Pressia's world is a scary world. Eight years after the bombs went off, food and water are in short supply. Many of the inhabitants are mutated cannibalistic beasts. Infection is prevalent, due to the fact that most people have had objects or creatures blasted into their bodies during the nuclear cataclysm. And if you make it to age sixteen, as Pressia has just done, the militia is going to come in a truck and capture you.
Partridge, who lives inside the spick-and-span Dome that was constructed in advance of such a catastrophe, has his own worries. His brother has committed suicide, his mother is missing, presumed dead, having not made it into the Dome on the day of the bombs; and his autocratic father, one of the architects of the Dome plan, seems to be coming a bit unglued. Partridge comes to believe that his mother is Out There, and resolves to leave the Dome in order to find her in the ruined outside world.
And here we go.
This is Pure by Julianna Baggott, who writes under a number of names. Readers of kidlit will know her as N.E. Bode, author of The Anybodies
Pure is Ms. Baggott's first sci-fi novel. It is long. It is weird. Fox 2000 has already bought the film rights. This review will contain a ton of spoilers, because a) I write my reviews for grownups selecting books for children, so I don't shy away from spoilers generally and b) there is no way for me to critique this book without them. Because I have issues with this book.
Young adult science fiction action romance is a category that, three years ago, nobody - and by "nobody" I mean not even the editors at venerable sci fi publisher TOR Books - would have believed was a comer, but which is absolutely THE hot genre right now.
The future is an appealing place to set a story because in it, parameters have changed. Rules can be broken, just as in paranormal fiction. In a narrative sense, the appeal of vampires, angels, Slayers, and fairies is the stuff they can do. And after a decade or so of exploring those possibilities, the future might seem like the next logical place to go. But nobody believed in sci fi for teens because it was perceived to be a) dorky and b) sterile. Too much technology, not enough beefcake.
Ergo postapocalypse.
A ruined future Earth breeds tough, strong teens and allows an author to sidestep the technojargon that accompanies off-planet settings - while its radically shifted baseline allows stories and characters to move in ways that it is hard to make realistic contemporary fiction bend. Violently. Amorally. Sometimes in the company of robots.
But the postapocalyptic setting does have its problems. First of all, it does not hold up to scrutiny very well. Worldwide catastrophic events are difficult to imagine and hell to defend. Try it, it's a fun breakroom game: first player thinks up an end to the world, then the other players pick apart his or her proposal. What. Everyone doesn't play that game? Huh.
Secondly, if the world is kind-of-sort-of going to end, it is probably going to end all the way. If 80% of the population is killed by a virus/bombs/comet, the other 20% is likely to go very quickly. No time for any of this rebuilding society stuff.
Also, the postapocalyptic world is an unmitigated bummer, which can make for a tough read.
A world in ashes therefore works best as a metaphorical landscape, a brutalist backdrop, a set of circumstances in which human values can be examined. We see it brilliantly used in out-and-out horror novels (The Stand
Pure doesn't do any of these things. Not that it has to, no. But Pure does another thing - it makes the story about the apocalypse. The motor that propels Pressia and Partridge through the devastated DC suburbs is Partridge's search for his mother, which turns out to be a search for the truth about the Detonations. And ok, let me just say this: NO WAY.
In consequence of these bombs that went off eight years ago, not only did everything burn, but, thanks to a combination of radiation and some kind of nano-genetic component, extremely weird shit happened to survivors. Some had other people, animals or objects driven into their bodies; some joined with buildings or the ground; some merged with animals. So this means that a pile of rubble can reach out, grab you, and eat you. The ground may rise up and swallow you. The hot guy has a trio of cedar waxwings embedded - and flapping around - in his back.
One character got Siamesed with his brother on Detonation day - while he has grown to adulthood, his brother remains child-sized, left behind. And since the little guy is fused to his brother's body like a half-sentient backpack, that phrase is true on more than one level. Pressia herself has a doll head instead of a hand.
Further, these mutations are genetic: children born since the bombs have inherited physical deformities - including the embedded objects.
Now, I don't object to super weird, in fact I think super weird is entertaining in a variety of ways, but... NONE of this science works. And if you have created a world that doesn't work in any sensible way - which is a valid thing to do - you are actually in Magic Land, which is still ok.
But magic is even weaker in the face of scrutiny than is apocalypse, and IF you are in Magic Land, AND you make your story about how Magic Land came about, you will end up piling nonsense upon nonsense to defend the nonsense that came before, and the circumstances of your plot will all collapse into a kind of silliness. Sometimes Philip K Dick ended up there. But Philip K Dick was actually crazy. Which in a way kind of validated his messes.
But. Even if you accept this plot, with its ever-more-baroque explanations - "When I installed the chips in your head that turned you into an unwitting audiovisual surveillance machine that transmits across significant distances despite the total destruction of infrastructure in our world, I cross-wired them, so that's why you didn't die when the bomb that I also installed at that time was triggered to blow" - there are other problems in this book. Problems that I might expect an editor to catch, problems like: really? the brain bomb is the way to kill this kid, in a world full of guns and knives and carnivorous patches of gravel and robo-beast-soldiers?
There is Partridge's escape from the Dome, a Dome which seems to be at least the size of a small city. He has a photo of the blueprints of the Dome, and then times out the ventilation system cycles, and identifies a sub-four-minute window during which he can escape. This would work in a building, but not in a structure as large as the Dome.
There are conversations that take place amid gunfights or while running flat-out. There is a severely wounded character leaping out a car window to take on a robo-beast-soldier. Another character gets stabbed in the back with a scalpel - your typical scalpel is one inch long, and by the way in an operating room in which someone has performed neurosurgery without the patient noticing, nobody is using knives - and dies almost immediately. Shit, you could probably stick ME in the back with a scalpel and I'd be able to drive myself to the ER.
Well. In my neighborhood, the ER is pretty local. Mile and a half away. The most distracting problem in Pure, for me, is in fact its spatial relationships. Characters walk for a couple of hours, and pass through commercial districts and then suburbs. Suburbs plural? If I walked for a couple of hours, I would barely make it to Trader Joe's. A walk of a day takes them out of the city, past the suburbs, and into the mountains. That is one small city, or some amazing walking. I am never sold on these movements - in a world where so much is explained away by techno-magic, I might have expected half-human, half-Hummer beasts of burden or something facilitating our characters' itinerary.
This world is deeply felt by its author, I can tell. There are bits that are completely arresting. It will make an exciting movie - movies are so fast-paced nowadays that sense has become a tertiary consideration anyway ("Where'd you get that sword, Neville?" "I pulled it out of a hat!" - and we DON'T CARE).
But I hold books to a higher standard: either your setting makes sense, or your story does, unless you have written Alice in Wonderland. And despite rabbit holes and breadcrumb trails, Pure is not that kind of fairy tale.
I thought about getting this for SPawn and you reminded me instead of THe Stand and I was just a tad older than he is now when I fell in love with Stephen King an his short stories. Breathing Lessons is still one of my favorite short stories of all time.
I think I will dig out my doggeared copy of The STand and put it in his room and wait and see if he reads it.
xx
Posted by: blahblahblah | Friday, July 22, 2011 at 11:26 AM
Hi, Pink Me. I know, I know... I'm breaking the rules by commenting on a review of one of my books, but I think your take here is an important one, and your review is thorough and worth discussing. I don't intend to change your opinion here, in any way. My novel frustrated you. But I thought it might help to mention my intentions and background -- in case you run into some readers who might have a different take. I don't come from a sci-fi background. In fact, I don't consider my work sci-fi. I know that it falls under the definition and exists in the tradition, but I came to this novel by way of magical realism -- your Marquez, Calvino, even Aimee Bender. These characters first existed in literary short stories. (My novels for adults under my own name are pretty much straight-up literary. It's what I've studied and what I teach.)While writing the novel and talking about it with my father and husband (and daughter), I would say that once you have a character with live birds embedded in his back, you've moved away from sci-fi and exist in the otherworldly world of magical realism -- think "The Very Old May with Enormous Wings". From there, science and revisionist history become subservient to image and language. The true sci-fi writer wouldn't allow this, I don't think. Would they? I know Atwood insists on the term speculative fiction. I don't know if I've earned a right to be insistent on anything. But, as you've noted, I haven't picked up the true burdens of sci-fi. I have picked up other burdens instead. Danielle Trussoni's full blurb of PURE mentions Manga and Alice in Wonderland. So many times, my family and I talked about the back pocket. How do we get readers to get just enough science that they can put realism in their back pocket and come along for the journey across this wild (and hopefully wildly visual) terrain? Was that fair? You'd say no and that, too, is fair. I hope this helps to reframe the book in some way. I have much more to say about these genres, as well as pigeon-holing in the publishing industry, and moving among genres -- the blurring of all of those lines and the risks inherent in those decisions. (I just saw the Alexander McQueen exhibit in the Met -- my brain went wild. That is some stunning terrain that will, undoubtedly, influence the next two novels.) There were things I wanted to say about war, about the atomic bomb, about grief and loss, hope and resilience. That was where I hoped to contribute and I hope, in some small measure, that I have. (I write all of this with deep respect for your take and appreciation that you took the time to read PURE and review it with such precision. And I'm glad I found your site -- hope to follow your work here.)
Sincerely,
Julianna Baggott
Posted by: Julianna Baggott | Monday, July 25, 2011 at 03:04 PM
Hi Julianna,
Thank you for your amiable and thoughtful response. I always feel a bit frail when I post a less-than-100% positive review on Pink Me, without a publication or an editor to cower behind (I also review for SLJ and VOYA). It is a real boost to get a wonderful response like this from such a talented author.
I get the magic realism in PURE, I do. I was reluctant to use the phrase in my review, but in fact, I think a lot of sci-fi has elements of magic realism in it. Maybe we need a new term - magic speculative? Magic speculative...ism? Ew, that's awful. Anyway. The sci-fi novel of ideas, including some of the novels I mention in my review, is particularly prone to presenting a world with a bunch of strange givens and requiring the reader to turn a blind eye to how and why those givens came about.
We may discover the rules by which these phenomena are applied (i.e. which people are turned to zombies by the comet dust), but we never get a nitty-gritty explanation of why? exactly? does the comet make people zombies?
If anything, I think PURE errs on the side of too much science. I love the images of the fused mothers and children, I think the metaphor of the military man with his childhood literally watching over his shoulder is wonderful. If I were to read PURE again I think I'd try very hard to see the fairy tale and ignore the sci-fi. The amorphous-distance thing works in the magic-forest landscape too.
It's possible that some of the initial hard edges, especially of life inside the Dome, which more resembles contemporary reality, tricked me into reading PURE as a more technical sci-fi book than it is.
You've given me a lot to think about, Julianna, thank you. I'll bet you are a fantastic professor!
Congratulations on the success of PURE - I've seen the very enthusiastic response on Goodreads and elsewhere, one reason I overcame my reluctance to post a dissenting view. My voice in the wilderness will do the book no harm!
many thanks,
:paula
Posted by: :paula | Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 07:57 AM
Hey, thanks for YOUR response to mine. And this is actually a really helpful dialogue especially as the book has not yet gone to print and we have the time to discuss how to situate the novel editorially and marketing-wise -- which blurbs to use, the language reserved for the description -- to frame the experience for the reader, to help set expectations. For example the part of the Trussoni quote that I reference isn't the part that we were intending to use, but maybe we should. So, you've given me a lot to think about too!
I hope our paths keep crossing!
All my best,
jb
Posted by: Julianna Baggott | Sunday, July 31, 2011 at 02:17 PM
I just found your blog on Ask Jeeves, a really good read.
Posted by: wsheson | Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 03:41 AM