Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (48 page)

The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

HarperPrism, 726 pages, hardback, 1999

The disaster novel, of which this is an example, is a subgenre in desperate search of a genre to be sub. Closer to the adventure thriller than to anything else, although quite distinct from it, disaster novels are more frequently lumped in with science fiction on the basis that the catastrophes that are their mainspring are somehow regarded as sciencefictional. Impacting comets – them's yer astronomy, and astronomy's a science so a novel involving them must be sf. In this instance the catastrophes are earthquakes – them's yer geology/geophysics, and so this novel is being published by an sf imprint and will doubtless be reviewed (or, more likely, disparagingly
not
reviewed) as a work of sf. Yet the "pure" disaster novel is in no sense sciencefictional: the underpinning calamities are not countered using scientific/technological means – indeed, in general they cannot be countered at all, merely
survived
.

Stories in which the disaster is successfully averted are a different kettle of fish, of course. Arthur C. Clarke's
The Hammer of God
is indubitably an sf novel (assuming one chooses to describe it as a novel), as is the movie
Armageddon
– though
Lucifer's Hammer
by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle arguably isn't. Post-holocaust novels generally sit happily within the sf framework, in that their concerns are with sociological implications and "sociofuturology" (even if represented only in microcosm) rather than with the disaster
per se
. And there are novels in which the central concern is indeed with the science, such as
Richter 10
by Arthur C. Clarke and Mike McQuay, which deals not so much with earthquakes-as-disasters as with earthquake prediction and earthquake control. But none of the books here cited can be regarded as examples of the "pure" disaster novel.

So the writers of "pure" disaster novels are confronted by a marketing problem, and
The Rift
is no exception: as noted, it is being published as sf; as hinted, it will thereby be ignored by a huge proportion of its natural readership. And there is a further problem for these writers: disaster novels have a formula that is imposed not by literary convention – as is, for example, the formula of high fantasy – but by the nature of the subject matter itself. There is thus not a great deal that can be done to alter it, to introduce new wrinkles.

The formula goes approximately like this:

•
Stage One: Before the Disaster
We are introduced to a bunch of characters who we know will survive the cataclysm. We follow them as they go about their daily lives, the purpose of such a treatment being to make sure we thoroughly identify with them –
know
them – so that we'll fully appreciate the rigours they will later undergo. (One or two of the lesser characters involved in this Stage may be snuffed out in Stage Two or even Stage Three. Because of their thorough introduction here we will be properly affected by the poignancy of their subsequent demise and thus convinced that this particular disaster really is, you know,
big
.) All of these characters, no matter where their starting points, will eventually be brought together and made to interact with each other by the dictates of the plot.

•
Stage Two: The Disaster Itself
Millions of spear-carriers meet their ends. Our plucky heroes have lots of jolly exciting adventures while losing a few supernumerary friends and relatives and being amazingly stiff-upper-lipped about these bereavements.

•
Stage Three: A New Era Dawns
The comet/earthquake/defective nuclear reactor/whatever has done its worst, and the significant characters from Stage One stagger around in the sudden preternatural silence as a new order is established either worldwide, or over a significant part of the globe, or merely within the characters' immediate surroundings. Martinets spring loathsomely from the debris of society, and can be regarded as sub-disasters or (fittingly in
The Rift
's context) aftershocks of the main one; they must in turn be survived and in due course erased. People learn things about themselves they never knew before and indeed would never have discovered had they not been subjected to conditions of
extremis
. New alliances are formed, often between odd couples ("I never dreamt that I, a lesbian professor of Greek philosophy in an obscure Midwestern university and part-time lecturer on the works of Eric Satie, would fall in love with a homophobic, Harley-Davidson-riding, rap-"singing", multiply tattooed bodybuilder half my age, but we've saved each other's lives three times now ..."). By the final page either some kind of post-disaster society is well on its way towards stability and an exciting future or the US Cavalry, in the form of outside governmental aid, has come charging over the hill to the rescue.

Constrained by this formula, the writer of the disaster novel must perforce concentrate her or his attentions on matters other than the injection of anything new into the overall plot. Obviously one major concern must be to make this a better page-turner, a rippinger yarn, than any of the competition; this is exactly the concern of the non-disaster adventure thriller, which is nothing if it can't be an unputdownable read. On a different front, the disaster novel is obviously an excellent venue in which to make acerbic social comment, and here it has immense flexibility in that not only is the field wide open for the writer to generate whatever post-disaster society s/he chooses – whatever villains, whatever saints – but also in that s/he can select at will the particular
focus
of the novel through choice of the group(s) of characters, among the many millions involved in the catastrophe, whose stories will form
the
story. Or the writer may elect to use the story as a means of drawing a moral – whether it be that nuclear reactors are the preserve of God, not Man; or that there is something rotten at the core of any democracy which chooses to ignore for political reasons (e.g., getting votes by keeping taxes artificially low) any likelihood of future mayhem on the grounds that it almost certainly won't happen in
this
US President's term of office; or that we tolerate neo-Nazi enemies within society at our peril; or that ...

It is manifestly evident that Walter Jon Williams, a deservedly eminent writer of science fiction, was aware of all these problems and constraints when he sat down to write
The Rift
. So far as sf was concerned he had little latitude, and so he confined himself on that front to first-rate descriptions of and explanations of earthquake mechanisms; indeed, as a seismological primer alone this book can be recommended to the lay reader for its fascinating infodumps. He therefore determined to write a hell of a good yarn in which social comment about the restless state of the contemporary USA, and in particular about that country's racial disharmonies and the sheer barbarism of its white-supremacist racialists (the novel's title is of course a pun), would be omnipresent without ever becoming hectoring.

To take the first of these aims first, how does
The Rift
shape up as an adventure thriller? The quake occurs not along the San Andreas Fault but in the major fault complex underlying the Mississippi/Missouri; since this is smack in the US heartland the consequences in terms of both social infrastructure and, more importantly, human lives are far more devastating than could be those of a Californian quake, located on the nation's periphery. Furthermore, there are three major temblors – all in the Richter 8+ region – rather than just the one (although the third of these has little impact upon either an already devastated land or the plot, so one wonders why it was introduced unless for symbolic/allegoric reasons that have escaped this reviewer). The central characters introduced in Stage One are: a black divorced male and a rebellious white adolescent male, Nick and Jason, who are thrown together immediately after the first quake and whose joint story is the backbone of the novel; a vile Ku Klux Klan male sheriff, Paxton, who with his even viler supporters will have an extermination camp up and running by Stage Three, so that they can be satisfyingly squelched by the good guys (and, yes, this reviewer raised a cheer when Paxton Got His); a white male fundamentalist Christian preacher, Frankland (not, repeat not, Falwell) and his simple-minded disciples, who believe the quake heralds the gaudier bits of
Revelation
; and the female General Frazetta, in charge of the military's attempts to ameliorate the consequences of the situation. Williams effects the convincing portrayal of these characters with differing degrees of success, achieving his aim with exceptional skill in the case of the heroes: Nick and Jason, with whom his heart and soul clearly lie, and Frazetta, who's just eminently likeable and as a result very immediately engages our understanding (although it grates that in the narrative she's referred to usually as Jessica, whereas a male equivalent would be referred to almost always by surname).

Williams has less success with the two groups of extremists. In order to round them out as people rather than paper tigers he struggles to show they're not entirely bad. Paxton is not as murderous as the psychopaths around him, and his attempt at mini-genocide is generated partly from weakness of character and partly from that in other contexts laudable characteristic, family loyalty, taken to ridiculous extremes: he encourages mass murder in order to protect his repulsively homicidal son (who doesn't even have the excuse of being a semi-literate dimwit, since he's a college boy an' all). Similarly, the much more interesting character Frankland, despite starting out as a caricature, becomes a sympathetic angel of mercy – feeding and sheltering local refugees, doing his best to make sure the sick are tended, etc. – before force of circumstance (folk have this irritating habit of wanting to leave his encampment and its nonstop diet of shrieked sermons) reveals the true sinisterness of his bigotry. Yet neither character entirely convinces – Paxton because who the hell
cares
if a psychopathic racist has a minor redeeming feature (to be fair, in the very late stages of the book there are some attempts to explain the cause of his racism) and Frankland because the earlier caricature is so beautifully executed that it's impossible for later developments to shift it from one's mind. Thus, quasi-paradoxically, it's easier for the reader to be chilled by the villain who is less of a real person and more of a cypher; an observation that could perhaps be tailored to equate with the technique whereby racists deliberately pervert their acolytes' (and their own) perceptions of the victims to mere cypherhood.

But, as noted, Williams's character portrayal is first-rate where it matters most: with Nick and Jason. They spend much of the novel travelling down the river in a not particularly waterworthy small boat, encountering friendly or hostile strangers and journeying towards Nick's reunion with his daughter and ex-wife and, although this is of course unplanned by them, Jason's unconsummated union with Nick's daughter, a practical demonstration that the racial rift of the book's title is an artificial one rather than something inherent in the human psyche. (The fact that scapegoating, of which racism is merely a very significant but hopefully transient facet, seems more deeply ingrained is an issue which Williams probably wisely avoids.) Perhaps more than half of this exceptionally long novel is devoted to their adventures, and as a result the tale rattles along at a satisfyingly accelerating pace; only the dullest of sticks would fail to find themselves reading later into the night than they'd intended. Williams's skill in this respect is best demonstrated by the lengthy passages located on the river, where a succession of seemingly unrelated adventures might well have become boring (one thinks of John Grisham's attempts in similar circumstances in his recent legal thriller
The Testament
) but are in fact thoroughly engrossing. As a direct consequence, Nick's and Jason's later travails under the temporary subjugations of first Frankland and then the murderous Paxton suitably raise the adrenalin levels: the turning pages become a bit of a blur. Also as a direct consequence of the strength of those river scenes, the denouement – whereby, although Nick has the anticipated happily-ever-after outcome, Jason achieves only a stage-backdrop Promised Land whose thin card ripples even as you watch – carries a truly powerful bittersweetness.

The writing of all this is hewn rather than crafted. To choose a passage at random:

All he asked was that someone go to his house to make sure that his wife was okay. It turned out that one of his own people could do that on his way to his own family, so that Jessica didn't even have to detail one of her own.*

[* This novel was read as a bound proof rather than as a finished copy. It is therefore possible that this particular passage may have been "tidied" by the time of publication. However, there are plenty of other examples.]

Elsewhere, in the space of a mere page and a half, we have "Fury flashed like fire along Nick's nerves", "Anger beat a slow throb in his temples", "Rage burst like a firework in Nick's brain" and "Fury simmered in his veins". Ten pages later, just as one has more or less recovered from this onslaught, one finds that "suddenly a graveyard chill ran up his spine, and he felt the winds of desolation blow in the hollow of his skull". Blimey. Yet for the most part this crudeness of language and imagery works towards the novel's benefit: it conveys a robustness, a lack of refinement, that is entirely appropriate to
The Rift
's robust themes. A more refined and polished telling might all too easily have insulated the reader from the true drama of the depicted events.

And yet, and yet, and yet ... there's something
missing
from the novel, and it's the sense that this disaster (or series of disasters) is genuinely large-scale. Yes, we feel the full force of its physical and psychological trauma, because there are people-who-could-be-us undergoing far more intense physical and psychological violence than most of us will, we hope, ever be unlucky enough to have to cope with. Yet – and this is the difficulty of the technique of concentrating on the experiences of a few characters as examples of what is going on on a far vaster scale – we are given nothing but the haziest perception of the
real
nature of the tragedy: that very vastness of effect. We are
told
of all kinds of devastations that are manifesting themselves offstage, but they're mere statistics: we are less affected by them than if we were watching scenes from the stricken regions on television or hearing news from the front on the radio. In short, Williams doesn't really manage to convey the
bigness
of his catastrophe – and it's difficult to see how he could have done given the constraints of his chosen formula.