Aqueduct Press, 2004, 369pp, $19

reviewed in Foundation 95, Autumn 2005

In the end, one puts aside quibbles and uncertainties to congratulate a new American small press upon publishing what is, perhaps, the best novel that Gwyneth Jones has written in some years, a novel that has already won the Philip K. Dick Award and been shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and which will undoubtedly go on to gather more accolades. Because this is a rich, potent, challenging and original novel which does exactly what we always demand of the very finest science fiction: it makes us think about ourselves and our future and how we want to be. And yet …

    There is always an ‘And yet’ as you read the book. While part of the mind is admiring the quality of the writing, the depth of characterisation, the startlingly adept way in which the ideas are deployed, another part of the mind is more detached, more uncertain, offering a hesitant ‘Yes, but’ every so often.

    Yes, but it’s very schematic. Yes, but those particular characters just wouldn’t come together in that particular way. Yes, but it wouldn’t actually work like that.

    Life might more appropriately have been called Sex, because it’s about how we define our sexual identity, how we create and operate within gender roles, what makes us women or men. At the core of the book is a scientific discovery which suggests that the male Y chromosome is reverting to an X, in other words that gender differences are disappearing. One of the best things about this book is the way that this discovery is arrived at, a portrait of science as it is done today, a culture riven by personality clashes and driven by the desperate quest for funding. Anna, the central character, is one of the workers at the scientific coalface, chipping away bit by bit at the revelation she has accidentally hit upon, while spending most of the time losing jobs or working at a slightly dodgy infertility clinic. She is denied the opportunity to publish by colleagues who don’t want to rock the establishment boat, finds her research used as a weapon in internecine warfare, has to abandon the research for long periods because of the demands of administration or the sheer need to earn a living. The working scientist is, in fact, a surprisingly rare figure in science fiction, perhaps because the workaday nature of the job of scientist is too far from the drama that science fiction craves. But Life is one of those rare examples of a novel that makes the routine of doing science a vital part of the core of the story.

    Nevertheless, good as this thread of the story is, there is not enough here to carry the weight of the whole novel. We need to see what goes on in Anna’s life around this discovery, for she needs to be a living, breathing human being and not just an anonymous automaton ‘scientist’. In the character of Anna – frail, nervous, clever, self-deprecating, determined but never quite sure of the best way to turn determination into action – Gwyneth Jones succeeds admirably. But it is in what goes on around Anna that the skeleton of schematic plotting begins to show through the flesh of story. Because in the people who circle Anna we see reflected in social terms the consequences of degendering that her scientific ideas imply.

    Assuming you were to put together a story about the breakdown of our old assumptions about gender roles what sort of characters would you want to put in. A house-husband contentedly looking after home and children while the wife pursues her career? A woman who feels guilty because her career takes precedence over her child? An aggressive lesbian? A predatory woman? An old-fashioned chauvinist whose aggressive masculinity is expressed in a central rape? An older woman whose increasingly eccentric attempts to comprehend the modern world are accompanied by a descent into confusion? A middle-aged Indian man whose unquestioning acceptance of tradition leads him to devalue the work of women? Tick all the boxes. Every character in the book, even relatively minor ones, seems to be there as a representative, a figure in the chart demonstrating how gender roles are played out.

    This is not to say that they are clichés, far from it. Each of these characters is as vividly drawn, as full of all too believable strengths and foibles, as any that Gwyneth Jones has created in her career. These are not all people that you would like to meet, there are a couple I would certainly do my best to avoid, but they are all people you recognise. Human beings really do behave like this, speak like this. It is not the vigour of their delineation that is at issue, but the roles they are called upon to play. Because they are representatives, because somehow the spectrum of gender role playing needs to be refracted through the prism of the novel, all too often events and relationships are forced into a schematic pattern that doesn’t quite ring true.

    That a bunch of disparate young people should find themselves coming together at university is perfectly normal (though the fact that scientist Anna, whose interest in books seems to be limited to say the least, should spend her university career mixing almost exclusively with humanities students is less so); that they should continue coming together throughout their lives, during which time they appear to have less and less in common, stretches credulity a bit. That a postgraduate student in the 1990s should be raped by a fellow student and say nothing, not even to her closest friends, is unlikely; that she should thereby quietly let her university career be destroyed beggars belief. That the predatory woman who initiates an affaire with Anna’s husband should be married to the male chauvinist pig who raped Anna at university and derailed her glittering postgraduate career is the sort of coincidence that does not belong in a novel as good as this.

    Coincidences and unlikelihoods such as these recur throughout the novel, so that one is absorbed in the thoroughgoing reality of the work at one moment, and brought up short by the patent artifice of its structure the next. Though the biggest structural problem actually stems from one of the most significant characters. Ramone, described by Jones herself as ‘Anna’s shadow-girl’, is the novel’s avatar of polymorphous perversity. At various times throughout the novel she appears as the companion to a renowned philosopher slowly losing her mind, as a famous author, as a homeless person living on the streets, as a revolutionary activist stirring up trouble in a remote part of Asia, as a media personality, and as a partner in a sado-masochistic relationship. This is not a career shaped by verisimilitude but by authorial dictat. Ramone appears in the unlikeliest moments whenever the plot needs a shot of drama, but the unlikeliest thing about her is her continuing relationship with Anna. She is not so much her ‘shadow-girl’ as her polar opposite, and it is hard to conceive of any relationship between these two that would not dissolve in short order into antipathy, distress, and quite possibly violence.