Review: Only Ever Yours

Only Ever Yours by Louise O'Neill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book at the suggestion of my friend Caroline, and with some hesitation because of its YA categorization. Young adult novels are not a disqualifier from my reading list, but I do tend to scrutinize them a little more prior to reading them. This was absolutely worth the risk. There are stretches where it's heavy on the YA feeling, but in the end it commits to the darkness within the story and the characters in a way that's more typical of classical dystopian literature than any YA novel I've read in the past 15 years.

A brief summary of the premise reads like a YA version of "The Handmaid's Tale" mixed with a morality tale about social media: In the future, some sort of ecological disaster has happened, the oceans have risen and separated the world into geographically and economically distinct 'zones', and female babies are no longer born naturally, but manufactured. They come off the production line with features like Perfect Green eyes, Ebony #2 hair, Flawless Pink skin on body template #607. The number of girls produced each year equals the number of men born that year in that zone, multiplied by three. This is because there are three roles a woman can fill: companion (the equivalent of wife), chastity (future teacher to young girls), and concubine (this one should be obvious). Until the age of 16, all girls are raised in a School where they learn all the things that women should learn to fill these roles, which, in this world, is mainly just how to be prettier, skinnier, and better than everyone else. They have no contact with the outside world (and, indeed, the novel never leaves the School, one of the many devices used to create a feeling of panic with no chance for escape), but are rated by the men of the zone based on weekly pictures, which determines their school rank and essentially their entire life.

I won't bother with a summary of the plot, because the standout of this novel is not plot but character. The main character, frieda (women's names and titles aren't capitalized here), has never been low in the ranks, but never been #1, either. That spot, from age 4 to 15, has gone to her best friend, isabel. But at the start of their final year, isabel suddenly withdraws from frieda and loses all interest in her ranking and physical appearance. frieda, unmoored from her emotional, psychological rock, slowly begins a slide into insanity. This is where the novel excels, wholeheartedly. frieda begins to crack under the constant pressure to be perfectly beautiful, her constant failure to do so, and the competing demands of what perfect entails (we're talking 'blonde or brunette?' here, not 'pretty or true to yourself'). It's a gut-wrenching, painful train wreck as we watch frieda try to navigate a social field she's never had to before, because she had one friend and that was enough. One of the understated messages of the book is the need for true human companionship; it's not just isabel's honesty or decentness or kindness that frieda desperately needs, but simply her presence, her interest in frieda. The presence of someone she can trust. When everyone treats you as an object, obstacle, or tool to leverage themselves, you have no context for 'self' beyond that, and frieda is not strong enough to create one from scratch. But their trust is broken, frieda can't bring herself to truly trust isabel again. There is a point where it seems like frieda might get the typical YA happy (or at least bittersweet) ending - she might land the hottest guy (who's nice, and into her as a person!) - but the novel grimly marches past that to the logical conclusion of frieda's personality and instability and what is allowed for her in this society. There are obvious comparisons to "The Handmaid's Tale" in terms of worldbuilding, but the most apt comparison for me in terms of how this novel felt was "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or maybe "Woman at the Edge of Time" by Marge Piercy. Hell, throw in some "1984" for that ending. It's a tragedy in the classical sense, and an entertaining (if horrifying) spectacle to read.

There are some sizeable flaws in the story. Most notably, this world holds up to absolutely zero scrutiny. There are only 40 people born in a year in an entire Zone, and 30 of those are women with absolutely no skills, not even an idea of what 'math' is? And this place is somehow functional? No animals exist? It's not particularly solid storytelling in that respect.

The novel walks a fine line between 'satire or dystopia' and 'caricature,' and occasionally crosses that line. All of their high-tech sci-fi devices have names like ePad and MyFace - cutesy concatenations that seem like snide jokes, like what a middle-aged adult thinks things that teenagers like are called. Every Zone on the planet apparently functions in the same way and has the same culture (with strikingly Western values). Some of the world-building problems are a result of this effect, where something is so obviously exaggerated for effect that it couldn't possibly actually work. But this isn't always a problem. I don't think there's a single thing in this story that isn't just an exaggeration of what women experience in the real world on a regular basis. This world is clearly intended to be the real, gendered (Western) world with the contrast and saturation turned up to maximum.

I personally think there is a huge missed opportunity with this story in the relationship between frieda and isabel. The book is billed as a story of a deteriorating friendship between two girls; the title is "Only Ever Yours," referring to the girls' belonging to each other, not to these men. I was expecting something along the lines of Black Swan, maybe, but where the girls begin as true friends. But the novel begins at the end of their friendship, and while there are some moments of near-reconciliation, their relationship is not the story at all. A bigger focus on these two girls as friends, trying to be functional together but failing somehow, would've added a lot to the story (especially toward the middle, where it feels a bit repetitive).

Highly recommend this. I'm rating it 4 stars because of how powerfully the characters are written, but I suspect that after a few months I'll want to bump it down to 3 because it's not particularly complex or groundbreaking.

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Review: Low, Vol. 2: Before the Dawn Burns Us

Low, Vol. 2: Before the Dawn Burns Us by Rick Remender
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I received a free e-galley copy of this book from Image Comics.

I have gushed about Low, Volume 1 previously, and here I am to gush about Volume 2. If the artwork was stunning last time, it's decadently astonishing this time. The colors (which tend toward blue/orange, like Volume 1, but add in some lovely red/green/yellow and purple/green locales as well) are rich and layered. The oppositional color schemes work without looking cheesy because while the blues and oranges are rich and deep and pure, they're also nuanced; the blue has streaks of green, the orange streaks of red, both have streaks of yellow intermixed. I also still love the connection between color and location. In such a visually busy comic (that, as I mentioned last time, tends to skimp on backgrounds), the colors are a clear and beautiful way to establish location, so that detailed backgrounds for each panel aren't necessary.

One of the many things I love about the world created here - a world where everyone is forced underwater due to the toxic radiation of the sun, where humans have lived under the ocean for centuries - is that it echoes a lot of concerns in the solarpunk movement. Solarpunk is generally about fiction that has an optimistic view of the world (like the one Remender tries to convey here) and focuses on ecologically and socially sustainable futures. In terms of the literal world here, where most of the underwater colonies are in disrepair and societal collapse, it's not quite solarpunk, but the importance of sustainability is definitely a strong theme here, and I like that a lot.

My problem with Volume 1 re: the nakedness of all the ladies and the not-nakedness of all the men is somewhat rectified here. There are fewer ladies and fewer men, so fewer chances for disparity. Though it still succeeds in showing us the boobs of almost every female character to grace its pages.

I wish the story had flowed a little bit better here. Coming from the first volume, everything is mostly fine (except for the first sequence with Della, where it's initially unclear who the characters are or where it's taking place), but the switch from Della's story to her mother's and back across three issues makes this volume on its own feel choppy or uneven, as if it's not sure what story to tell at first. By the end, though, things feel fine; the focus is unequivocally back on mom and her journey to the surface.

Della's story arc also seemed brief - I wanted to savor her anger, her conflict in this society, but it resolves so quickly that I'm not even sure where she is (though this might be because it's been a while since I read Volume 1). I could read a whole volume, at least, about her life in this place, maybe about her youth. That goes for all the characters and all the locales, too. I just want so much more about this world, because it's so rich and invites so many story opportunities. Leaving a reader wanting more is definitely not a bad thing, though. Just a thought if this story wraps up soon - we're all eager to read more stories in this world!

There are still some trite-ness issues in the writing for the optimistic characters. Even when Stel becomes briefly disillusioned with her optimism, she seems one-dimensional - just in the opposite direction than usual. It makes the characters seem immature, like they can only hold one very literal interpretation of the world in their heads at once. And again, I have problems with the idea that their thoughts can literally change the world around them, because it's a strange belief for a person to hold. And it's executed pretty poorly. The characters say superficial things, they aren't allowed nuance in their understanding. It's single-mindedness, and it's frustrating.

Still - this is a beautifully illustrated comic, an intriguing and expansive world, and an interesting story to follow. I would definitely recommend this to anyone trying to get into comics who isn't into superheroes or is into beauty. Review was initially 3 stars, and then I realized that despite the technical issues I simply love this story so much I had to bump it to 4.

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Review: Speak

Speak by Louisa Hall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Speak" by Louisa Hall immediately calls to mind "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell. Like "Cloud Atlas," "Speak" is a novel told in parts by 6 different narrators throughout time. The earliest narrator here lives in the 1600s and the latest lives around 2050. Most of the narrators are involved in the creation of artificial intelligence - or at least an advanced chat-bot program - and the relationships between speech and true communication and intelligence are a major concern of the novel.

Our narrators are:
Eva, a discarded, highly-advanced robot with an exceptional conversational program based on the early chat-bot program called MARY. All of the other characters' stories are framed as texts that have been input into her program, part of her index that she references when communicating.

Mary, a young girl from the 1600s who is traveling from England to America with her parents, her dog, and her future husband. We read excerpts from her journal, written in the style of her favorite adventure writer.

Alan Turing, concerned over the health of his best friend but excited about the project they're working on: the early version of a computer. He writes to his best friend's mother throughout the course of their lives.

Karl Dettman, the computer scientist circa the 60s who programmed MARY, but refuses to give it the capacity for long-term memory despite his wife's insistence. We read his letter-like journal entries, addressed to his wife.

Ruth Dettman, wife of Karl Dettman, who studies Mary's journal and reads it to MARY. Like Karl, she is Jewish and from Germany, and narrowly avoided the Holocaust. We don't see her perspective until halfway through the book - it is much later in her life, and she is looking back on her time with Karl via letters (seemingly unsent) to him.

Stephen Chinn, creator of the babybots: realistic baby dolls equipped with his own special version of MARY and given to young girls, who become unhealthily attached to the dolls. He is in jail for his actions and writing a memoir, circa 2050.

Gaby and MARY2, a chat transcript (submitted as evidence in Chinn's trial) between one of the girls who was devastated by the confiscation of her babybot and subsequently afflicted with some sort of psychosomatic disease, and the chat-bot version of the program that ran the babybots' conversations.

Eva, who it appears is Gaby's former babybot, ties the novel together. She and the other confiscated babybots (so removed because they were deemed too humanlike and a danger to children's health) are being shipped off to warehouses to die, and she looks back on the voices programmed into her and the rest of the dolls, searching for words to describe her life, to communicate with someone - perhaps the other dolls, but since they all clamor at each other, all of them speaking and none listening, it seems like she's searching for someone to listen, as well. She says, many times, that she speaks but does not understand the words. This is something many characters, Karl Dettman, Stephen Chinn, and even the chat-bots themselves included, repeat about the various MARY/chat-bot incarnations: they can speak, but not understand. Dettman's refusal to program MARY with memory is ostensibly not because he worries she will eventually understand (though Ruth believes that he does fear it), but because the people who speak to her - including his wife - will be tricked, will think the bots understand. This fear is made manifest with the babybots; the young children who own them refer to themselves as parents, the babybots as their best friends.

The novel's greatest success is in hitting home how little (or how much) we can understand about other humans through their words and how perhaps, then, the way people in their daily lives define humanity or intelligence or communication is not by whether the speaker knows what they're saying, but how the words are perceived or understood. The problem with chat-bots and babybots becomes not when they don't mean what they say, but when they cannot provide meaning to what the humans say to them - when they can't truly understand.

Mary's best friend is a dog, and she claims he understands her the way no one else can, but he can't speak. Are we to say that emotional connection isn't real, that there isn't communication happening there? She is initially cold to her future husband but once she has reached a point where she's willing to listen to what he says from a generous, understanding perspective (because he has been saying kind things to her throughout and she continually rejects him out of hand), she begins to accept and love him. It's the meaning she takes from the words that matters, not the words he says, that makes her see him as a person.

Stephen Chinn creates an algorithm for dating based on conversational patterns that always works - until everyone uses it, and then it's not the words that matter, but the structure they take. He makes people into chat-bots, teaches them to fill in whatever response seems most appropriate without regard to the content. And his success in love comes when he breaks that mold, learns Spanish to talk to his cleaning lady, and tells her stories about himself. He wants her to understand him, so he breaks the language barrier and makes sure the content matters. Not all the stories are true, some are fanciful, but she understands the meaning behind them, and sees him as a person. And he creates the babybots for his daughter, who has grown up rather isolated and speaks her own idiosyncratic language, so she can have someone who understands her.

Karl and Ruth Dettman are the source of the most poignant emotional scenes of the novel. I cried several times at the emotional weight and complexity and beauty of their loss. Karl writes to Ruth that he knows he is losing her, that he wants her to open up to him, that he wishes he could remember their past the way she does, that he understands her needs but is failing to communicate it. He thinks she spends so much time with MARY and wants the program to have memory because he doesn't remember, and she wants the computer to fill that need. Ruth, in her old age, writes to him that she misses him, but never felt like he was listening to what she was saying. And then, in Ruth's final letter, she tells him she is still inputting text to Eva, and she inputs what, she says, she remembers him saying to her when he thought she was asleep, word-for-word. These are Karl's letters, the ones we read in the first half of the book. At this point, we are forced to ask: are those Karl's words? Is Ruth remembering, 20-30 years later, exactly what he said? Or is she telling herself-Eva-us what she wanted him to say, or what she thinks he would have said, if he had spoken? In the end, we can't know. But it is what Ruth thinks he said, or what she wanted him to have said, and what matters is that (whether he spoke or not) she understood him as trying to reach out, to understand, to communicate, but failing to speak. Their relationship's dissolution was not, as 'Karl's' letters indicate he thought, because he failed to remember their traumatic history or understand Ruth's feelings, but because he failed to speak to her about it. This casts Ruth's relationship with MARY in a different light - she spoke with MARY not because she hoped MARY (unlike Karl) would remember, but because MARY (unlike Karl) spoke to her. Here, the speech act itself is what's necessary for communication, not the intention behind it - Ruth understands Karl though he doesn't speak to her, but she needs him to try to speak to her at all, like MARY does. (Ruth doesn't seem to send her letters to Karl in the end; instead, having written out all 'his' letters, she returns home, finally at peace with her life, so perhaps she is merely writing to communicate to herself why she has been unhappy.)

Gaby and MARY2 provide the sterling example of why computers and chat-bots ultimately, occasionally, may fail to truly communicate, and it's when they are on the receptive end of the communication. Gaby sees the ocean for the first time and tells MARY2 in Gaby's only expansive, descriptive block of text. It's a fully sensorial experience, something MARY2 can't understand in a deep, meaningful way, since she has no senses. This brings to mind the classic philosophical thought experiment about Mary and the black and white room: Mary is a scientist who studies color. She knows everything there is to know, factually, about the color red, but has lived all her life in a black-and-white room and has never seen the color red. If Mary finally steps out of the room and sees a red apple, has she learned something new about the color red? It seems in this novel, she has, and that the chat-bots with no sensorial experience cannot truly understand Gaby's moving letter. This leaves open the question, though, of the realm of emotional experience, and of the baby-bots who appear to have sensory receptors. I don't think the novel answers conclusively whether the babybots have understanding, or whether chat-bots can understand emotions. Eva, it appears, searches for words to describe her feelings, and though she falls back on the words of others, those feelings exist.

Even the format of the novel contributes to this theme: each of these are written (or, in Eva's case, spoken) accounts of lives. Mary is constantly unsure who she is writing to, writing for. God? Her dog? But it seems she is writing to understand herself; she chooses her writing style to imitate her favorite adventure novelist, because she wants to see herself as an adventurer on her trip to America. Chinn is writing so the world understands why he did what he did. The Dettmans' letters are attempts to make the other understand, or at least Ruth's attempts. But they are all fictional. They only exist as the reader (or, within the text, as Eva) parses them. All Eva has is the words of others, the words of the people in this novel. If the reader is supposed to read these select words, selected from her entire database, as conveying Eva's feelings, then perhaps Eva does understand. Either way, both Eva and the texts themselves convey to the reader an understanding; the reader finds meaning in the words, the reader creates these (fictional) people to correspond to the words, the reader understands.

The novel has one large narrative flaw: everything is written in first-person retrospective. All the characters are looking back on incidents that have already occurred (and often refer to past events in other characters' tales). This takes a lot of the momentum from the story. I'll admit I was often bored. There is no mystery, no narrative tension. The reader knows or can easily deduce what happens for every character fairly quickly, with one remarkable exception, mentioned above. Most of the stories lack their own exposition-rising action-climax-falling action and are simply flat re-tellings of life events. Hall's prose saves the novel, but this could go from 'pretty good' to 'amazing' with some kind of narrative structure spanning more of the individual stories or a substantial arc tying the stories together. Turing could (and I'd say should) have easily been cut from the novel, as his contributions to the creation of computers are peripheral to the AI discussion, because his story is almost entirely biographical, because all dramatic tension in his story ends in his second or third letter, and because his story contributes little to the themes of the novel. And because three of the threads of this story are about old male computer scientists who are unlucky in love and his, as written, is the least compelling. Gaby's conversations with MARY2 are especially flat, existing just to give more information about the world in 2050, but at least provide an emotional climax that is essential to the novel's thesis on speech.

I feel parts of my argument here are a bit muddled, and welcome any contributions.

And one final opinion: no one should ever be allowed to name a female robot (especially one of the first female robots in whatever world) Eve or Eva or any variation on that again. It's tired. It was tired decades ago.

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Review: Tank Girl, Vol. 1

Tank Girl, Vol. 1 by Jamie Hewlett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Tank Girl should have been in my life probably from birth, but somehow I didn't see the movie until about a year ago, and just got around to making my way through the comics. It's a post-apocalypse tale in the style of Mad Max: lots of loosely-connected tales with an 80s punk aesthetic about zooming around the Australian wilderness in a trademark vehicle with few connections to others, giving zero fucks. They could even be in the same universe. Tank Girl, though, is spastic, spontaneous, and thoughtless where Max is deliberate and methodical, always with one eye toward the future. Tank Girl is also much more lighthearted; whether it's a warehouse full of beer, Tank Girl's life, or the whole world at stake, you know that somehow she'll pull through. It makes both the movie and the comics incredibly fun to experience.

Tank Girl, Volume 1 is a collection of the first several runs of Tank Girl, accompanied by commentary from the authors that frame Tank Girl's origins and development. I'm probably in the minority on this, but sometimes I wish all books came with a retrospective letter from the author (or an informed editor) that give some context or history for the work. In this case, the foreward gave me notice of the various inspirations for Tank Girl, told me how the character developed to the point where she got her own story, and discussed the styles of each of the creators, which allowed me to trace various artists' and writers' contributions.

For the most part in Volume 1, each issue was its own, self-contained story. Tank Girl fucks up a rare mission from what I presume is the post-apocalyptic Australian government in the first story, liberates a warehouse where some cronies are stockpiling her favorite brand of beer in another, and (possibly my favorite) teams up with her best friends Jet Girl and Sub Girl for a birthday bash in yet another. We see a lot of Booga, her on-and-off fuckbuddy/boyfriend. One of the most striking stories is one that has little Tank Girl in it at all; she appears at the end, as a mythic figure of liberation. And another (again, maybe my favorite) where her teddy bear is ruined and they have to retrieve another from the store.

The artwork develops throughout, since these are the first several issues, but from start to finish it's a blast. There isn't an inch of wasted space on the page, everything is full of in-your-face bold colors or fantastic world-building detail. I'm a sucker for comics that flesh out their world by paying close attention to their scenery and details - adding in tiny elements that don't just add visual interest but convey something about the world, about the characters. And that's something the artists do here wonderfully.

I also just love Tank Girl. I love her kickass style. I love her foul language. I love the design of Tank Girl, unabashedly female and not here for the male gaze; there were very few moments where I was uncomfortable with the physical portrayal of the female body, which is rare for comics of any era. She's sexual, voraciously and scarily. I love that in some scenes her face reminds me so strikingly of my sister that I do a double-take. I love her combat boots and her stupidly awesome hair.

The world-building and storytelling here is interesting to me, as someone who came from the movie first. In the film, it's clearly a post-apocalyptic scenario. Here, amidst all the chaos of Tank Girl's life, it's hard to tell exactly what is happening. A gang can control the production and release of a brand of beer, but Tank Girl clearly gets orders from someone military. There's still media and government. But I love that things are left unclear; the patchwork nature of the story here, where you get bits and pieces of sometimes clearly contradictory information as-needed for whatever story is happening, is something quintessentially Tank Girl. It's as if we're seeing the world through Tank Girl's eyes, regardless of how the world actually is, she only pays attention to what is relevant at that moment.

I'm eager to read the rest in this set - hopefully, they're all as rewarding and entertaining a read as this.

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