, it results in a strange psychological poetry, deep and elusive, full of insights one feels forever on the point of grasping.

If, in a superficial sense, Our Ecstatic Days is a direct sequel to The Sea Came In At Midnight, in a more meaningful sense it is a sequel to all of his previous novels. Images from and allusions to those books crop up all the way through this novel, casting an unexpected light backwards upon them while at the same time gaining a disconcerting resonance from the echoes. But Erickson is not (as, for instance, Asimov and Heinlein have done) simply trying to gather disparate works into one incongruous whole. There have always been recurring images that link his books, but here they seem to have been brought together to act as a springboard for a new direction. The earlier books were engaged in the quest to find a moral path through the Twentieth Century, the Black Clock. Tours Of The Black Clock, for instance, featured a blueprint of the century which revealed the secret room where the soul of the century was located; in The Sea Came In At Midnight there was a new calendar of the century shaped by its disasters. Though the books ranged freely backwards and forwards in time and, in Tours Of The Black Clock and Arc d’X, into dystopian parallel timestreams, their subject was always the Twentieth Century, and what moral redemption was to be found lay in the dedicated pursuit of love.

The Sea Came In At Midnight reached its moral climax at the millennium (Kristin was, for a while, part of a cult whose members intended to commit suicide at the midnight stroke which ended the old century). Our Ecstatic Days now takes the story on into the twenty first century (no longer capitalised) and finds its moral resolution not in romance but in childbirth. This is a book that is filled with images of the pain and ecstasy of parenting, notably in the novel’s most bravura literary coup.

The novel opens with Kristin and her son Kirk living in an almost deserted hotel already marooned by the rising lake waters of Los Angeles. One day, for reasons she never fully understands (Erickson’s characters are forever impelled into actions they cannot explain yet which they will endlessly relive and regret), she dives into the lake to discover the hole that is its source. When she returns to the surface, Kirk has disappeared. Distraught, she lives for years on the shores of the lake, an object of cult veneration, until she comes to believe that she surfaced in a different Los Angeles, and if she returns back down the hole she will find Kirk still waiting. So she dives back into the lake and her journey along what is simultaneously the birth canal of the lake and the birth canal of the new century is told in one single unbroken sentence which starts on page 83 and continues as a single line three quarters of the way down the page until it is brought back into the text, and to a full stop, on page 315. This long sentence both recapitulates significant points from The Sea Came In At Midnight and acts as a thread literally tying together the rest of the story. For all his postmodern games and experiments, Steve Erickson has never previously used the shape of the text on the page to any great effect, but here this extraordinary line of text is inseparable from what makes the novel work.

But Erickson’s characters are rarely all one thing or all the other, and this uncertainty about their identity is expressed in a literal fragmentation. Twins (often with one unborn or long dead) have been a feature of his work since Days Between Stations, and they have appeared alongside doppelgangers, alter egos, and variations on the character in different timelines. Kristin, for instance, has long believed that Kirk had a twin sister, Brontë, who was never born. Nor is it any surprise that when Kristin dives back into the lake she leaves behind an alter ego – or perhaps they pass each other swimming through the birth canal. This alter ego is Madame Lulu, a dominatrix who lives on the top floor of Chateau X, an otherwise drowned hotel.

(Madame Lulu first appeared as a character in a pornographic novel written by the failed novelist who is Kristin and Kirk’s neighbour in the sunken hotel. The novelist, Banning Jainlight, was Hitler’s pornographer who inadvertently extended the Second World War in Tours Of The Black Clock. Jainlight came from the mist-shrouded river island of Davenhall, a place that seems to be cut off physically and metaphorically from the rest of the United States. And Davenhall is where Kristin comes from. Such are the tangles and confusions of fact and fancy that operate both within and between Steve Erickson’s novels.)

When Lulu becomes too old for her trade (and this novel covers a great sweep of the twenty first century, from 2001 to 2089) her place is taken by Brontë, a golden-haired girl who emerges from the lake with no history and no memory. Is she Kirk’s unborn twin? Did she swim past Kristin in the birth canal? Perhaps, though there are several other mysterious women in this novel that she could also be. Though the loops of time and circumstance in a typical Steve Erickson novel don’t preclude her being all of these at once.

At one point, when Lulu seems to be dying, Brontë takes her on a train journey. Erickson has an ambiguous attitude towards trains: they feature regularly in his work, but as a symbol of dislocation or isolation rather than connection. His trains rarely go anywhere: Days Between Stations takes its title from a journey that lasts subjective years, and a journey in Rubicon Beach ends at Angeloak, a tree turned into a way station situated in the middle of a river that is as wide as an ocean. In this instance, though supposedly heading for Chicago, Brontë and Lulu find they must change trains at Pueblo d’Elektrik, an abandoned resort hotel now blasted by a perpetual electric storm where no other trains ever call. They are trapped there for four hundred days, a time of deaths and births, and when they finally return to Los Angeles Brontë carries with her the child of a Navajo woman, abandoned by her lover, who committed suicide by calling the lightning down upon herself. So Brontë the not-quite daughter becomes a not-quite mother, and a sort of redemption is achieved.

But that is only one strand from a complex web of story which winds itself about this small but variform cast of characters. Another strand concerns Wang, one of Madame Lulu’s clients at the Chateau X who is also the charismatic leader of a rebel army fighting a mysterious war – even Wang never knows if this is Tribulation Two or Tribulation Three. (As in Rubicon Beach, this future America is divided along ill-defined and ever shifting political fault lines.) Wang is also the enigmatic man who kept Kristin as a willing sex slave for a period in The Sea Came In At Midnight, but if Lulu is indeed an avatar of Kristin there is no suggestion that she and Wang ever recognise each other. This is not particularly surprising, however, since Erickson’s fractured characters often intersect with variations of themselves without any recognition. Above all, though often tangential to the main action of the novel, Wang is pivotal to its historic sweep. He is a type of character that Erickson loves, you will find echoes occurring in Tours Of The Black Clock and Arc d’X, a character who embodies within himself a turning point in history. For Wang was the lone student who stood in front of the tanks in Tienanman Square at the end point of one strand of the Twentieth Century. After coming to America he worked as a maintenance man in New York, and on the evening of 10^th September 2001 took a woman who looked a lot like Brontë to his secret lair on the roof of the World Trade Center, so he was entwined also with the start of one key strand of the twenty first century.

Wang is the focus of one of the dislocations that Erickson always throws into his novels to ensure that we can never trust any internal chronology. At one point Wang starts remembering the events of many years before, and in that memory, casually buried in the heart of a paragraph, Wang himself is killed in a routine traffic accident, and the focus shifts to the son he never had. There can be no redemption for Wang in this story, but in his son, real or imagined (again within the child not the lover) there is redemption.

Finally there is the silent youth in the silver-coloured canoe who rows clients to and from the Chateau X, and who later comes to worship Brontë. He might be Kirk, though at times he is known as Kuul and other times as Kale, and just once, for one brief episode, he is Cale whose story opened Rubicon Beach. He might be a boy who was raised by owls, he might be the owner of Kulk, the plastic toy monkey that is there in key scenes throughout the novel. He is not exactly the silent witness to the story because at crucial points he is engaged in the action: he cares for the old woman who is a psychiatrist of disturbed buildings and who was once the lesbian lover of the Brontë-like woman who died on 9/11; he rescues Brontë from gangsters; and he is the guide to the Hotel of Thirteen Losses, a building which, according to the records, should not exist, though it is located directly over the birth canal of the lake. Yet he is never an instigator of action, he never directs the movement of the novel. But he is the child, the brother of Brontë, the promise of the future.

And there is much more besides, scenes pregnant with meaning which don’t seem to fit into any of the main story strands of the novel yet which still contribute crucially to what the whole thing is about, characters who drift into the action for a few brief pages yet have an indelible impact on what happens. But any novel by Steve Erickson is like this, complex and difficult to grasp in detail. He has a trick of shifting from one scene to another, from one time to another, from one viewpoint to another, all within the space of a paragraph. The sequence is never entirely coherent, events from the future can affect the past, characters from one timeline can change the course of others that they should never have been able to meet. The more you analyse how a story is structured the more certain you are to come up against a dislocation where it just does not make sense. And yet his books are never incoherent, never out of control, somehow they make a sort of breathless, breath-taking sense. This is not the world as we know it, but it feels right because here the outer world takes on the shapes of our inward fears and desires.

Late in the book we come across a passage from the memoirs of Banning Jainlight:

I’ve made my peace with the failure of my life by believing that, sometime in a future I’ll never see, I made a deal with God. This wasn’t a vision, it wasn’t a dream. It was an unshakeable notion that whatever good things might have ever been in my future, I made a deal with God trading all of them for the well-being of my little girl. (p. 311)

He has given up his future to provide a future for his child. It is an exaggerated version of the deal every parent makes, and it is central to this whole novel. This is a book about that deal with God, about how much we might be willing and able to give up for the promise of a future, and what are the consequences of that deal. It is also the most electrifying and disturbing novel Steve Erickson has so far written.