A young British Christian minister signs up to spread the Gospel on another planet. The lovely wife he leaves at home is pregnant, as it happens, and must navigate her way through the alarmingly hazardous Earth of the near future. She watches aghast as tsunamis, volcanoes, drought, famine, and genocide devastate more and more of the planet. She waits in vain for rubbish pickup service, becomes injured cleaning up her home after a freak storm, and faces life-threatening conditions at the hospital where she works as a nurse.
Author Michel Faber clearly wanted to make a statement about the 21st-Century state of the planet - he shows it to us from the incomprehensible distance of the planet Oasis, where the minister has gone as a missionary. But the alien planet is so placid and unchanging, and its human complement of staff so phlegmatic and so complying, that barely anything happens there, other than to Peter, the cleric.
The fraying relationship between Peter and his wife Bea forms the core of this story. They send text communications back and forth and through these we watch as the tension mounts. As befits his central theme, Faber handles this progress more subtly and more effectively than anything else in the novel. He sets this against the backdrop of the collapsing, disaster-beset Earth, where human society takes pains to tear itself apart.
A few notes for sci-fi readers: the author describes the alien planet in fairly rudimentary terms, and he invests zero text to the science of inter-galactic travel. His devout aliens have a certain personality, but aside from hinted-at physical weaknesses, do not hold our (my) interest strongly. No, the marriage of Peter and Bea occupies center stage, and their threatened separation focuses the book.
Faber handles this focus well; his strategy of placing millions of light years between them has a certain novelty. It’s difficult for me to develop strong feelings about this novel, so perhaps be guided by that lack.
Author Kate Horsley dresses up her novel as a codex found on an archeological dig in Ireland. It purports to be a first-person narrative of a woman trained as a druid in early 6th Century Ireland; it even includes a Translator’s Note explicating the scholarly treatment of the text. Horsley establishes this as a way of lending a present-day flavor to a long-ago text. It works really well, and at the same time the story manages to be a compelling text with human suffering, thwarted romance, power-mad clerics, and a deft treatment of how some true stories evolve into legends, embellished with magic.
Gwynneve, our wise and realistic narrator, tells her first-person story of passion, growth, and loss. This serves as a cross-section of the wrenching Irish conversion from the ancient Druidic faith to Christianity. In fact, the story by design straddles the exact period where the Christian faith takes strong root in the land, and succeeds in eradicating all traces of the old ways. But not in our Gwynneve!
This woman trains the full nine years required to become a druid, travels that path, and gains some renown. Her passion, which she discovers quite young, is for reading and writing; she burns to know what the long dead philosophers and seers and poets and clerics said and thought. This leads her to Giannon, a tall and rather unfeeling druid, from whom she finds she desires affection and partnership. He does not provide these in any gratifying amount, but he does teach her the druidic disciplines. Through a series of adventures and misadventures Gwynneve is admitted into a convent devoted to St. Brigit.
At this convent, Druid Gwynneve pursues her love of writing as a scribe, and sets the current manuscript to parchment. Before very long she runs afoul of the new Christian male hierarchy, is imprisoned and martyred. She thus personifies the dying of the old, nature-based beliefs prevalent in Ireland - she couches this often harsh transition in very human terms. In addition, there is a fine and lovely lilt to the writing, as befits something composed in English by an Irish wielder of words.
Straightforward, feeling, well-paced and lovely, there is much here to use your time well. It imagines its time and place thoroughly, much to the delight of the modern reader.
Upon its 1947 publication Invisible Man became a cultural phenomenon. It’s easy to see why. In it Ralph Ellison produces a novel-length polemic observing and decrying the treatment of blacks in America. A first-person African-American man’s consciousness changes from the accepting subservience (and bootlicking) during his college years to big-city radical political activism, to a disillusioned resignation, through which he finally emerges a thoughtful, perhaps hopeful, individual. It’s a vivid indictment, and required reading for anyone even reflecting casually on race relations in the modern world.
From the outset we witness the shocking prejudice and mistreatment of African- Americans in the Depression-era United States. But because he shows skill in parroting back the “modern” Negro approach of acceptance through good manners and mindfulness-of-his-place, his native Southern town grants him a scholarship to college.
Through no fault of his own, he runs afoul of the college administration and is expelled. After he removes to New York his skill as a speechmaker lands him work in a subversive political organization, where he eventually chafes under the boot-heel of a central committee’s iron discipline. His career there disintegrates during a vivid description of the Harlem riot of 1935.
Of overarching importance: Ellison’s recounting in cringe-worthy detail a broad sample of the degrading stereotypes and rituals white people employed to keep blacks in their “place.” These accrete a weight as the book progresses, and establish the background in which our story takes place. They distill to the razor-sharp tip of Ellison’s spear; he aims this weapon at American race relations and lets fly.
However, in his introduction to the 1981 re-issue, Ellison cites Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” and observes “ … that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.” It’s difficult to find any passages in “Invisible Man” that indicate a course toward the “democratic ideal.”
His invisibility evolves from his withdrawal from all aspects of his world and life. He lives where he can’t be seen, he understands his voice will be ignored by all sectors of society, be they black, white, radical, or reactionary, or any combination. He first encounters the idea of invisibility on the bus between his native South and New York. He is distressed to see the “vet” on the bus, the black onetime doctor and current mental patient who caused him so much trouble at the whorehouse where he found himself one fateful day.
The vet tells him:
Play the game, but don’t believe in it - that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way - part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate - I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment. We’re an ass-backward people, though. You might even beat the game. It’s really a very crude affair. … You’re hidden right out in the open - that is, you would be if you only realized it. They wouldn’t see you because they don’t expect you to know anything …”
After affirming in the Epilogue that he is forced into action, and cannot remain invisible, or at least that he can’t remain on the sideline, the narrator says:
So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? … There seems to be no escape. … I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some if it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I’m a desperate man - but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I renounce and I defend and I hate and I love.”
The author takes pains to describe an outcome, a result of his journey.
Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge. And there’s still a conflict within me: With Louis Armstrong one half of me says, ‘Open the window and let the foul air out,’ while the other says, ‘It was good green corn before the harvest.’ Of course Louis was kidding, he wouldn’t have thrown old Bad Air out, because it would have broken up the music and the dance, when it was the good music that came from the bell of old Bad Air’s horn that counted.”
So ultimately, Ellison’s narrator finds that love is necessary to telling his story, but that the love will always be mixed, polluted, by rampant hate and repudiation.
As I said, it’s easy to see why this title has risen to such prominence. Angry but wise to the human condition, unforgiving even as it admits to limited hope, “Invisible Man” remains a canonical work illuminating an issue still vexing America today.
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