Critical Survey

Contemporary fiction has to address all manner of uncertainties. Those brought about by scientific developments and related social changes are possibly most acute in novels which experiment with the new science of cloning and reproductive technologies. Here there is often an explicit exploration of what it means to be human. As Eva Sabine Zehelein’s article shows, the capability of science to replace sexual reproduction is explored as a potentially liberating idea by the scientist-author, Carl Djerassi. His novel provides a means of educating the reader about science as well as providing a testing-ground for the ethical issues which face today’s scientists. Notably it is the long-term effects of scientific inventions in reproductive technologies which require hard thinking today. While these concerns will be considered by scientists and legislators, they are certainly being tested in the relative freedom of the novel. Thus Eva Hoffmann’s The Secret demonstrates that, to some extent, it is the clone who exposes what is taken for granted as human. Susan Stuart illustrates here the critical perspective offered by this novel. Whatever scientific interventions and biological crafting are involved in the creation of new life, the complexity of the decisions and actions of the life created provides a rich source of narrative exploration, especially in the bildungsroman form.

In Powers of Horror (1982), Julia Kristeva suggests that the corpse is ‘the utmost in abjection. It is death infecting life’. This categorical statement, while not intended for the genre of crime fiction, nonetheless does much to explain the power and appeal of the twentieth century’s most successful fictional formula. For Kristeva, the abject is ‘the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (4); it is experienced as an encounter with ‘an other who precedes and possesses me’ (10) and it is ‘a border that has encroached upon everything’ (3). Borders both defend and confine. They are the necessary limits that protect the subject from psychosis, and they are that which deny us our desired return to a lost imaginary plenitude. Kristeva’s abject evokes seepage, it speaks to the instability of borders, and the impossibility of the pristine, the firm, the uncontaminated. And it is just this sense of unavoidable defilement, this tension between the maintenance and collapse of cultural and social boundaries, that underpins both the crime genre and our fascination with the form.

Families, hidden family links and family origins feature largely in the detective novels of both P.D. James and Reginald Hill, as indeed they did for their precursor Agatha Christie. With their more recent police procedurals, however, both authors have intensified the plotting around the motif of family and friends. James and Hill now write long and expansive novels, introducing us to large, extended communities often consisting of a central family, their servants and employees, their friends and lovers, and at times even a dependent village. The novels by P.D. James, featuring the policeman Adam Dalgliesh, and the novels by Reginald Hill, based around the detectives Dalziel and Pascoe, are hugely popular detective series. However, in narratological terms, the novels’ length and the sheer complexity of the plotting around the family would initially appear to be distinctly counterproductive. Indeed, as the detectives interview them one by one, so many family and friends pass the review that one of the basic features of narrative would appear to be undermined, the narrative tension established in a novel’s opening pages and arching down to its closing sentence.

Cat’s Eye, published in 1989, reveals Margaret Atwood’s preoccupation with both family ties and friendship. The profundity and fallibility of such bonds are made manifest by the relationships in which Elaine, the novel’s protagonist, becomes involved during the course of the novel. Her family background is an unorthodox yet loving one, and the father-figure of this family contrasts strikingly with the domineering patriarch within Cordelia’s family, who subdues and excludes his youngest daughter. The bond between siblings is explored through reference to Elaine’s brother Stephen, and also through Cordelia’s patronising older sisters, who tend to contribute to her sense of inferiority and abandonment. The interconnection between family and friendship is evident in the way in which modes of behaviour formed within the family context are perpetuated within a friendship group, as the child attempts to compensate for his/her own, and others’, inadequacies.

The Secret is a first novel by Eva Hoffman, a Polish-American writer, better known for her non-fiction work, her memoir Lost in Translation and other writings which take her back to eastern Europe and the experiences of an earlier generation. It is set in a future USA where cloning is legal, though not acceptable to everyone, and the development of the narrative is largely guided by an implicit exposition of issues related to cloning. The Secret is a first person, chronological account in which many voices are heard, and these diverse voices contribute to a lively discussion within the text of the possible effects and implications of cloning for the clone, and for the clone’s family and friends.

Some fifteen years ago, a distinguished chemistry professor at Stanford University closed his lab in order to write autobiographies, novels and plays. The ‘(god)father of the pill’ (a term he has often criticized) has received numerous scientific prizes and honours. Carl Djerassi is one of the few American scientists to have been awarded both the National Medal of Science (1973) and the National Medal of Technology (1992). He has been called an outstanding scientific hero of the twentieth century, well-situated in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and now even immortalized on an Austrian postal stamp. Djerassi decided to fence off his own personal garden patch on the vast prairies of belles lettres, and to create his own literary genre.

While London was to prove the cauldron in which the future of modern Britain would unfold, the early post-war anxieties about London and the social, political, and cultural future of the country initiated a series of near-future dystopian visions of the city. Although this was never an extensive tradition, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), and J.G. Ballard’s High Rise (1975) represent three clear waypoints in its development. It has, nonetheless, marked a continuing sense of a loss of national prestige and an acute anxiety over the future of both the city and modern British society. Strikingly, given the known liberal credentials of these authors, such anxieties have provoked in these novels a conservative fear of change, whether represented by a socialist government, a burgeoning youth culture, or technological development.

McEwan’s Saturday (2005) begins and ends in the edgy border zones between sleeping and waking, the public and the private, night and day. The main plot action concerns a violent threat to the domestic security of its protagonist Henry Perowne, while its setting draws on contemporary political events. It is a novel which can be seen to develop aspects of earlier works, including A Child in Time (1987), Black Dogs (1992) and Enduring Love (1997). As a novel set on a single day, it can be compared with a closely contemporary American work, Don de Lillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) and the modernist day novel such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Saturday communicates its political themes in terms of family life, celebrates the power of the novel to explore both pathological and political states of the mind and draws on uncanny politicising effects in representing the everyday.

Ballade of the Makers Envoi SCOTT KELLY

New Year’s Day 2008 Action STEPHEN HUGHES

Lines North by Pat Corina (Soundswrite Press, 2008) 96 pp. ISBN 978-0-95507-86 1-3, £5.00

Sympathetic Magic by Brian Fewster (Poor Tom’s Press, 2008) 92 pp. ISBN 978-0-95433-715-5, £6

Notes on contributors