What, Again Dangerous Visions: `Lamia Mutable', M John Harrison
Joseph Nebus
M John Harrison
At last, someone has the courage to take on vapid would-be
artists who lack interest in or compassion for their audiences. At
least I figure that's the point; ``Lamia Mutable'' reads very strongly
like a tale of moral comeuppance, but what the the moral is supposed to
be is a little unclear. I admit I'm getting some of the reading of the
story from the introductory material and afterword, which feels like
cheating; from what's presented in-story ... well, here:
We start at the Bistro Californium where various people who
appear to be the portraits of Smug Dilettante Non-Artists gather. I'm
sure there's a TV Tropes label for this particular kind of artist but I
don't know what it is; it's the supposedly menacing kind that produces
stuff without any sort of self-criticism or editing or feedback
possible. Minor characters mentioned are the blind painter, the deaf
lute-player, and the chromium-handed poet who writes without ever
looking back at what was writ. We're spared any direct examples of
their art but I don't doubt we're meant to take it as being
near-insufferable gibberish.
Those are the supporting characters. The main characters are
the Birkin Grif, whose exact role I don't quite get, and his lover
Lamia, the ``skinless woman'' (she's plastic-wrapped instead so you can
see her innards), who contract with a Dr Grishkin to take them to The
Wisdom, the ruins of some kind of war so far back nobody's quite sure
what it was about or just what happened (although, I note, not *so* far
in the past that the characters can't joke about great burnings
including Hiroshima, Buchenwald, Joan of Arc, and `Virgil' Grissom;
I'd have thought `Gus' Grissom would be the name variant that lasts).
We're supposed to take these characters as being so fatuously
self-satisfied and detached from basic humanity that it's fine with us
if something horrible happens to them. That's satisfied; Dr Grishkin
spends his time explaining how it's all inevitable, including the murder
of a security guard along their way to breaking into The Wisdom. The
Wisdom is this vast grey expanse of grey dust reaching to the point that
one loses all sense of orientation, and Birkin Grif has some hopes of
meeting someone there. Instead, what happens is Lamia begins to dance
and undergoes a series of wild metamorphoses; ``Is this not the ultimate
in body-scheme illusions? See: she is *living* her hallucination!'',
according to Grishkin.
Grif protests the unfairness of it all; Grishkin goes on about
how fairness doesn't enter into it; it's all inevitability because it
has happened. Grif learns too late whatever it is he learned, exactly.
Harrison's afterword mentions that he wrote it, in part, as ``an
allegorical illustration of a philosophy'', and as ``a piece of
grotesque comedy'', and as ``snide parody of London intellectual life''.
So far as that's concerned, he's succeeded; I don't have any doubt he's
really laying it in to whoever his satirical targets are. But from my
perspective forty years on, and as quite the naif in most of 20th
century philosophy or of London intellectual life of the 1960s, putting
too much vitriol into satirizing them feels kind of like writing the
definitive parody of rotisserie-league baseball managers: they may be
silly but how are they bothering me?
Well, there's a partial answer. The characters are callous,
indifferent to cruelties past (I suppose telling a lame Holocaust joke
is an easy way to establish a character as unpleasant) or present (as in
barely caring that they killed a person for trivial reasons). But I
don't see where the characters are given the chance to repent, or to
change, unless Lamia's mutations are supposed to be that chance, in
which case Grif fails, but he's hardly got a clear question of what to
do presented to him before Grishkin proclaims it was all inevitable.
Again in the afterward Harrison explains he wanted to pose as
many unanswered questions as possible and ``imply rather than to make
statements'', producing what he considered a ``sprawling and multivalent
story''. He succeeds there too; I'm interested by the presented world
--- a place where you can go without skin has interesting features, and
this Wisdom as a place where inner hallucinations and perhaps inner
character become manifest is a solid base for a story. I'd like to see
more of that, and to see a story that's got a less insular storyline.
(There's something gone very wrong when I realize I'd like to
know how Jack Chalker would have gone from this starting point, though
I kind of know how he would have.)
DANGER LEVEL: A lot of these people seem to be
missing key organs.
VISION LEVEL: There's a good chance you'll be lost in
an undifferentiated grey background.
NEXT: ``Last Train To Kankakee'', Robin Scott
NEAR: ``Empire Of The Sun'', Andrew Weiner