Mute Women

[mtvessel]

May 2018
A Borrowed Man - Gene Wolfe – Tor, 2015
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I think it is safe to say that Gene Wolfe does not like author interviews. He comes across as affable enough in the ones that I have read, but given that this is a book where the main character is an enslaved clone of a genre author who is required to explain what his original was thinking to any reader who is interested, it is fairly clear what he really thinks. I imagine that he is also bored of his reputation as a subtle, deceptive writer. It would explain why, unlike any other book of his that I have read, there appears to be no clever subtext whatsoever in the plot, which is a near-future murder mystery with science fiction trimmings. "Go ahead, try and find a deep meaning in this one!", he seems to be saying. Unfortunately, the straightforwardness makes it rather uninteresting and throws his one great weakness as a writer - his inability to create female characters with a plausible interior life - into painful relief.

Earnest Smithe is a reclone, a vat-grown copy of a mystery author with his implanted memories, who lives on a shelf in a public library. Readers who want to understand an author's motivations can borrow him just like a book. One day a woman called Colette Coldbrook does just that. Her brother Conrad has been murdered shortly after discovering a copy of a novel called Murder on Mars written by Smithe's original in a safe belonging to their brilliant, secretive and now dead father. Clearly the book is important, but it is not clear how. But who better to investigate than a clone of its author?

There were a number of things that annoyed me about this book. Firstly, the worldbuilding is lazy and inconsistent. The story is set in a Gernsbachian twenty-second century with population control, hovercars and servitor robots, but also paper receipts, no mobile phones, and the forelock-tugging social stratification of the 1950s. This is fine for the likes of Asimov and other golden age writers who didn't know better, but the world has moved on in the last sixty years, and nowadays a writer cannot expect to present such a world without the reader asking some immersion-breaking questions.

Then there is the whole concept of clones as slaves. I must say that I am getting very tired of it. So many writers have used this trope - C.J. Cherryh, Kazuo Ishiguro and Paolo Baciagalupi to name just a few that I have reviewed - but no-one ever explains how, in a universe where human rights have presumably been invented at least once, the assignment of slave status to what are clearly human beings simply because their DNA was copied from someone else's rather than arising from egg-and-sperm combination could possibly have become generally acceptable. By that logic, a second-born identical twin should also be a slave. Yes, yes, I know that it’s an SF metaphor for other unjust ways of segregating people such as gender, colour, sexual orientation or wealth, but you shouldn't just plonk a honking great social allegory into the middle of your worldbuilding without explanation. It's particularly egregious here as Wolfe clearly had no figurative intention in mind (despite my satirical musings above). He just liked the idea of a person you could borrow from a library.

My final source of annoyance is, as always, the female characters. Rather than addressing this long-standing weakness, Wolfe seems to have doubled down on it. Collette is a simpering femme fatale straight out of Philip Marlowe; Arabella, Smithe's recloned ex-wife, has no purpose than to be a love interest for Smithe; and Mahala, the only other female character, is quite literally mute. She either has to rely on her friend Georges, with whom she is in a quasi-spousal relationship, to speak for her, or use cryptic hand-written notes because Wolfe's future world apparently lacks any sort of medical device that could help her. To be fair, she still comes across as a bright and interesting personality, but she lacks agency.

The noir plot is okay I suppose, but is based around a revelation that again feels like something that writers were doing sixty years ago. And I think this explains the inconsistency of the worldbuilding. The reclones are an interesting idea and require a future setting to be plausible, but the noir plot needs a retro 50s environment to work. Wolfe can normally hide inconsistencies like this behind stylish writing, but here he hasn't bothered. And it's not as if it can't be done - cyberpunk frequently uses a similar noir style, but authors like William Gibson have carefully worked out and explained just why their societies were so unjust and have built it into their plots.

I note from his wikipedia page that Wolfe seems to have stopped writing since the sad death of his wife. What a shame it would be if this minor work turns out to be his last novel.