I’ve now read all three of Hall’s novels, and although this, her first SF work, seems to me the weakest of them there’s no doubt that she is a prodigiously gifted and genuine novelist. I shall certainly read her next novel; and may even buy it in hardback, which is my actual cool-aid acid-test of a writer worth taking seriously. What is particularly markworthy about her writing, I’d say, is the focus and poetic intensity of her style: she tells straightforward but solid stories in a solidly rendered landscape, evoking both with a fine expressive excess. She is especially good at descriptions of nature, scenery and rural life. The Carhullan Army reworks some of the material from her first novel, the drowned-pastoral Haweswater (2002), relocating its clash of modern and traditional, town and country, male and female from the 1930s into the near-future.
Hall’s narrator (‘Sister’ is the only name she gives us) runs away from her grim factory job and unsatisfying relationship in the town to make a new life at Carhullan, a farm in the Cumbrian hills that is both a radical female collective and a seedbed for resistance to the centralized evils of the State. Carhullan is run by the charismatic, slightly insane ex-commando Jackie Nixon. Over the course of this relatively short novel Sister becomes in effect a terrorist, a member of the titular army. The book opens with an official epigraph: ‘English Authority System archive—record no 498: Transcript recovered from site of Lancaster holding dock. Statement of female prisoner detained under section 4(b) of the Insurgency Preventing (Unrestricted Powers) Act.’ So we know how the story is going to end; but we’d know that anyway from the unvaryingly doleful tone of the whole.
The Carhullan Army is a markedly, almost stubbornly old-fashioned dystopia that plays its premise entirely straight: there’s no irony, no intertextual self-knowledge in the foresquare representation of how hard life in this imagined world necessarily is. Hall plays no games with the genuineness or essential reliability of her first-person narrator. In many ways it's a strange work. That’s not intended dismissively, by the way. I like strange, and to a degree I liked this novel: I liked its single-mindedness, and its moral seriousness. I liked the way it construes both the strengths and weaknesses, or rather the freedoms and the limitations, of its rural gynocracy. I liked its attentiveness to the natural world, something too rarely found in novels, and in sf novels found more rarely still. But there have been a number of exceptional, powerful and enduring literary dystopias recently: Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Jim Crace's Pesthouse, McCarthy's The Road. The Carhullan Army is by no means a bad novel, but it isn’t in the same class as these others; and being published as it is in the wash made by their passage it can hardly help seeming a little belated.
More, its single-mindedness comes to seem tiresome before the end. It is relentless and rather spiritless, a book whose watchwords are seriousness and honesty, immanent qualities of the writing that are also deictically displayed (Jackie Nixon ‘did not try to describe Carhullan as any kind of Utopia [100]; ‘it was a serious and honest existence at the farm’ [103]) but which are perhaps too worthy to work as organising principles for this fiction.
Hall’s dystopian England, despite the role Global Warming has evidently played in its creation, could have been written in the 1960s. Life is sliding towards a miserable subsistence level under a Soviet-style tyrannous ‘Authority’; a regime that deploys ‘ten year recovery plans’, runs ‘detention centres’, nationalizes land ownership and pursues what one character calls ‘all that centralization nonsense’ [104]. It's a crude-enough caricature of Bad Government: a straw dictatorship against which Hall’s odd combination of radical rural conservatism and radical 1970s feminism can offset itself. So on the one hand there’s a Dave Spart feel to much of the rhetoric (‘‘Women were treated like cunts back down there. Like second-class citizens and sex-objects. They were underpaid and underappreciated’ [115]) and a shall-we-say lack of nuance to the book’s ideological bias:
She [Nixon] did not make monsters of us. She simply gave us the power to remake ourselves into those inviolable creatures the God of Equality had intended us to be. We knew she was deconstructing the old disabled version of our sex. [187]That women not be treated like cunts, sex-objects and second-class citizens is something on which we can all agree. But threading through these mainstream opinions (offered as if revolutionary) is a much more dubious essentialism and a celebration of dogged passivity associated with the enduring if dour landscape Hall loves. Towards the end of the novel we are told: ‘it is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most that will conquer’ [158]—one of the most monstrously wrongheaded things I have read in a novel for a long time. And then there’s this romanticized, slightly sap-headed peroration, right near the end of the book:
Revolutions always begin in mountainous regions. It’s the fate of such places. Look around you … these are the disputed lands. They have never been settled. And those of us who live in them have never surrendered to anyone’s control. Nor will we ever. [195-6]Revolutions always begin in mountainous regions? That would be news to Wat Tyler, Cromwell, George Washington, Robespierre, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh—wait up. Actually, let's rephrase: ‘Revolutions rarely begin in mountainous regions’. Or indeed: ‘I’m Cumbrian and I don’t like people telling me what to do.’ That would be less starry-eyed and less grimly self-romanticising. ‘We have never surrendered to anyone’s control. Nor will we ever’. Grand. Although, didn’t Hadrian build a big fuck-you wall right through the middle of Cumbria? Ach, I’m nitpicking … except I’m not, really: this is a novel that needs to build more than a series of minute poetic observations of landscape. It needs to understand how politics actually work; how history actually moves; how tyranny actualizes itself in the world. It doesn’t. 1970s Feminism taught us that the personal is political; but this novel can only encompass the first, and not the second, half of the equivalence.
But the biggest disappointment in the novel, I’d say, is the quality of the writing itself. Both Hall’s previous novels contain numerous passages of superb, luminous writing. In The Carhullan Army the writing seemed to me simply less controlled, less effective. In part this has to do with a tendency to infodump (‘we seemed united by our disappointment, our anger, our distrust of the reinvented Forward Party, who had taken office under the banner of reform, and had then signed the Coalition Oil Treaty … [led by] Powell, one of the old guard … a bigot’ etc etc [24-5]) ‘This was not England, everyone said. This was some nightmarish version that we would wake from soon. The overdose and suicide rates climbed’ [30]. This is not Writing, everyone can agree. This is telling rather than showing. The reader's engagement falls away.
But there’s also a kind of wobble in the texture of the writing itself, from sentence to sentence, that struck me as off-form for a stylist as gifted as Hall has shown herself to be. To be clear: this novel is better written, and Hall a much better stylist, than any other writer on Clarke 08, and better written than most other novels I read this year. But although she is often evocative and poetic (‘the November sky was ash-blue and the clouds moved fast above us’ [96]), often grimly so (‘the white smear of moon, a ridged and filmy ulcer in the lining of cloud’ [8]), or very good on minute observation: felled by the Carhullan guards, Sister sees wildlife in amongst the grass: ‘an inch from my eye a spider was belaying down one of the stems on a pale rope. Its legs pedaled precisely on the descent’ [58]. There is a good deal of excellent writing like that. But just as often she misfires. ‘The man had a red face like a daub of glass taken out of a furnace’ [11] (what—featureless? luminous? hot?). ‘The fell was covered with stiff gingery grass and droves of heather’ [55] (gingery? droves?). ‘Above us the sky was charcoal-coloured and disturbed, the clouds swirling in vortexes, ripping along their edges’ [173] … ‘vortices’, presumably; and don’t you think this description comes over like a special effect from The Philadelphia Experiment? And here is the narrator approaching the rectangular-windowed Carhullan farmhouse at night for the first time, seeing ‘a dozen soft lights, loose glowing ovals like egg yolks’ [64]. Um?
A half-hewn novel. A plainsong novel. Not without moments of harsh beauty, but incomplete, unfinished, not quite earning its outrage, not quite fulfilling its contract with the reader.
4 comments:
>>>'there have been a number of exceptional, powerful and enduring literary dystopias recently: Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Jim Crace's Pesthouse, Macarthy's The Road. The Carhullan Army is by no means a bad novel, but it isn’t in the same class as these others; and being published as it is in the wash made by their passage it can hardly help seeming a little belated.'
It is not clear to me that The Carhullan Army is this sort of book at all. I haven’t read the Crace (but yours is the first positive mention I’ve seen), and while the others have their points (and are both enjoyable books to read for different reasons), what needs to be said is that they are both deeply misanthropic. This misanthropy is related to (indeed stems from) a collapse in belief in humans as collective agents; in other words a collapse in belief in politics. ‘70s feminists’ like Russ, Piercy and (even) Tiptree were never misanthropic in this way and that is one reason why Hall’s return to these areas is so welcome. Like those writers, she is primarily writing a utopian fiction which cuts out an isolated community from the endlessness of the present and thus creates a space for an alternative set of values to appear. The problem with utopias has always been how you get to them and whether you would want to get there anyway given that they are necessarily built restrictively in order to exist at all. Hall overcomes this problem by having the utopian isolationists voluntarily return to take political action in the wider world and by the same stroke she counteracts any charge of feminist separatism. In that sense, I think the book does demonstrate a significant development of the genre (and I hope to write about this in more detail at some point in the future).
As to the tone and the fact that is the account of the defeated – I think that works well; we the reader can still see a broader picture than the narrator. Also as in those arguments about Nineteen Eighty-Four, one can argue that the fact the book is published suggests that there was a subsequent political upturn further down the line. The British totalitarian government seems dumb and grey but a British totalitarian government would be dumb and grey – fetishizing scarcity in an attempt to tap into the spirit of the Blitz and all the rest of that crap we’ve been cursed with from birth. Ultimately, hall returns to the 70s because that was the last time we had politics and we need to go back there and drag it into the future. A timely book.
A very interesting position, Nick.
I wonder, though: when you say 'Russ, Piercy and (even) Tiptree were never misanthropic', do you mean that they never lost faith in human nature, or something of that sort? Because one aspect of that vintage of feminist thought is that in the gender-specific sense of the word it very often involves hostility towards the anthropic. Hall is rather like that, her male characters either old-school sexist boors, or feeble kept-men.
You say: 'As to the tone and the fact that is the account of the defeated, I think that works well.' Yes, I see the merit of this position; though I didn't, on balance, share it. Not that I have any problem with a dour tone itself. Pretty much all the novels I've written myself have been gloomy. But Hall wants her 'defeated' to be both downtrodden and at the same time timelessly enduring, like the Cumbrian hills. That's the mix I didn't buy.
I meant that McCarthy and Atwood are misanthropic in that they brutally kill off humanity in a way that suggests to me that the unconscious argument of these books is ‘better an end in horror than horror without end’. The 70s feminists struggle with the ‘horror’ but refuse to give up and instead strive for human, political solutions (although Tiptree does sometimes slip over into the camp of despair). I would see this ‘end in horror’ position in terms of the paradox described by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel on ‘the paradox whereby lofty and sensitive writers, in both an aesthetic and a moral respect, like Flaubert and [Conrad Ferdinand] Meyer, were driven to such cruelty in their writing’ (280, Penguin edition). Lukács goes on to suggest that such writers – amongst whom he includes Baudelaire – only succeed, for all their intellectual and human qualities, in giving artistic expression to the ‘warped and disavowed’ unconscious feelings of the average bourgeois or petty bourgeois of the period. The reason for this – which can also be applied to McCarthy and Atwood in the present – is ‘the loss of an inner relationship with history’ implicit for Lukács within Walter Scott’s technique of giving living human embodiment to historical-social types. In particular the McCarthy book really disturbed me; it’s a horrifying picture of the American psyche.
I think there is a gender dimension to this in that despair would more often be the male response. An analogy would be the situation where some men faced by family break-up have killed their children. I’m not saying that a woman would never do this but it is possible to see this kind of action as broadly gendered. Likewise, I don’t want to overly gender the literary positions but I think that feminists by and large are not guilty of this kind of misanthropy (Atwood is an interesting case but then there is an ambivalence about both feminism and sf in her work – thinking also of Handmaid’s Tale – and generally I would say that she displays the limitations of liberal thought).
On one level, I don’t see that it is the responsibility of feminist writers to make the case for men – rather than criticising their representations we should behave differently. In any case, a book like The Female Man interrogates gender so thoroughly (and wittily, it should be emphasised) that it has more universal legitimacy than traditional essentialist gendered fiction. I don’t feel any hostility towards me in those books; all the hostility is directed to an essentialist (and repressive) notion of masculinity which I don’t like much either. (Tricia Sullivan’s Maul is a recent, very funny, playful exegesis on these themes satirising essentialist logic and offering a post-essentialist future). Hall’s book is not constructed in this way, true, but then I took it as post-feminist (in perhaps a different sense to the usual usage of that term) in that we could take this for granted. In any case, the (arguably) main male character, the father, is positive and at the same time not patriarchal.
This does all tie in with the tone and the depiction of future Britain – it is because the narrator is that type of person that we get this type of story; you could imagine a more playful narration of the whole story. Ok, part of this is a nod towards a type of revolutionary romanticism (scenery etc) but I think it is also probably essential for the book to work. The mix of utopian community and engagement with the world is a delicate balance which probably requires this approach. They can’t win or it would be undermined; even if we had the missing struggle section it would probably be undermined. In short, the book depends on its emotional truth – Hall can get away with not really explaining the emergence of her near-future because it feels true emotionally – and this in turn depends on the tone.
I don’t know that any of this will necessarily convince you but I think it is recognisable as a viable argument for the book’s achievement and importance, which I think extends beyond the current Clarke discussion (although I hope it wins!). I am going to write a longer article on the book for Vector.
Belated as I am I had to respond as reading your review made me think we read different authors.
I found Electric Michelangelo to be overwritten, saccharine romanticised pap from start to finish. Fragmented sentences, adjectives and ludicrous metaphors ran amock in Hall's Cumbria, her loved for the region released, unrestrained.
I reacted differently to Carhullan Army because, unlike you, I did not think that Hall offered the monolithic vision you described at all. Yes, Sister's narrative voice carried a serious, restrained monotony throughout which rang the first alarm bells for me -- it showed the rigid perspective of a fanatic. And any idea that Carhullan could pretend to be any kind of utopia -- didn't Sister herself describe it ultimately as a "defective society"? -- is destroyed with her brutal initiation and never quite rebuilt. Jackie's position as both military and civilian leader, her brutal military training, her treatment of the satellite male community, and pretty much every decision she made from the mock raid on her community 'till the end conveyed just how "defective" the community was. Heck, Sister suggested that Megan is, for her, nearly an idealised female but what is most memorable about Megan is that she is a robotic killer who will shoot on command, cool as you please.
Sister's own judgement is undermined from the beginning in her thoughts while she travelled on foot to Carhullan. She had these childlike visions of what Carhullan will be like, so vivid that one was inclined to believe she'd seen it herself until one remembered she'd only seen newspaper clippings. She even imagined Jackie as a child discovering the abandoned farm for the first time, camping in at night, and so on. Effects of gruelling journey or no all her actions afterwards indicates that she was well on her way to hero-worship before Jackie said the first word.
She reveals this herself without working out the implications when, at the last community meeting, she realizes that Jackie had tagged her as a devotee from the beginning which is why she didn't even need to have her in the army sooner than planned. Sister needed no convincing and, simply being as she was, could act as a "sleeper agent". How much louder could Hall ring the alarm bells? I mean, Sister didn't even want a name for herself so content was she to submerge into the collective.
I don't think that Sister is an unreliable narrator in the typical sense ie she skews events to make herself and her cause look good. That was the beauty of it -- that she was so sure of the legitimacy of her enterprise that she revealed everything (I assume, although in the plot some files were "corrupted") including the ugly developments, when a savvier Jackie would have left out a scene or two (or three) and covered the rest with maniacal grandiosity. So sure that when Jackie and her mini-army executed a mock raid on her own sisters, for no other reason except to scare the shit out of them, the only person who isn't outraged is, surprise, the one well-accustomed to repressive government.
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