Golden State + The Black Dwarves of The Good Little Bay
Let the record show I'm still reading.
Dear Reader,
As lockdown and despair becomes everyday facts, I spend half of my days working from home and the other half wondering which I’m worse at — reading or writing. (Don’t answer that. Let me hold on to the illusion of the jury being out on that one.)
But leaving aside my lack of skills, there is one thing I’d like you to remember. Contagious and potentially life-threatening as the new strain of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 may be, it looks like a pompom. A virulently infectious one (especially among asymptomatic carriers; so please pray hard that employers embrace the idea of working from home as a long-term option), with a significantly higher mortality rate than the regular flu; but still a pompom. Maybe even one that’s been chewed on a little.
Instead of Sars-Cov-2, which is the scientific name for this strain of the coronavirus, or Covid-19 (the 19 refers to 2019), which is the name of the infection, imagine if we knew it as the pompom fever. For one, it would be infinitely less racist than “kung flu”.
Turns out I’m not the only one who saw the “crown-like spikes” of the coronavirus and thought of a pompom. In fact, the only reason I’m confidently putting my pompom imagery on record is that a wildly respectable someone had the same idea: Margaret Atwood. Listening to her liken the virus to a pompom was the first time a giggle spilled out of me while listening to anything related to pompom fever, aka Covid-19.
The Sars-Cov-2 virus — just trips off the tongue, doesn’t it? — is an undeniable part of our reality now and it will continue to be so until a vaccine or treatment is developed (and at least the vaccine is not happening anytime soon). There is a good possibility that every one of us will contract Covid-19 at some point in the near future. We can only hope that when we get pompom fever, it will be mild and if it’s severe, that the hospitals are not overburdened as they are now. There is every reason to be careful and cautious, but there’s only so much we can do if we’re paralysed by fear. So to that end, I’ll see that scary virus and raise you…a pompom.
Incidentally, if you feel like making a thoroughly adorable pompom dog, see here.
Also, I rather loved this poem by Jessic Salfia, with its self-explanatory title: “The First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining”. Sadly, it doesn’t mention pompoms.
The pompom first came up in an interview that Emma Barnett of the BBC had with Atwood, in which Atwood pointed out that the coronavirus is not an invisible enemy, but a slightly-ridiculous looking virus. It’s one of two interviews of Atwood I heard last week. The other was Atwood with Cheryl Strayed for the New York Times.
To my mind, Barnett is the better interviewer because she gets Atwood to talk about a wider range of things (from the technical meaning of ‘dystopia’ to the human tendency to burn things that we consider ‘evil’ and the grief of losing her partner last year, among other things), but it’s still guarded in the way a conversation between professional acquaintances tend to be. There’s a lot to be said for being able to hear the laughter in Atwood’s voice as she talks about climbing on to her roof (to deal with a squirrel problem); teases Strayed about wearing the same set of clothes (“That’s a little unhealthy, Cheryl.”) and generally be her winsome self (“I’m wearing red, Cheryl. Because I’m old.”). Both offer glimpses into facets of Atwood’s personality. Facets that Atwood is willing to put on record.
Which brings me to Golden State, Ben Winters’ dystopic novel, which some have clubbed with the likes of 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale. Bluntly put, the entire novel not that good, but most of it is very engaging and the premise is clever enough to merit being put on the same shelf as the best of dystopic fiction. It also got me thinking about another book, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Golden State is a novel about a law enforcement officer employed by Golden State, a place that was once Los Angeles. Only the word ‘novel’ in Golden State is not fiction, but a true story, “organised into chapters or incidents, featuring a historical character or characters” and “implying an inspirational message about the nature of the Golden State.”
Built on the idea that truth is objective, unchanging and sacred, Golden State rose as a response to a mysterious catastrophe that saw a general breakdown in trust. Now, within the borders of what was once California, lies are a criminal offence, fiction is prohibited, all tv programming is made up of reality shows; and metaphors, similes, exaggerations etc are frowned upon. People greet each other with what they consider established facts, rather than greetings. Instead of “hello”, each person says a fact and the other responds with a corresponding fact. Then the first says “Always has it been” and the other replies, “Always it shall be.”
As part of the campaign against falsehood, citizens of the Golden State accept constant surveillance as normal.
“Everything is on the Record, just waiting to be discovered: the whispered confession, the stolen kiss. This is not the goal of good and golden systems; the goal is simply the maintenance of reality as it occurs, so that all can live together within the same sheltering truth, safe within the strong high walls of the Objectively So. We may keep secrets from one another, but not from the Record… .”
Upholding the Objective So, or absolute truth, is an elite squad of law enforcement, known as the Speculative Service. Its officers, the Speculators, are gifted with an ability to detect lies. Laszlo Ratesic, our hero, is a Speculator and he’s a complete cliché. He’s a grumpy, middle-aged detective whose gruffness conceals a marshmallow heart. He has a fondness for fast food, is haunted by personal demons and insecurity, and has a failed marriage behind him. Circumstances saddle him with a rookie sidekick and they’re assigned a case that seems routine, but ends up leading the detective down a dangerous rabbit hole.
If you’ve read noir fiction, you know too many detectives like Laszlo and I think Winters is very deliberately trying to reference that worldview. It’s an apparently simple world that is filled with façades and secrets, which is essentially true of Golden State too. Also, there are few genres as gripping as noir murder mysteries, no matter how familiar the clichés.
Laszlo and his partner, the gifted Aysa Paige, are sent to check out what appears to be a natural death — a man has fallen off a roof to his death. However, as Laszlo and Aysa sift through the facts on Record, they realise there are many camouflaged anomalies. As they follow the clues, Laszlo realises that beneath the Objectively So lurk lies, infidelity and treason. What the reader eventually realises is that there is also an anti-climax. (I’m trying to be as un-spoiler-y as possible.)
Winters is good at world-building, which means you quickly have an image of this futuristic city that is conceived of as an American utopia. There are clever little details that will haunt you (like the food truck that Laszlo longingly gazed at, clueless about the vehicle’s more sinister purposes. Yes, the food truck has sinister purposes. As far as I’m concerned, that’s more telling of a distorted society than anything else in the novel because food trucks are a gift).
Unfortunately, the great reveal in Golden State isn’t as impressive as either the premise or the world in which the story is set. This is partly because the reader figures out who the bad guy is before Laszlo, which means I as a reader am waiting for Laszlo to catch up. What I really wanted to know was why the bad guy had come up with this elaborate plot. Unfortunately, the motivation is at best vague. There’s also a tangent involving the erstwhile Las Vegas, which to me seemed like Winter had already lost interest in the end of this book and was vrooming towards a sequel.
What Laszlo discovers is a threat to the fundamentals of Golden State, but it’s never really clear why Laszlo is playing such a key role or how the plot will disrupt the systems Golden State has in place. Even though we know what life in Golden State looks and feels like, Winters doesn’t tell us much about how it’s governed, which is important given the plot is actually against the state rather than any individual. If one is looking to destabilise a country, it makes sense to discredit or target a publicly-recognised figure of authority (the Prime Minister, the President, an important cabinet minister, for example). The plot in Golden State hopes to dismantle the system down by pulling out a largely replaceable cog in the bureaucratic wheel.
Still, the flat ending doesn’t take away from the intriguing and unsettling world Winters creates in Golden State. It’s unsettling because Golden State shows you how unreliable the Record can be. For the media and the legal system in particular, putting something on record is incredibly important. If you pay even glancing attention to the news, you know this. What President Trump says at a media briefing; the verdict that the Supreme Court gave in the dispute over the ownership of the land where once Babri Masjid stood; the FIR that the police files in any case; the Indian health ministry’s daily briefings which update the number of Covid-positive cases reported in the last 24 hours — all these are facts being put on record. The record as we know it establishes events as actual and precedents as valid. Off the record, it’s only an anecdote. It was interesting to see how Golden State imagined the idea of being on record as something that manipulates the narrative rather than a device to establish the truth of a situation.
The importance of the Record in Golden State reminded me of Varun Thomas Matthew’s The Black Dwarves of Good Little Bay. I read it while on jury duty for Tata Literature Live! last year and have since recommended it to many people though I’m reasonably certain I’ve ended up calling it “Good Dwarves of Black Little Bay”. Oops.
The Black Dwarves… was one of the books that we the jury were sharply divided on. I really enjoyed this novel which ambitiously tries to bring in everything from environmental decay to politics, prejudice and social inequality, while telling the story of the last civil servant of India who has decided that his final act is going to be one of mad rebellion. Ultimately, Matthews isn’t able to juggle all the balls that he throws up in the air, but for a while in his first novel, he succeeds in putting up quite a show.
Set in 2041, The Black Dwarves… imagines Mumbai as a city that’s been devastated by climate change. Most people in the city live in the Bombadrome, an enormous artificial city that floats above the old terrestrial Mumbai. There’s a new order now, led by a man who has risen to power on his popularity, and used it to establish himself as a benevolent dictator. Those above have practically forgotten what is below and what happened in the past.
Among the few who remember is our narrator, Convent Godse or CG (there’s an explanation for the name) who is determined to put on record everything that he remembers. CG is among those who helped this new regime come to power and he’s horrified by what he’s enabled. To set the record straight is all the defeated can do, and so our civil servant sets himself a final task: Outwit the system as well as the dictator who was once his friend, so that he can put facts on record.
As you ‘hear’ the narrator recount the past, if don’t notice the shadows cast on the incidents of the novel by recent Indian current affairs then I’m slightly envious of you because you’ve managed to completely miss much of the ugliness that’s stained contemporary India. There’s a lot of recent history and politics folded into Matthews’ fiction and it’s to his credit that this is mostly done without making The Black Dwarves … preachy. The novel is at its best when it’s remembering the past and when it settles in its present towards the end, The Black Dwarves … becomes both a little too convenient and a bit rushed. Matthews is also occasionally a bit on-the-nose — for instance, one of the heroes of the novel is an idealist lawyer who moonlights as a rat catcher. Yup, human vermin by day, animal vermin by night — but that didn’t bother me much. I was far more disgruntled by the dictator, who (for all his other misdeeds) practically redeems himself at the end by offering unexpected support to the narrator’s project. A redemption arc for the dictator? Really?
My favourite parts in The Black Dwarves … are those featuring the public art and artists who pop up across Mumbai to create angry, dissident works that fire the imaginations of all those who see them. Unfortunately, this strand fritters away as the novel focuses its attention upon politics. There’s also a mural that is painted by an old man, which initially seems to be a random collection of motifs, but later proves to be chillingly revealing. Chances are, you’ll be haunted by the image of that old man and his art.
However, the reason I remembered it while reading Golden State is that the record is for CG and The Black Dwarves … a solution to the problems posed by a present infested with apathy and misinformation. In a way, The Black Dwarves … feels vaguely like a prequel to Golden State, as though the catastrophe that led to the cult of the Record is the unholy mess that drove CG to commit his memories to words.
While Winters’ Golden State makes a mockery of the idea of the Record, The Black Dwarves holds out the hope that it is possible to maintain a record that is both reliable and valuable. Ever since I finished Golden State, I’ve been imagining Arlo Vasouvian, the patron saint of the Speculative Service, facing off with CG. I’m not sure who would win.
Before I go, I’ve been blogging a bit and if you’re so inclined, you can read the entries here.
And with that, I must be off. Work-from-home beckons. Take care, stay well and Dear Reader will be back soon.