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avevale_intelligencerThanks to the kindness of a generous friend, I now have a copy of S., created by JJ Abrams and written by Doug Dorst (as mentioned in an earlier post on LJ) and have completed my first pass through it.
In the first place, my gods it's a beautiful thing. The creators set out to express their love of books as distinct from any other form of art, and so they made (well, the publishers made at their direction) a really nice book, that feels the comforting way books used to feel. I read somewhere that it even has that old-book smell. It comes in a slipcase, with a seal which you can peel off and stick on to an index card or something (I did). Even the seal is beautiful. Nothing is shoddy, nothing is skimped.
And when you get inside it...well. Dennis Wheatley once, long ago, produced a couple of mysteries which were presented largely as collections of clues, telegrams, photographs, scraps of fabric and such, with the solution in a sealed section at the end. My uncle had one, and I loved it. For a while, in my youth, there were Jackdaws, collections of facsimile documents in cardboard folders which attempted to instil in adolescent minds a flicker of interest in history. I didn't get that, but I loved the things. Later on, I produced something in a similar sort of vein (but fantasy, obviously) as a one-off thing to be auctioned at a filkcon, creating maps and pictures and puzzle-rhymes around a story which, to be honest, I made up as I went along. It worked, though, and I enjoyed doing it.
S. is like the grown-up and much cooler brother of all these things. There are inserts between the pages, artifacts, postcards and such, but not too many. (Abrams and Dorst reined themselves in.) They too are beautiful things, well made, but they don't distract from the story in the book, which I'm getting to at last.
The novel itself, Ship of Theseus by V M Straka, is, first of all, not the kind of novel to which I would ordinarily be drawn. (I'll explain why that's not important in a minute.) First of all, it falls into the category of "magic realism," which always seems to me to want to be fantasy but not quite to have the nerve. Fantastic things happen, but there seems to be no internal logic to them and they are never either remarked on as fantastic or accepted as real. The whole thing just drifts along, written in present tense, with one sudden startling dip from third person into second somewhere near the middle. Secondly, it is the kind of story in which nothing is ever nice and nobody is ever comfortable. I can deal with characters suffering as long as there's some respite along the way, but in this kind of story the only sensations worth describing in detail are the unpleasant ones; anything else is skipped over or touched on only awkwardly and with a sort of "sorry about this" embarrassment, almost till the very end. (There's a reason for that.) Some people, I know, enjoy that kind of raw, brutal, refreshingly bleak et cetera fiction, but I don't so much. So if I had encountered Ship of Theseus on its own, I'd probably have got about a third of the way in, started skipping, read the last few pages and called that it. It's a painstakingly accurate pastiche of a kind of book I don't usually read.
But it's not important, because the novel is not the story, or not the whole story. It is worth reading, and I plan to read it again very soon, but the novel is actually the subject of the story, or of the other layers of story. The next layer up is the story of V M Straka himself, a mysterious personage who may have been one or more of several other people, or not, and his interactions with his translator, F X Caldeira, equally mysterious. This story takes place mostly in the foreword to the novel, and in footnotes scattered throughout the chapters, and gives us the beginnings of an idea of Straka the writer and the people who surrounded and may or may not have been him, in the first half of the twentieth century. (Ship of Theseus is supposed to be his nineteenth and last novel, published in 1949 after his death. The book is full of tantalising hints about the other eighteen. I don't know if I'd want to read them, but I'd love them to exist.)
But the next layer of the story is--I think--the most important one, and it takes place in handwritten notes liberally scattered throughout the book by Jennifer, a senior college student who doesn't like the way her life is going and doesn't know what to do about it, and Eric, a former student who had a breakdown, vandalised the college and has now been not only expelled but "expunged," made a non-person as far as the college is concerned. He haunts the place, forced to remain unseen by the authorities, because he has nowhere else to go. When Jen leaves a note for him on the front page of the novel, he responds, and soon they are corresponding regularly, using the book as a maildrop, the timeline of their correspondence shown by the different coloured pens they use. And part of this layer of story is about their growing relationship, and it's very nicely done, without schmaltz or too much angst and with a nice seasoning of wit on both sides.
But another part of the story is about how Eric and Jen gradually get drawn into investigating the life and apparent death of Straka the author, tracing his reputed involvement in the tempestuous politics of his time, and the group (the S Collective) which grew up around him. The footnotes by Caldeira turn out to contain coded messages, and there are other puzzles scattered throughout the book, not essential to the enjoyment of S. but there if you care to look for them. It emerges that there are powerful interests working against Jen and Eric, trying to bury the memory of Straka, and their actions are mirrored in the action of the novel. There are startling discoveries, moments of danger, and after Jen and Eric actually start meeting in person, the reader has to fill in some of their story for hirself.
So what is S., the book, the stories, the experience, actually about?
I only partly know, I think. I'm going to be coming back to this book a lot, I know that. But the title of the novel, Ship of Theseus, is a clue.
The ship of Theseus is another version of the axe of my grandfather, one I hadn't previously encountered; every plank and rope and sail is changed along the way, but it remains the ship of Theseus nonetheless. Even if the crew die and are replaced by other sailors, it remains the ship of Theseus. And this is one of the major concerns of the novel, Ship of Theseus, and the book, S.; identity, what it is, how it changes, what influences it.
We are all, after all, ships of Theseus. Every cell in our bodies replaces itself several times in the course of our lives, and yet we remain, somehow, ourselves. This is commonplace, a well-known fact. What may not be as commonly known, what the book points out, is that the same thing happens with the things we think of as the most immutable part of ourselves: our thoughts, our feelings, our identities. Everything--almost everything--changes.
S________., the main character of Ship of Theseus, emerges from the ocean suffering from amnesia: his identity has been effaced, erased, taken from him. We're familiar with this trope, and we know what happens next; the quest for self, the gradual accumulation of clues, the sudden return of memory. But Straka withholds that development from us. Instead, S________. becomes caught up in a chain of events which culminates in his adoption of a new career, a new identity. Time passes, S________. grows older, and eventually he comes to the conclusion that his former identity is no longer important to him. He does not care enough about it to pursue it. Why should he? Those planks are long rotted, those ropes untwisted; the cells that made up his body are gone, the thoughts that possessed his mind no longer relevant to anyone or anything. What matters, the only thing that matters, is who he is, and who he may be.
The same thing happens with Jen and Eric, the two readers. When we first meet them, Eric is obsessed with his conflict with his former professor and how it will affect his career, while Jen is recovering from a bad break-up and searching for motivation. By the time we say goodbye to them, after multiple passes through Ship of Theseus, they have both left their former selves behind and found new identities in their pursuit of Straka, Caldeira and the S Collective.
So does this mean, as one of the candidates for Straka-hood theorises, that identity does not exist, that every element that makes up a person is mutable and formless? No. It means simply that identity is found elsewhere, on a deeper level than cells or thoughts or memories. Eric unwittingly gives the clue within the first few pages: "find what you love," he counsels Jen, who already knows. It's love that provides the thread of continuity through all S________.'s changes in the course of the book, unchanging even when he himself is not paying attention to it. It is what, and who, we love that defines us, not what we think or what we feel or what we remember.
That's the theme of Ship of Theseus; of the story contained in the footnotes and coded messages in the book; of the story of Jen and Eric, that begins in uncertainty and ends in quiet, comfortable resolution. (The last line in the book is a master-stroke.) That's the thread of identity that runs through all the changes that take place in the text of the book, itself a ship of Theseus whose substance changes as our readers add their notes and solve the puzzles.
The essence of identity is love. That's what S. is telling us. And that's really why I love it.
In the first place, my gods it's a beautiful thing. The creators set out to express their love of books as distinct from any other form of art, and so they made (well, the publishers made at their direction) a really nice book, that feels the comforting way books used to feel. I read somewhere that it even has that old-book smell. It comes in a slipcase, with a seal which you can peel off and stick on to an index card or something (I did). Even the seal is beautiful. Nothing is shoddy, nothing is skimped.
And when you get inside it...well. Dennis Wheatley once, long ago, produced a couple of mysteries which were presented largely as collections of clues, telegrams, photographs, scraps of fabric and such, with the solution in a sealed section at the end. My uncle had one, and I loved it. For a while, in my youth, there were Jackdaws, collections of facsimile documents in cardboard folders which attempted to instil in adolescent minds a flicker of interest in history. I didn't get that, but I loved the things. Later on, I produced something in a similar sort of vein (but fantasy, obviously) as a one-off thing to be auctioned at a filkcon, creating maps and pictures and puzzle-rhymes around a story which, to be honest, I made up as I went along. It worked, though, and I enjoyed doing it.
S. is like the grown-up and much cooler brother of all these things. There are inserts between the pages, artifacts, postcards and such, but not too many. (Abrams and Dorst reined themselves in.) They too are beautiful things, well made, but they don't distract from the story in the book, which I'm getting to at last.
The novel itself, Ship of Theseus by V M Straka, is, first of all, not the kind of novel to which I would ordinarily be drawn. (I'll explain why that's not important in a minute.) First of all, it falls into the category of "magic realism," which always seems to me to want to be fantasy but not quite to have the nerve. Fantastic things happen, but there seems to be no internal logic to them and they are never either remarked on as fantastic or accepted as real. The whole thing just drifts along, written in present tense, with one sudden startling dip from third person into second somewhere near the middle. Secondly, it is the kind of story in which nothing is ever nice and nobody is ever comfortable. I can deal with characters suffering as long as there's some respite along the way, but in this kind of story the only sensations worth describing in detail are the unpleasant ones; anything else is skipped over or touched on only awkwardly and with a sort of "sorry about this" embarrassment, almost till the very end. (There's a reason for that.) Some people, I know, enjoy that kind of raw, brutal, refreshingly bleak et cetera fiction, but I don't so much. So if I had encountered Ship of Theseus on its own, I'd probably have got about a third of the way in, started skipping, read the last few pages and called that it. It's a painstakingly accurate pastiche of a kind of book I don't usually read.
But it's not important, because the novel is not the story, or not the whole story. It is worth reading, and I plan to read it again very soon, but the novel is actually the subject of the story, or of the other layers of story. The next layer up is the story of V M Straka himself, a mysterious personage who may have been one or more of several other people, or not, and his interactions with his translator, F X Caldeira, equally mysterious. This story takes place mostly in the foreword to the novel, and in footnotes scattered throughout the chapters, and gives us the beginnings of an idea of Straka the writer and the people who surrounded and may or may not have been him, in the first half of the twentieth century. (Ship of Theseus is supposed to be his nineteenth and last novel, published in 1949 after his death. The book is full of tantalising hints about the other eighteen. I don't know if I'd want to read them, but I'd love them to exist.)
But the next layer of the story is--I think--the most important one, and it takes place in handwritten notes liberally scattered throughout the book by Jennifer, a senior college student who doesn't like the way her life is going and doesn't know what to do about it, and Eric, a former student who had a breakdown, vandalised the college and has now been not only expelled but "expunged," made a non-person as far as the college is concerned. He haunts the place, forced to remain unseen by the authorities, because he has nowhere else to go. When Jen leaves a note for him on the front page of the novel, he responds, and soon they are corresponding regularly, using the book as a maildrop, the timeline of their correspondence shown by the different coloured pens they use. And part of this layer of story is about their growing relationship, and it's very nicely done, without schmaltz or too much angst and with a nice seasoning of wit on both sides.
But another part of the story is about how Eric and Jen gradually get drawn into investigating the life and apparent death of Straka the author, tracing his reputed involvement in the tempestuous politics of his time, and the group (the S Collective) which grew up around him. The footnotes by Caldeira turn out to contain coded messages, and there are other puzzles scattered throughout the book, not essential to the enjoyment of S. but there if you care to look for them. It emerges that there are powerful interests working against Jen and Eric, trying to bury the memory of Straka, and their actions are mirrored in the action of the novel. There are startling discoveries, moments of danger, and after Jen and Eric actually start meeting in person, the reader has to fill in some of their story for hirself.
So what is S., the book, the stories, the experience, actually about?
I only partly know, I think. I'm going to be coming back to this book a lot, I know that. But the title of the novel, Ship of Theseus, is a clue.
The ship of Theseus is another version of the axe of my grandfather, one I hadn't previously encountered; every plank and rope and sail is changed along the way, but it remains the ship of Theseus nonetheless. Even if the crew die and are replaced by other sailors, it remains the ship of Theseus. And this is one of the major concerns of the novel, Ship of Theseus, and the book, S.; identity, what it is, how it changes, what influences it.
We are all, after all, ships of Theseus. Every cell in our bodies replaces itself several times in the course of our lives, and yet we remain, somehow, ourselves. This is commonplace, a well-known fact. What may not be as commonly known, what the book points out, is that the same thing happens with the things we think of as the most immutable part of ourselves: our thoughts, our feelings, our identities. Everything--almost everything--changes.
S________., the main character of Ship of Theseus, emerges from the ocean suffering from amnesia: his identity has been effaced, erased, taken from him. We're familiar with this trope, and we know what happens next; the quest for self, the gradual accumulation of clues, the sudden return of memory. But Straka withholds that development from us. Instead, S________. becomes caught up in a chain of events which culminates in his adoption of a new career, a new identity. Time passes, S________. grows older, and eventually he comes to the conclusion that his former identity is no longer important to him. He does not care enough about it to pursue it. Why should he? Those planks are long rotted, those ropes untwisted; the cells that made up his body are gone, the thoughts that possessed his mind no longer relevant to anyone or anything. What matters, the only thing that matters, is who he is, and who he may be.
The same thing happens with Jen and Eric, the two readers. When we first meet them, Eric is obsessed with his conflict with his former professor and how it will affect his career, while Jen is recovering from a bad break-up and searching for motivation. By the time we say goodbye to them, after multiple passes through Ship of Theseus, they have both left their former selves behind and found new identities in their pursuit of Straka, Caldeira and the S Collective.
So does this mean, as one of the candidates for Straka-hood theorises, that identity does not exist, that every element that makes up a person is mutable and formless? No. It means simply that identity is found elsewhere, on a deeper level than cells or thoughts or memories. Eric unwittingly gives the clue within the first few pages: "find what you love," he counsels Jen, who already knows. It's love that provides the thread of continuity through all S________.'s changes in the course of the book, unchanging even when he himself is not paying attention to it. It is what, and who, we love that defines us, not what we think or what we feel or what we remember.
That's the theme of Ship of Theseus; of the story contained in the footnotes and coded messages in the book; of the story of Jen and Eric, that begins in uncertainty and ends in quiet, comfortable resolution. (The last line in the book is a master-stroke.) That's the thread of identity that runs through all the changes that take place in the text of the book, itself a ship of Theseus whose substance changes as our readers add their notes and solve the puzzles.
The essence of identity is love. That's what S. is telling us. And that's really why I love it.