sf, page 13 of 32

Just what is the aliens’ plan in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? We know they’ve come to Earth in the past and kidnapped a random selection of people — some of them military personnel, others just ordinary folks — along with, in the military cases at least, their vehicles. Now they’ve come back, but to do what, exactly? First, they leave those captured vehicles in random, out-of-the-way places, such as a ship in the middle of the desert. Then they zip down from the skies and buzz aircraft or swoop along US highways, causing all sorts of poltergeist-like electrical disturbances as they go, including shutting off the power to whole towns (including hospitals?), incidentally causing skin burns in those who see them too close, and resulting in at least one policeman crashing through a road safety barrier and down a (fortunately not too steep) incline beyond. They kidnap a child whilst terrorising its mother; they induce a mental breakdown in the lead male character who, as a result, loses his job and then his family.

The odd thing is that, throughout, everyone seems to feel this is all to some ultimately benevolent end. Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) wants answers, and Jillian (Melinda Dillon), who had her child ripped from her hands after having a selection of kitchen knives thrown at her, wants her child back, but both seem more angry at the government for refusing to admit anything’s happening, than at the aliens, who are the cause of it all.

And what do the government know, anyway? (And it’s not just the treacherous post-Watergate US government. At some significant meeting before the film begins, it’s said to have gone very well for the French in some way, meaning François Truffaut’s Claude Lacombe is in charge of the whole official response. His speaking French to the US military and government implies that the difference between their attitude and his is a question of people speaking, metaphorically as well as literally, entirely different languages.) The most the government seem to do is rush around ticking off vehicles as they’re returned, and listening to a crowd in India enthusiastically chant a five-note melody then pointing at the sky. Associating this melody with a series of hand signals gets Lacombe a round of applause, as though translating this message from one abstract form to another were some sort of breakthrough. Later, while the other government scientists are getting excited over the idea that a series of numbers being beamed at them from somewhere within the solar system might be map coordinates, Lacombe shouts at them to listen, then once again picks out the five-note melody, as though he’s only just discovered it.

This welter of strange phenomena — electrical disturbances, lights in the sky, sunburn at night, random kidnappings, lost military vehicles reappearing in desert locations, obsessive visions of a mountain landmark, a five-note musical sequence — feels like one of those “terminal documents” J G Ballard’s near-to-breakdown protagonists from The Atrocity Exhibition insist on making: fragmented lists of specific-but-random images or objects they nevertheless assert “all make up one picture”. (At one point, Roy, tearing apart his and his neighbour’s gardens for raw materials to build a living-room-sized sculpture of Devil’s Tower, says, “You ever look at something and it’s crazy, then you look at it another way and it’s not crazy at all?”) Like The Atrocity Exhibition, and Garner’s Red Shift, Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Wilson’s The Outsider, Close Encounters is crisis literature, but it’s not an individual going through a crisis, it’s an entire world, even though it occurs as much at a domestic as an international level. (Roy’s wife, Ronnie (Teri Garr), on the poltergeist-levels of disruption of Roy’s UFO obsession: “It’s turning this house upside down.”)

But where does it all lead? What are the aliens doing? It’s as if they’ve come, not to reassure humanity there’s a greater power up there in space that’s looking after them — they’re not, it turns out, the sort who disarm our nuclear weapons and wag an extraterrestrial finger at us, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still — but, rather, they’ve come to reassure us that the world is far stranger than we’ve become used to. Our world, the aliens seem to want to say, is capable of turning upside down, of breaking apart, of having things disappear then reappear thirty years later for no apparent reason, of having the sun come out in the middle of the night, of interrupting your normal, humdrum life with disruptive artistic visions, devastating losses, and wonder-inducing bright lights. One of the government men says, at one point, “There’s so much we don’t know.” He, it seems to me, is the one who sums up the aliens’ message. Not that they’re some vast benevolent force who are going to intervene in the course of human history and save us from ourselves, but, rather, that they’ve come to remind us of chaos — creative chaos, but disruptive and often painful chaos all the same — to remind us that this is what life’s about. Unpredictability. Incomprehensibility. Then they go away, taking another human with them, as though to say, “Don’t think this is over.”

The end of Close Encounters (1977) is oddly similar to the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). In both cases, we have a remote, rocky location where a film crew — an actual film crew in the case of the Nazis in Raiders, a government crew of scientists in Close Encounters, though one equipped with a host of cameras, bright lights, and even a musical instrument, therefore much closer to a film crew than your usual group of government scientists (it’s even, to underline the analogy, presided over by a real-life director, François Truffaut) — attempt to record the unrecordable: a meeting with the supernatural. (Which ties both films in with all those ghost stories where scientists try to understand the supernatural with a host of electrical measuring devices, as in The Stone Tape or The Awakening.) Clouds gather, and wonder-inducing lights weave among the watchers — angelic ghosts in the case of Raiders, UFOs in the case of Close Encounters — before the main visitation itself. This, of course, is where the two differ. In Raiders, the angels turn to demons and everyone who’s been watching gets melted, burned, or zapped; in Close Encounters, everyone gets a milder-comeuppance: a dose of benevolent awe and bewilderment. The worst that happens is a window gets shattered and a man has to rush to the toilet.

The key to Close Encounters is probably in the way the kidnapped child reacts to it all. He’s not scared of all that poltergeist activity (just like the young girl in Poltergeist (1982), in fact) — the eerie wind-up monkey that springs to life in the middle of the night, the vacuum cleaner that begins hoovering the carpet on its own, the kitchen knives that launch into the air — he just accepts it as part of how the world is, sometimes. (He also almost gets run over by standing in the middle of a bend in the road. Childlike wonder is no defence.) And the aliens themselves, even those who aren’t child-sized and child-proportioned, look more like childish drawings, with ill-shaped potato heads, round starey eyes and shapeless mouths, can’t-be-bothered-to-draw-it-right long-fingered hands and vague, oval bodies. “It’s like Halloween for grown-ups,” says Jillian, in the early days of waiting for the UFOs to reappear. Lacombe, shouting, “Écoutez”, as he picks out a five-note melody on his toy keyboard, and who brandishes crude paintings as evidence before the military, is like a child who insists on taking his own games as seriously as the adults take things like bills and work and national security. But, at the same time as all this child-like wonder and awe, there’s also a feeling of childish self-involvement which, however unintentionally, hurts others. It all starts to feel a little like that Star Trek plot where the god-like alien is just about to kill the crew of the Starship Enterprise when his parents turn up and tell him to stop being such a naughty boy. Are we dealing with grownup aliens, here? They certainly don’t behave that way.

Close Encounters is, at its most boiled-down, a film in praise of awe and wonder. Made as it was in a post-Watergate, post-1960s age of increasing cynicism, it duly acknowledges the adult complications of awe and wonder: mental breakdown, paranoia, governmental attempts to return things to a point of control and secrecy, and the possibility of real, irrevocable loss on a human level. But ultimately it waves its hands over those things. We see Roy ascending to the skies like a child being taken, finally, to the ultimate Disneyland; we don’t see his wife and children living with the aftereffects of his breakdown and abandonment. Also, perhaps too obviously, it’s about the most cinematic aspects of awe and wonder: bright lights, close-ups of wide-eyed human faces, strange and awful things you’ve never seen before (and wouldn’t really want to see, outside of a cinema), and wonderfully convincing special effects.

Tia and Rabbit are a little bit different from the other children at the Base, a primitive hunting and farming culture lorded over by the Major and the other Fathers (any man who sires a child is admitted to the upper ranks), who worship the relics of the ancient past, chief among which is a missile in a silo under their “church”. It’s an utterly repressive society, and a life of endless toil and constant fear of punishment for any transgression against the Major’s whims. Tia, though still a child, is taller than most of the other women and men at the base, though she gets breathless more easily; Rabbit, a younger boy, stammers. The two have shared a connection ever since Rabbit fell down a hole in the woods outside the Base’s grounds, and Tia, somehow hearing his cries for help, knew exactly where to find him. Ever since, she’s been branded a witch by the superstitious-minded people of the Base.

And, it turns out, she sort of is. She and Rabbit share dreams in which they talk to Ashira and Varas, a man and woman living in a far different community called Morrow. The Morrowans are telepathic, and survived the ecological “Destruction” of the past (which began with the “Death of the Seas”, during which 93% of all living creatures died of suffocation) thanks to the foresight of Simon Asher Morrow, who created a subterranean complex into which he and his chosen few could retreat while the Earth recovered. Tia and Rabbit can communicate with Ashira and Varas because they too are telepathic, and when Rabbit’s nascent mind-powers result in him killing one of the more abusive Fathers in Tia’s defence, the two children flee the Base and, guided by Ashira and Varas but pursued by the Major and a handful of hunters, make their way down a hundred miles of river to meet the Morrowans on the coast of what was, many years ago, San Francisco.

(The writing really comes alive, I think, when the children encounter things on this journey they at first can’t understand — a ruined and overgrown city, for instance, or the sea, whose strange, distant noise and smell puzzle them at first.)

Helen Mary Hoover’s Children of Morrow was first published in 1973, and has much the same scenario as John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, though the emphasis is less on that book’s struggle to keep its child protagonists’ telepathic powers secret, and more on the post-discovery chase and rescue. Unlike Wyndham, though, Hoover returned to the world she’d created with Treasures of Morrow (1976), a book that starts right where Children of Morrow ends, meaning the two can be read quite satisfyingly as a single story.

In Treasures of Morrow we get to see Tia and Rabbit’s journey to Morrow and their assimilation into a culture completely alien to them because of its technological advancement and its capacity for kindness. After this, Tia, Rabbit, Ashira, Varas and some other Morrowans go on an expedition back to the Base, and Tia and Rabbit get to look at the grim, unforgiving and brutal culture in which they were raised with fresh eyes:

“Did I ever look like that?” Tia wondered as she stared at them. At this distance, in their still pose, the women’s faces were blurs, one indistinguishable from the other. All had the same wild, tangled hair. All wore the same sacklike brown leather dress. Their feet and arms were bare and muddy. But it wasn’t their bedraggledness that bothered her so much as their hangdog air of subjugation. She had not been so aware of it before, and seeing it now, and remembering, disturbed her.

Although there’s less plot and less urgency to Treasures of Morrow (there’s still a tense, action-filled ending, but it feels a little less desperate than the first book’s, thanks to the comforting presence of the technologically-advanced and cool-thinking Morrowans), to me the second book feels a bit more emotionally satisfying. Revisiting their abusive childhood world, Tia and Rabbit get to see it for the sad, demeaning tragedy it is. They can even feel pity for their abusers, seeing many of them as doing the best they could in pitiless circumstances, or simply acting out of unthinking ignorance. Ultimately, they have to turn their back on the Base, but seeing it again, now they know a better alternative, allows them to properly leave it in the past.

Although it might sound like Morrow and the Base are being presented as moral opposites, Hoover makes it clear that Morrow isn’t entirely a utopia. It was founded by one of the very industrialists whose greed caused the ecological Destruction in the first place, and who did so out of the desire for personal survival rather than an ideological investment in humanity’s future. And a potted history of Morrow in the aftermath of that mass extinction makes it clear how close it came to falling apart, with a slow deterioration of its power structures, and the enforced inbreeding of its limited population. A contamination of its main protein supply led to a chance evolutionary leap, killing some, but resulting in a few children being born with telepathic powers, after which a strict programme (still adhered to) of controlled breeding led to their present state of all being telepaths. There’s still a hint, in Treasures of Morrow, that Morrow is in danger of cultural sterility, due to there being no other equivalent civilisations to interact with:

“I mean, we’re smarter than any of the old civilisations. But there’s no one else to care what we are—or do. For example, my sister, Elizabeth, says the neutron star in the Crab Nebula is winking out. Once that news would have excited astronomers all over the world. Now it excited about six people.”

It would be interesting to read a third book on how Morrow deals with this situation — something Tia and Rabbit, raised in a different culture, might have a vital perspective on. It also seemed, in Treasures of Morrow, that one of the Morrowans, Senior Geneticist Elaine, was being set up to act as a Morrowan villain, with her coldly scientific attitude towards the people of the Base, and her disapproval of Tia and Rabbit. She accompanies the expedition to the Base, but pretty much fades from the narrative, except to make the occasional offensive comment, but I felt she had the potential to underline the sort of extreme Morrow might go to, if it ever lost touch with its humanity.

There’s also the question of Tia and Rabbit’s origins. In Children of Morrow, we learn they’re the result of an unauthorised experiment in artificial insemination by a Morrowan who happened on the Base, though even the Morrowans who discover the diary describing this incident agree it sounds unlikely. It sounds as though the Morrowans have a dark side to their nature they’re perhaps not confronting. So, plenty of potential for a third book, but as it is, the two we have feel complete, so far as telling of Tia and Rabbit’s escape from an unpleasant childhood goes.

I bought the first book because of the UK edition’s Michael Heslop cover. Treasures of Morrow doesn’t seem to have been published in the UK in paperback, so perhaps the first wasn’t as successful over here as the publishers were hoping. They’re both now available for Kindle.

The unnamed narrator of Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice returns to his (unnamed) home country “to investigate rumours of a mysterious impending emergency in this part of the world”. But immediately he becomes gripped with an obsession for a young woman he was formerly infatuated with, a girl (she’s known throughout the novel as “the girl”) whose “timidity and fragility” made him want to “shield her from the callousness of the world”. Her rejection of him left him traumatised, and he still suffers from insomnia and headaches, the medication for which gives him “horrid dreams, in which she always appeared as a helpless victim”, dreams which are “not confined to sleep only”. Even as he drives to the house that the woman shares with her painter husband, he sees her before him, helpless, surrounded by encroaching cliffs of ice — the first of the novel’s many slips into a different sort of reality.

His visit is unsatisfactory — he hardly sees her, and when he does, she hardly speaks to him — and soon after, he learns she has fled the country. Ignoring his mission to understand “the coming emergency”, the narrator follows, ending up in an (unnamed) nordic country semi-ruined by war, where the girl seems to have been taken by a militaristic leader known as the warden. The narrator poses as a historian, looking for sites of potential archaeological investigation, and manages to convince the warden to let him see the girl. He wants, of course, to take her from the clutches of this overbearing, controlling man, but when he’s finally taken to her, she’s plainly afraid of him. When the political state in the country worsens, the warden flees, taking the girl with him. Again, the narrator follows.

All this time, the strangeness of the narrative is escalating. The narrator continues to have even more vivid, elaborate, and violent fantasies about the girl being endangered and his trying (and failing) to save her. In one, told that she’s dead, his main feeling is of having been “defrauded”: “I alone should have done the breaking with tender love; I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds.” He also finds, at times, his identity somehow merging with that of the warden; also, with the girl’s: “It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.” Sometimes, his narration slips to include scenes in which he is not present, but the girl is, and in which he can somehow know her feelings. There’s a dreamlike blurring of boundaries between the narrator, the girl, and the warden who, at times, because they’re left unnamed, seem not so much fleshed out characters as roles being played, or, perhaps, fragmented aspects of an absent whole. Is the narrator projecting his fantasies of saving/“shielding” someone onto the young woman he’s pursuing, despite her obvious fear of him, or is the young woman projecting her fear of others onto the narrator? Whenever he does get to be with her, his actions are hardly those of a protector, more those of the sort of abuser who tells his victim, “I’m doing this for your own good.”

We never learn the origins of the “coming emergency”, only that:

“Day by day the ice was creeping over the curve of the earth, unimpeded by seas or mountains.”

At the same time, though, the world is descending into militaristic chaos, “a senseless mania for destruction” even in the face of the coming environmental annihilation. There are rumours about “a self-detonating cobalt bomb, timed, at a pre-set, unknown moment, to destroy all life”. It’s as if, the narrator says:

“An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.”

It all focuses on “the girl”, even though she makes only brief appearances (usually to flee from the narrator as soon as she can). Early on, we’re told the origins of her permanently terrified state:

“She was over-sensitive, highly-strung, afraid of people and life; her personality had been damaged by a sadistic mother who kept her in a permanent state of frightened subjection.”

She has a permanent “victim’s look”. Fear, we’re told, is “the climate she lived in” — a fitting word, “climate”, for an ecological disaster novel. And:

“The irreparable damage inflicted had long ago rendered her fate inevitable.”

Just as the world is heading towards extinction — through ice or nuclear fire, it hardly matters which — the girl is heading towards her own inevitable fate. The ice in the world echoes her inner numbness to her own condition, driven by a lifetime of emotional helplessness; the lack of names given to countries and characters echoes her disconnection from the world around her; the narrator’s unstable sense of reality echoes how “Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of [the girl’s] personality”.

The characters, and the world they’re in, all become echoes of one another, reflections of one another. The boundaries between them are unstable, just as a child victim’s are with an abusive parent. Victims of abuse, reduced so utterly to powerlessness, take their abuser’s side in a last-ditch attempt at psychological survival. It’s quite possible Ice’s male narrator is in fact the girl’s own narrative voice, seeing herself, through another’s eyes, objectified and victimised because it’s the only way she can see herself and not experience that paralysing fear. (Which would explain the narrator’s initial trauma on being rejected by her — it wasn’t a love rejection, but a shattering of the self.) Meanwhile, the ice encroaches — the chilling distance between herself and her own emotions, freezing the world as she herself is frozen inside, forever trapped at the moment of her victimisation. (Hence, she’ll always be “the girl”, the victim of her mother’s bullying, and never a grown-up woman in her own right.)

And all this takes place in a world of power, possession and increasingly mindless violence, a totalitarian, male-dominated world on the brink of chaos, all too ready to pander to the girl’s “I deserve no better” siren call to be terrorised, victimised, brutalised.

This was Kavan’s last novel before her death in 1968, and it’s all too easy to read it in the terms laid out in biographical sketches, which include a lonely, neglectful childhood, a probably abusive early marriage, battles with heroin addiction (which began in the days when heroin was an over-the-counter drug; she was apparently persuaded to try it in the belief it would help her tennis serve) and depression. Even her name — adopted as a pseudonym, then taken on in real life from one of her own fictional characters — could be seen in the same terms as the self-distancing use of “the girl” in Ice: an attempt to divorce oneself from one’s unhappy past, an attempt to outrun one’s shadow, to numb the pain through dissociation.

I came across this book while looking for something similar-but-different to the last disaster novel I reviewed here, John Christopher’s Death of Grass, but it was a cover quote from J G Ballard that clinched me into reading Ice. Its vision of a world being slowly encased in ice echoes Ballard’s The Crystal World, but in Ice the examination of the human story in the face of worldwide disaster is deeper (though Ballard’s is also, curiously, a tale of love triangles being fought out while the world freezes).

Kavan’s novel, with its unnamed characters, unnamed countries, and never-fully-defined disaster, has a sort of Kafkan purity of fable to it, but at its heart there’s a weird, hallucinogenic feeling in which it’s impossible to fully separate any of the characters from one another, or from their unstable, violent, ecologically-endangered world — each seems a facet of the same central, frozen crystal, a prismatic illusion thrown off from the ice-hard heart of unhealed, perhaps unheal-able, psychological abuse that seeded this novel.

Chilling.