The science-fiction writer and futurist Stanisław Lem was well acquainted with the way that fictional worlds can sometimes encroach upon reality. In his autobiographical essay “Chance and Order,” which appeared in The New Yorker, in 1984, Lem recalls how as an only child growing up in Lvov, Poland, he amused himself by creating passports, certificates, permits, government memos, and identification papers. Equipped with these eccentric toys, he would then privately access fictional places “not to be found on any map.” Some years later, when his family was fleeing the Nazis, Lem notes that they escaped certain death with the help of false papers. It was as if the child’s innocent game had prophesied a horrific turn in history, and Lem wonders if he’d sensed some calamity looming on the horizon—if his game had sprung “perhaps from some unconscious feeling of danger.”
Lots of sci-fi focuses on rollicking adventurers hurtling through space, with characters who don’t have time to worry about, say, making dinner for each other. It’s easy to overlook the everyday mundanities of what people are putting in their bodies when there’s a plot to focus on.
When you look beyond complicated narratives and fast-moving stories, you begin to notice that just as many characters aren’t eating as don’t have enough to eat. More and more, authors are interrogating problems of climate change, equity, and food security through the table even as their protagonists explore galaxies far, far away.
This wasn’t always the case.
Behind the desk in my office is a portrait of the young Iris Murdoch painted by artist-philosopher Renée Bolinger in the style of Lucian Freud. Murdoch stares over my shoulder as I type, her boyish haircut bristling in oils, lips pursed, emphatic cheekbones gray-green-blue. I first encountered Murdoch as one of BBC Two’s “Men of Ideas,” interviewed by the irreplaceable Bryan Magee. You can watch the video on YouTube now, but I read a transcript in the volume that followed the series. I was 15 years old and I adored the book. It was my window to a world of urbane intellectualism, a symposium at which Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were virtual guests. The best conversation was Murdoch’s, on literature and philosophy.
Murdoch was a professional philosopher for 15 years before leaving her position at Oxford University to work on fiction full time. By the time her interview with Bryan Magee was broadcast, in 1978, she had written 19 novels, including The Sea, The Sea (1978), which won the Booker Prize that same year. Her dialogue with Magee has become infamous among students of Murdoch for its sustained resistance to the blurring of lines between philosophy and literature. Philosophy “states and attempts to solve very difficult highly technical problems,” Murdoch begins, whereas “art is fun and for fun, it has innumerable intentions and charms.” She concludes: “I am reluctant to say that the deep structure of any good literary work could be a philosophical one.”
If the contents of the story are under tremendous pressure, so are the book’s political themes. This is supposed to be a mad and furious book about a mad and furious city, and I suspect that Gunaratne wants his writing to borrow some of the freedoms of song lyrics and engaged journalism—to deliver political commentary, ardent instruction, and harsh intervention, to praise and to rage. But I also want to hear the characters sing the song of themselves. Gunaratne’s powers of observation are so acute and extractive that he can trust his material to generate its own human significance. Caroline, when denouncing familial blood enmities, is relatively predictable. She is anything but earlier in the novel, when she says this about her former partner: “I thought if I married John, I’d be safe. It was a common-law marriage, mind you. Though it might as well have been the real thing because he beat the shit out of me anyway.” That’s mad and furious, too.
I was born to watch
the beavers’ chewing
flood the pond.
Fated to bear witness
to such confident
accretion, my life was bitten down