Under the Blue

 

This has been my favourite read of the summer, and I'm trying to figure out why.  A couple of things come to mind, but first it's a great story, very well told, and that is reason enough in itself to read this novel.  But what makes it exceptional for me is how it builds upon two strands of literature. The first is obviously genre, science fiction, and I thought here of Day of the Triffids, but without the plants. The irony here is that the clear blue skies of the title pervade the book and should bring happiness (both to plants and to people) where there is only sadness.  That being said, this is a great beach read, which I know from having enjoyed my hardback copy on the beach in Bournemouth.

The second strand is post-apocalyptic, but without so much of the genre elements, in which I place the work alongside Camus and Saramago.  Specifically coming to mind are The Plague and Blindness.  The only problem with this placement is that Under the Blue is science fiction, and an excellent example at that.  The novums revolve around AI and drones, and how these two technologies are inextricably intertwined in the vision (and perhaps future reality) of societies of power and control (see my previous review of Attack Surface on this blog as well).

Patrick Meier, in a humanitarian vein, discusses drones in terms of intelligent flying robots.  The AI in Under the Blue is disembodied and remains just a voice in the lab of characters that inhabit one structural half of the narrative.  It is this half in which we observe, along with some scientists, the evolving intelligence of the AI that is being 'trained'.  The way these sections are set off is almost like bare reportage, giving it a very authentically 'scientific' feel. But other sections here, with odd line-breaks, make very much akin to poetry at the same time.  A poetics of science and artificial intelligence emerges that is unlike anything I've ever seen in fiction.

One thing I questioned was how little of humanity seemed to remain alive, but this is also in keeping with the main character's (an artist) isolated, misanthropic, existence, one with which we become intimately involved in the novel's opening scenes. Here we inhabit the artist's world, and see how little time he has for a humanity he almost seems to see as separate, outside, of his own self.  At one level, this book is very much about creation and the isolation of the artist, and the necessity of such in order to maintain the 'purity' of the vision.  But the artist's life is anything but pure, from the materiality of his apartment, to the entanglements (romantic and otherwise) that we follow as the characters (more than one from the artist's apartment building) develop. 

A romantic entanglement evolves, and is complicated, as a road trip unfolds, a wonderfully evoked sense of constraint that allows certain freedoms amid catastrophic failure of the lifeworlds of humanity; and in this we have a flipped, and counter-mapped, 'road trip' paradigm that is another of this novel's many innovative features.  For so many reasons, and for the way the AI/drone nexus is represented, quite believably and subtly, this book is compelling and, I would say, a 'must-read'.  I haven't read Station Eleven yet, maybe it should be the next novel I pick up, as I've seen comparisons to it in reviews of Under the Blue.