Fully-Medicated Luxury Communism
I read Carl Neville's SF alt-history thriller, "Eminent Domain"
Welcome, creatures! In this edition, a book. That’s basically it. Plus some flotsam at the end.
And There’s Another Country I’ve Heard of Long Ago
I discovered Carl Neville’s Eminent Domain via We Are the Mutants’ retrospective on the Year of Our Lord 2020. Michael Grasso writes,
Its deep, detail-packed examination of a “utopia with dystopian characteristics”—a largely post-scarcity “People’s Republic of Britain” where a 1990s revolution against the CEOs and toffs has allowed an ostensibly classless technologically-driven society to flourish—is a political thriller, a spy novel, an exploration of alternate-history culture and art, and in the character that I identified with most—a young American college student who falls in love with the PRB thanks to its cultural products, art, and music—a simultaneous celebration and warning about falling in love with a place you’ve never been.
Eminent Domain is a novel about a world where all of Europe including/and the UK has gone full Communist. Now that political settlement is showing its cracks, both in the development of a psychedelic (and maybe also psychic) movement called the Enthusiasm, and due to an aggressive new American administration whose governing philosophy is, “Get in losers, we’re becoming pure chaos!” A murder investigation uncovers countless little betrayals and losses on the path to a world where nobody profits from the immiseration of others.
Alternate worlds crack the timeline, psychological damage and psychic communion crack the mind, like tree roots breaking out from under concrete. There’s even an unplanned pregnancy: “a new world,” a loss and a shock which also brings “exhilaration, hope, release”; the ultimate image of life cracking the planned economy of our days. Or… the possibility of that cracking-open, so young and vulnerable that almost anything can threaten and forestall it.
Man, I loved so many of the ideas here, and the confidence with which they’re deployed. So I will talk mostly about those ideas, but it’s also worth saying that Neville builds a political novel inlaid with lyricism. And that’s part of his point, too, that material equality has to form the substructure for beauty if you want people to accept it. There’s a tension explicitly stated within the book between lyricism and material equality, or maybe lyricism and material well-being; or maybe lyricism and a moral worldview, a worldview which prizes morality above and often against sublimity. So we get “a brandy he swirls up into thinly interleaved caramel sheets around the snifter.” “There’s a dark tunnel and pale hands holding something out to her, a cup of green liquid, the face veiled in shadow and she is saying, well the undiscovered, you know… the undisclosed.”
Or a personal favorite: “She blows smoke into the air, watches it drift, blue nimbus, grey central grain, a bruise against the day, coughs, feels the half pleasurable shift and crackle of the mucus webbing her lungs.”
He’s also great at the smash-cut ending to a chapter: One interrogation scene ends, “Do you believe that the lion has lain down with lamb? That man is shepherd to man?” And scene!
The book is laid out mostly in microchapters, switching POV and frequently dipping into explanatory documentation. We get glimpses of the scaffolding that provides all this free food and medicine and information (though only glimpses: where are the electronics made, and how do the tantalum miners live?). There’s one great moment, I assume especially striking for the American reader, where we see that in this technofuture people still string out their washing from their windows, “bright as bunting.” It’s a country where nobody starves or begs.
There are two big weirdnesses here, both of which play a role in the plot: drugs and parenthood. This post-UK is nicknamed “the Party Republic of Britain,” but it’s not just about recreational pharmaceuticals. These post-Britons attempt to enter a shared consciousness via psychedelics. It’s a medicinal solution to the problem Orwell identified: how to forge the brotherhood of man, without the fatherhood of God. There’s an unexpected, hallucinatory mysticism to this novel, which gives depth and realism to its understanding of human nature. Man is the lonely animal; therefore, man is the mystical animal. Mysticism is not solely about self-loss but about an encounter with another: “And what is that room there at the end of the hallway? Who sits patiently waiting behind the door?”
PRB citizens also live under a strict medicopolitical regime. They wear Affective Monitors, basically what if a meat thermometer, but for your soul. They’re often required to wear anti-stress patches (though you can hack them so they don’t put you to sleep, but leave you “bouncing in and out of consciousness at incredible speed”!). They medicate away “Infantile Possession Syndrome,” which seems to include both the desire to accumulate material goods or wealth, and the urgent, possessive need of eros. You can come up with both historical and cultural reasons this desire has to be medicated away: Historically, of course people hoard stuff for their kids, the pressure to build a family is the pressure to build a household is the pressure to build a castle. Culturally, our very language trains us to link “belonging,” to a person or a nation, with “belonging,” the state of being a possession. So they take prescription-strength agape (use only as directed).
We meet Tom, a sad-sack who whines about his IPS but also has a deep, obvious artistic sensitivity. He’s a Nice Guy (but he’s taking meds for it!) who’s incredibly, sweetly enthusiastic about the possibility that music and architecture can shift consciousness and weave artistry, and therefore humanity, inextricably into the tapestry of nature. We can overcome our post-Eden alienation by building increasingly-weird Aeolian harps! I love this guy. But he can’t love me back, because that would be a symptom.
Tom is a mess; he’s easy to pity and disdain. He crystallizes the overall thwarted and resigned feeling so many of these character share, their attenuated human connections. You can always tell the British by the way they romanticize resignation.
In the heady early days of the revolution, this Britain experimented with separating babies from their mothers, to be raised collectively. This too has a deeper symbolic resonance; we learn on the second page that these Communists seek “to fully and absolutely remove all historical influences from the culture.” History is written by the landlords, after all. The experiment wasn’t devastating (or maybe they medicated the devastation! Can you medicate when the D/x is being a mammal?) but it left an ache, a guilty longing, “a scarred, white-dull pulse at the centre of things” activated by the word mother. Several of these characters don’t know their biological parents, and differ—or, sometimes, equivocate—on how much they care about that. The main exception is a man whose father, a conservative policeman, instilled in him a deep filial piety—but as the son notes with a certain grim relish, most of the words in that sentence are “dead words.”
Both the drugs and the weirdness around parenthood are presented as British things, not Communist things. The other post-nations don’t get it. I wish we had some sense of what they do get! We’re constantly told that Britain, and the Communist world of which it’s the weakest security link, is diverse and egalitarian among cultures, but what we actually see in the book is pretty monochrome. How do all those African and Asian Communist cultures handle the pressure that family loyalty places on egalitarianism? Religion has apparently disappeared; there are no Travellers, and this is a 1990s without mention of AIDS or, iirc, gay people. You can say it’s my fault for caring, not every book can care about every thing, but these are the things I care about and I like Neville enough to want to know how he’d handle them. (Also, the idea that state/unitary control of the means of production makes it even harder for subcultures to form and sustain themselves is a pretty normal angle of critique.)
The one alternative we do see is the American way. The chapters lengthen when we’re in the POV of the villains: an American mercenary, and a British traitor. This was a mistake imo. The descriptions of the evil American maniacocrat include shattered gems of horror prose: “a carapace of nanobots, [President] Connaught himself a shell within that shell, crepe-y yet glistening and reticulated, sustained in and out by this invisible swarm.” But the villains we get to know feel cartoonish; the American mercenary feels especially fake, not only because fakeness is part of his culture (and not only because he calls trash “rubbish” and lines “queues”). The mercenary has his own culturally-tortured idea of parenthood, and this I almost liked: He’s very sentimental about his daughter, but thinks he can’t spend time with her until he gets more money; she despises him and squeezes him for cash. That’s sad and recognizable, it’s in fact the traditionalist critique of Republicans (“yes chaos/yes derangement/yes disconnection but also yes home/family/responsibility”) although it’s painted here in unnecessarily-broad strokes. I resented spending full-size chapters with these people when we only get microchapters for the gamine psychic with a dog familiar, or the filially-pious spymaster who has nurtured perhaps too assiduously his own romantic renunciation.
This book felt like the middle book of a trilogy. I tried to figure out if reading Resolution Way, the author’s previous novel, which weaves into this one somehow, would have helped me, but in the end I’ll just recommend this volume for people who want to chew on it and talk to me about it. I haven’t even touched on the digressions (they’re not digressions! They’re answers to the question, “What is human nature and how can you tell?”) about algorithmic voting and nostalgia for the bad old days and the animal-liberation satire which, like all satire, reifies its target. Eminent Domain is a political novel in exactly the way I said One Night in Miami wasn’t a political movie; it’s a novel about all the things we do with our politics. We inhabit our politics like squatters, not like landlords.
icymi
I watched the recent two-part adaptation of Stephen King’s IT and filled a sewer with my thoughts: on spiritual friendship, Andres Muschietti’s skill in blending multiple horror subgenres, “guilt and convalescence,” The New Gay Subplot, and more.
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Chumbawamba, “The World Turned Upside Down”