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language: Scots
country: UK
year: 2000
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 26.11.24-18.12.24
a friend and I are trying to get into Scots literature and decided to start with Matthew Fitt’s But n Ben A-Go-Go, a (sort-of) cyberpunk novel originally published in 2000. we’d made an attempt at this in undergrad but didn’t get very far before I had to return the book (from interlibrary loan).
we were reading the book aloud, and aside from anything else I’m going to say, this really gives you a deep appreciation for Fitt’s attention to detail and to the construction of each and every sentence in the book. per his introduction, his goal was to produce a text that would guide readers unused to reading Scots but comfortable speaking or hearing Scots through the book. he clearly put a lot of effort into this: words and phrases he thinks may be unfamiliar, either because they’re archaic (he’s drawing heavily on Middle Scots vocabulary as well as modern Scots) or because they’re science-fictional neologisms, are frequently doubled, either with an alternate Scots word or phrase or occasionally with an English one, in order to gloss them. the result is both an impressive linguistic achievement and a text that is, I think, very accessible — only rarely did we have to turn to the Dictionaries of the Scots Language to double-check what were for the most part archaisms. if anything, I would say that it’s too accessible: I think I as a non-Scots-speaker should probably not have had quite as easy a time navigating the text as I did.
setting aside the linguistic element, the book is pretty good, but with some hesitations. in a near-future (2090s) climate dystopia, Paolo Broon is a “cyberjanny” working in “Port”, the agglomeration of floating cities that make up “Scotland” now that most of the country — except for the “Drylands”, a few mountain peaks in the Highlands and the Hebrides — has been flooded. his father is a notorious cybercriminal. his wife, Nadia, is permanently hospitalized in a “kist”, quarantined because she‘s suffering from “Senga”, a mutated, virulent future form of HIV/AIDS. when Paolo learns that she may have gotten Senga from his father — who has just broken out of prison — he sets out across the Drylands to But n Ben A-Go-Go, his father’s estate, to try to get a DNA sample that will let him release his wife from her suffering. Paolo is pursued by Vermont, an idealistic and inexperienced young cop who’s being sexually exploited by her boss; she hopes to catch both Paolo and his father and finally be able to get out from under her boss’s thumb.
the good: the concept is very good, and a bunch of the execution is also good. the scenes in cyberspace (amusingly called “VINE”) are fascinating, and the writing is very engaging. when the plot is moving, it moves — we were reading alternating pages and both found ourselves getting carried away onto the other person’s page. the character work is (mostly) solid, and Fitt also clearly put some thought into dialect and accent. the highlight for us early in the book was the interlude chapters from Nadia’s perspective, which are in a kind of hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness as she’s simultaneously aware of the physical pain racking her body and embedded in a virtual environment. the world-building is (for the most part; see below) extremely compelling — Fitt does a great job raising questions that don’t need answering but that imply a depth of history and major political change.
the mediocre: the pacing is a bit messy. Paolo’s journey across the Drylands, in particular, really drags on — it’s spread across multiple chapters, some of which are quite long, when it really should have been about 3 pages at most. there’s one multi-page sequence where he sees some “rebel tourists” at a distance that’s clearly only there so Fitt can show off his world-building. the climax of the novel, too, falls a bit flat, in part because despite explicitly informing us early in the book that if you die in cyberspace you die in real life the climax takes place entirely in realspace. the opening chapters talk a good game about cybercrime and cyber-everything, but the novel doesn’t follow through on what should have been its biggest selling point.
the bad: the gender politics are bad. Nadia’s effectively fridged for Paolo’s manpain, for a start. the politics of it vis-à-vis Scotland are also messy, to say the least: Fitt has the Highlands and Islands largely swallowed by the sea, but he also goes out of his way to emphasize that they are inhabited only by mutated animals (known as “kelpies”) and by “rebel tourists” — Americans whose speech is laced with Yiddish, which is. a choice. Gaels apparently do not exist, even in distant memory, in this future, except in two singular place names — Beinn a’ Chuallaich and Gleann nam Marbh (the only indication of Gaelic presence after the climate disaster, since it commemorates a disastrous climate flood) — and the fact that the Port police force is known as “Ceilidh”. this is what most rubbed me the wrong way when we first ventured into the novel in 2014, and it continues to rankle now, especially because not only do Gaels no longer exist but Americans still do, and have taken their place (something something Celtic fantasy…). beyond the (non-)handling of Gaels, specifically, there is also a general cyberpunk racism: most prominently, Paolo’s father’s bodyguard/head minion is a musclebound Inuit man who rarely speaks and is really just there to do brutal violence to people. yikes! and there’s the homophobia and biphobia: Paolo’s father appears to be bi or pan and is ultimately revealed to have intentionally given Paolo’s wife Senga in order to ultimately use her to manipulate Paolo. that’s a bunch of old serophobic homophobic tropes wrapped up together — the predatory Gays who are trying to give innocent straight people AIDS — combined with a bunch of longstanding biphobic tropes — the promiscuous evil bisexuals (who are also willfully spreading AIDS). it’s not a good look!
the complex: what does it mean to position Scots not as the language of, by and large, working-class communities but as the language of state power, such that everyone and everything from police executives to celebrity endorsement advertisements uses Scots as a matter of course? where Scots is the language of Port soldiers’ participation in imperialist wars around the world? there is a major tension here in the novel’s language use: on the one hand, the plot and protagonists appeal to the conventional association of Scots with poverty, the working class, and the social margins, and its careful attention to dialect asserts the value and viability of a wide range of informal speech practices; on the other hand, Scots is the language Paolo speaks when attempting to drag a wayward Danish refugee back to his shift as a menial laborer. is the future we want for Scots, within or outwith “Scotland” as such?
I suspect / hope that this novel would look different if written and published today. for all its flaws, it’s not a bad book — it is, in fact, a pretty decent book, one that I think is still worth reading. I wish Fitt had written more in this setting; perhaps someday he’ll come back to it.
moods: adventurous, grimy, horny, tense