Reflection's Edge

Book Review: Light by M. John Harrison

Reviewer: Romie J. Stott

Summary: In 1999's London, physicist Michael Kearney struggles to outrun something he calls the "Shrander," which drives him to murder woman after woman even as he searches for the pattern behind quantum mechanics. Meanwhile, in the deep space of 2400, a woman named Seria Mau Genlicher voluntarily lives her life as a spaceship, and loses her humanity in the process; on the other side of the Kefahuchi Tract, Ed Chianese fights an addiction to virtual reality. All three struggle to leave themselves behind. Eventually, they succeed through the intervention of a being who is more than human.

Note: Light was published in Great Britain in 2002, but was only released in the States in September 2004.

Most readers and writers of speculative fiction have a genre inferiority complex – a lurking fear that they are stupid for not preferring literary books. As a result, they fall all over themselves any time they find a story that "proves" science fiction can be literature – as if that hadn't been demonstrated a dozen times over by books like Slaughterhouse V, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, and 1984. As a result, Light has gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews that in some cases approach love letters.

What these reviewers fail to say is that Light doesn't make much sense. It's true that Light is both literature and science fiction, but it's bad literature, and it's bad science fiction. As science fiction, it is so vague that it might as well be metaphysics; as literature, it makes the reader work so hard to find meaning that one begins to suspect that Harrison forgot to include it, and hoped his prose was stylish enough we wouldn't notice.

"Style over substance" might be Light's defining characteristic. The prose is so overloaded with beautiful but meaningless imagery that I expected the ink to turn purple in front of my eyes. The writing style is adolescent, pulpy, and annoyingly preoccupied with unnecessary sex. Harrison can barely go two pages without a sex act, appropriate to the situation or not, degrading instead of erotic. This sex is masturbatory in more ways than one; you can practically hear the author congratulating himself about how daring he is.

Light has been called "brutal," and it is - but it is the brutality of an angry drunk swinging his fists, not the brutality of a coroner stripping a subject to its bone and gristle. Light is adamantly, bleakly nihilist; even science means nothing, since Harrison asserts that all science is valid even if it directly contradicts itself. (This seems suspiciously like an excuse for his own logical blunders.) At the same time, Light is weirdly deterministic for a book which is nominally about quantum physics.

The science itself can be summed up with the statement: "wouldn't it be interesting if there was some kind of pattern behind quantum mechanics that we just haven't noticed yet?" This is a question which has preoccupied both the literary and the scientific community for 50 years, but Harrison offers us no answers, new or old, scientific or philosophic; he just repeats the question, like a teenage boy at his first college party.

Moreover, Harrison falls into the trap of assuming that "science" and "technology" mean the same thing. His characters mine ten-thousand-year-old archaeological sites not for information, but for advanced working technology. Despite the lack of a parallel in the real world, this is a frequent conceit of bad science fiction - especially when an author wants a cool gadget he can't explain or justify. In another classic "bad science" moment, Harrison has a computer-less algorithm "reprogram" someone's cells into peacock feathers.

As for the characters, you can't root for any of them. They are less characters than empty shells; their decisions are arbitrary and often inhumane. They kill their lovers. They kill children. They kill bystanders. Seria Mau flippantly ejects her paying passengers into space. In between, they masturbate emotionlessly, or imitate other people having sex.

Although their storylines are theoretically parallel, they fail to affect or illuminate each other. The connections that exist might as well be coincidence: two of them play dice, two of them care about physics, and two of them are brother and sister, but haven't seen each other in 20 years – and never do. In fact, nothing changes during the book; with the possible exception of Ed Chianese, the characters and their situations are identical from page one to page 250.

The last twenty pages are a cross between the ending of Vanilla Sky and the ending of Kubrick's 2001, the science fiction equivalent of a twist ending to a murder mystery. Harrison suddenly reveals that there was a story all along – a purpose behind the actions of the characters that we weren't allowed to know. Any horror, any suspense, has been false suspense – the product of withheld information. Since this information – the storyline – is introduced so late in the book, there is no time to resolve it.

Instead, Harrison leaves us with an open ending. This is not a bad thing in itself. In the case of Light, it's a slap in the face to the reader: you've trusted me for 300 pages, so I'll show you what I could have given you but didn't. I could have narrated from the viewpoint of this knowledgeable, proactive character. I could have told you the ending first so you could follow along. I could have written this as a short story and not wasted your time. In short, I could have let you participate in the story, but I chose not to.

Some readers may find meaning in Light's sparse severity, just as people see pictures in inkblots; Harrison's symbolism is non-specific enough that internal monologue can be projected onto the blankness of the book. In that sense, Light will be whatever you need it to be. However, if all interpretation is left to the reader, one must question the necessity of the author. He is brutal, and he is shocking - but just because something tastes bad doesn't make it medicine.

Literature, like art, has two functions: it entertains and it illuminates. Light leaves us in the dark. If you're looking for entertainment, look elsewhere: this book is no fun. If you're looking for an intellectual challenge, try a Rubik's cube.

If you liked this book, you might also enjoy:

Dancing Wu Li Masters, by Gary Zukav

2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace

The John Varley Reader: Thirty Years of Short Fiction, by John Varley

Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut

Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins



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