The Membranes + Bewilderment + The Animals In That Country

I’ve been putting off writing this newsletter for weeks. Why? Because in the past month and a half, practically every week I’ve finished a book and thought to myself, “I must write about this in the newsletter and because it’s so good, when I write about it, I will pour everything into my writing — my soul, my emotions, the thoughts that have been sparked, the insights that I’ve collected, the epiphanies I’ve had, the lightbulbs that have lit up my adult brain, childhood resonances, the organic garam masala that I snuck out of my mother’s kitchen, everything must go into my writing.” 

It is now October 31st and I’m scrambling to write this before the day ends. Filed under: The Best Laid Plans of Writers and Procrastinators.

Since smooth transitions from one idea/ paragraph to another are feeling a bit ambitious at this point, I’m going to organise the books I wanted to tell you about into a list. Not just a list, but a ranked top-three list, which is already sounding like a terrible idea to me because what if you think the book at the bottom of the list is bad? Because it isn’t. It’s very good and depending on the mood you’re in and your interests, it may well work better for you than the book I’ve placed on top. Sigh. I’m undercutting this list before I’ve even put down the first item. Still, for what it’s worth, here it is: my top three reads from October.  

The Membranes by Chi Ta Wei (trans. Ari Larissa Heinrich)

It’s the late 21st century and humanity has been forced to retreat into underwater megacities because the climate catastrophe and human greed have literally scorched the earth. One of the most coveted beauty treatments in this era is an artificial membrane and one of the experts in this field is dermal care technician Momo. Momo is a bit of a mystery. She’s successful, aloof and full of secrets, not the least of which is the membrane that she applies on her clients. On the surface, the membrane is an innocuous application on one’s skin which needs to be removed and reapplied regularly. Actually, the membrane tracks the wearer’s every move. Using a scanner, Momo can read and experience the information encoded into the discarded membrane and when she does, it’s almost as though she’s reliving her clients’ experiences. 

This sounds like a bit of a spoiler, doesn’t it? It isn’t. The real twist in the tale comes later and I won’t spoil it for you. All I’ll tell you is that it’s one of the best reveals I’ve read in years. 

There are many reasons to love The Membranes. At the heart of the novel is the question of what makes something real — the fact of it or the experience of it? While imagining a chilling future that adds to the rich tradition of futuristic narratives in science fiction, Chi Ta Wei has also written a bittersweet ode to storytelling, dotted with loving references to 20th century European cinema, poetry and philosophy. He’s created a world in which queer relationships are the norm, but society remains in the stranglehold of toxic hierarchies. This is no utopia, but if the oppressed don’t know they’re being exploited, is it kindness to let them labour under an illusion?

The Membranes has everything from exploring trans identities to a character called Draupadi (no obvious connection to the Draupadi of the Mahabharat but if you start comparing the two Draupadis, be prepared to feel like your brain is on fire. Fascinating, delicious stuff). Capitalism, climate change, AI, gender dysphoria, labour rights, the construction of identity, depression, the nature of reality… it’s incredible how much Chi has covered in a book that’s less than 150 pages long. To properly appreciate this novel’s brilliance, read Heinrich’s excellent essay, which gives you some of the social context in Taiwan in the 1990s, out of which this novel emerged. 

Heinrich’s translation of The Membranes is wonderful and a review on Goodreads (by user Hsinju) gives you a sense of its brilliance:

“As a language nerd, I love Chi’s play on Momo’s name. Meaning peach (桃, momo) in Japanese, the fruit has a gay connotation (no, not because of CMBYN) since “peach sharing” (分桃, fēntáo) is a story between an ancient emperor and his male lover. “Momo” also means quiet in Chinese (默默, mòmò), which Heinrich aptly translated as “murmur.” In a way, she is also the namesake of the book, since The Membranes (note that the word also starts with the letter “M”) was titled 膜 (mó) in Chinese.” 

While reading The Membranes, I kept remembering Klara and the Sun and thinking this is probably the book Ishiguro wanted to write. Chi’s slim masterpiece is much more twisted, brilliant and disturbing than what Kazuo Ishiguro came up with and despite the initial similarities, the two books end up to be very different. Still, every review of Klara and the Sun should have noted the resonances between what Ishiguro imagines and what Chi wrote back in the 1990s (The Membranes was first published in Taiwan in 1995). I don’t think Ishiguro was influenced by The Membranes — the only English translation I’ve found of The Membranes came out this year — but it’s a reminder that we need to stop putting translations in silos. Klara and the Sun feels a lot less interesting when you know what Chi’s done with the ideas that Ishiguro explores in his novel.

If you’re not a science fiction fan, you may be thinking this book is not for you. But trust me on this — if you have even the tiniest interest in storytelling, you want to read The Membranes.  

Bewilderment by Richard Powers

With this, I’ve (finally) finished reading all the books selected by this year’s Booker Prize jury. When the longlist for the prize had been announced, Bewilderment hadn’t yet come out in the market, which made me growl. (This is an old grouse of mine.) I’m still against this business of using shortlists like a press release for a new book — the world of books is sufficiently unfair without adding prizes to a big-name author’s list of resources — but Bewilderment is definitely one of the most beautiful books that you’ll ever read. I wouldn’t be surprised if it won the Booker Prize this year although The Great Circle is still my favourite.

In Bewilderment, Powers writes about a father and his neurodivergent son who are both struggling with grief. Technically, it’s science fiction set in a near future that has enough recognisable elements to feel like the almost present. You might be reminded occasionally of Grief is a Thing With Feathers and Flowers for Algernon, but while knowing those books might give you some clues about what’s going to happen to our lead pair, it won’t make the heartbreak of Bewilderment any easier to read.   

For Theo, as astrobiologist, the loss of his wife Alyssa is like the universe taking away both his anchor and his compass. For Theo and Alyssa’s nine-year-old son Robin, who has been diagnosed with a variety of syndromes including OCD, ADHD and possibly autism, death is yet another frustrating and senseless part of the real world that keeps confounding him. There are only two things that help father and son keep themselves together — camping trips into the Smoky Mountains and the bedtime stories that Theo conjures for Robin, imagining histories alien life on fictional planets. Initially, I loved the idea that a man named Theo (which comes from the Greek word theos, meaning god) was making up these stories of life for his son, who is named after a bird his parents associate with hope and optimism. As Bewilderment unfolded, the sense of divine power in the name Theo started to feel like painfully cruel irony because the only word to describe Theo in Bewilderment is powerless.  

If you’ve read Overstory, for which Powers won the Pulitzer prize, then you know how beautifully Powers describes nature. All that magic is there in Bewilderment too. Powers tells the reader in his author’s note that the word “bewilderment” originally meant heading back into the wild. Both that old meaning and the modern meaning of confusion hold true for this novel. Nature is a majestic force in Bewilderment and Powers contrasts its expansive freedom with the claustrophobic despair of human society. The school Robin attends wants him to be put on psychoactive drugs — which Theo opposes — after he has a violent fight with a classmate. The threat of social services separating father and son looms large. The political system is collapsing with a Trump-like president in power in America. There are a few beacons of hope, like a character quite obviously inspired by Greta Thunberg and a therapeutic technology called Decoded Neurofeedback, but very little is able to withstand being mangled by the toxic juggernaut of mainstream society.   

It’s difficult to say what is more overwhelming in Bewilderment — the beauty or the sadness. All I can tell you is that this novel left me in tears and as soon as I’d finished, I reached for both chocolate and a fluffy romance (The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. Entirely fluffy, entirely lovely, but also has a #MeToo supblot. Highly recommend).  

The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

When most of us think of talking animals, what comes to mind are adorable little cuties like Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit or someone from the Disney universe. Here to singlehandedly destroy that illusion is Laura Jean McKay with her debut novel, The Animals in That Country. 

“Zooflu”, a flu-like pandemic, is raging across Australia (great timing, Ms McKay). The flu’s main symptom is that those infected are able to understand what animals are saying. In case you were hoping this would lead to harmony and happiness, allow me to tell you the three stages of zooflu. First, the infected victim gets sniffles, red eyes and is able to understand mammals. The next symptom of the virus taking over is being able to understand birds, and finally insects. By this final stage, most infected human have tumbled headlong into psychosis, frenzy and complete madness. So yeah, McKay is definitely not Disney. 

The protagonist of The Animals in That Country is a foul-mouthed boozehound of a grandma named Jean who works in a wildlife park in the Australian outback. Mostly she takes care of the dingos. Jean ends up contracting zooflu at the same time as her beloved granddaughter. Initially, it doesn’t seem like an awful disease to have even though Jean quickly realises that being able to hear the words spoken by animals is very different from being able to properly understand them. (There’s a terrifying episode involving a crocodile that wants to play, for instance.)

Without being obvious or preachy, McKay shows how difficult it is to truly communicate and empathise. She shows a shared language isn’t necessarily enough to scale ingrained differences and fear. The animals communicate with their bodies as well as with sounds, and McKay is at her best when she’s writing their speech. There’s meaning in every twitch, in the rippling fur, in the changing scent, and McKay weaves all this into her writing. It’s almost like she’s casting a spell with her words. 

The animals in this novel speak in staccato phrases that read like poetry and sometimes sound like nonsense. For instance, the wallabies say

“Happy isn’t

happy. Happy 

isn’t the only happy.”

Which sounds like something the Teletubbies would dance to but doesn’t give you much insight into what the wallabies are feeling. Are they happy? 

However, there is a logic to the seemingly nonsensical animal-speak and it runs like an undercurrent through the jagged shards of poetic phrases that the animals casually toss to the humans. It turns out that the same word can mean different things to animals and humans. For instance, the dingos use “glitter” when they see humans because to them, “glitter” means sweat or more specifically, the light that glints off sweaty skin. Jean’s granddaughter is the first person to understand how meanings of words shift when non-human animals use them.  

Early on in the novel, Jean’s granddaughter is kidnapped and Jean sets off on a road trip across Australia to find the little girl. Accompanying Jean is Sue, one of the dingos whom Jean had tended in the park. The two of them are effectively a new pack and even though they have to work at understanding each other, they do have a rapport. Every human around them can hear the words the other animals are speaking, but few understand anything other than their own language. Many are driven made by animal chatter. Using the road trip, McKay paints a portrait of a pandemic-ravaged Australia in a near future and on display is humanity at its ugliest.

As a story, The Animals in That Country is dark, eerie, and loses momentum from time to time as it charts a meandering path past humans who range from being delusional to horrible. However, it’s worth reading the novel just for McKay’s incredible use of language, particularly when she writes the animals and their speech. More than Jean, Sue was the reason for me to stay with the book to its bitter end. Sue, by virtue of being a zoo animal, inhabits both the animal and human worlds, but she belongs in neither. Perhaps one of the most beautiful bits in the book are Sue’s ‘rules’, of which my favourite is the final one: 

“Pay particular

attention to dirt and wind.

(Enjoy 

everything.)”

Which seems like a good point at which to press pause for now (even though there are at least five more books I do want to tell you about, but we’ll leave that for another newsletter and another day).

Thank you for reading and I hope you’re all well. Take care and stay safe. Dear Reader will be back soon.