[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: UK
year: 2010
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 8.5.25-12.5.25
(cw: rape, incest, bestiality)
Gwyneth Lewis’s The Meat Tree is the book that got me hyped for the New Stories from the Mabinogion series, published by Seren Books, because it’s a sci-fi reworking of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi, everyone’s favorite, about two space archaeologists — one, Campion, nearing retirement and one, Nona, an apprentice preparing to be officially certified — whose job is to determine what happened to wrecked ships that find their way into the solar system. in this case, the ship is a mysterious derelict orbiting Mars that looks like it should be from early in the history of long-distance space flight (solar sails!), except for its shockingly advanced virtual reality system, which the investigators have turned to in search of clues, since none are forthcoming on the ship itself. being an adaptation of the Fourth Branch, it is absolutely wild.
the narration is sometimes a dialogue and sometimes two interwoven monologues — or perhaps dia-log and mono-log, since for the bulk of the novel the characters’ words are coming either from their private logs or from a transcription of their mindlink during their investigation of the ship and, especially the VR. as the novel progresses, the boundaries between private log and official (dialogic) log becomes progressively thinner and ultimately dissipates entirely.
the Fourth Branch comes in through the VR, and by “comes in” I really do mean “takes over Campion and Nona’s lives”, for both personal, psychological reasons and for world-building reasons: as they slowly realize, the VR is not just a bit of casual entertainment. something on this ship is, for lack of a better word, alive, and it doesn’t want them to leave.
I put off reading this book for a long time because I was worried I’d overhyped itself, but I think — having spent some time deflating my expectations — I actually appropriately hyped it. I have some reservations (more in a second), but:
aesthetically it governs. there are a ton of comma splices, which I don’t love (though considering this was Lewis’s first work of prose fiction in either Welsh or English I was really impressed), but the structural conceit (dialogue and monologues bouncing back and forth between characters) is really cool, and I especially love her choice not to present the events of the Fourth Branch directly — rather, the events are narrated indirectly by Campion and Nona to each other and/or to the logs, as they take a variety of roles in the story. it adds an extra layer of enstrangement, and it also lets Lewis offer some metanarration, as Campion and Nona are actively theorizing about both the plot of the VR story (since they’re unfamiliar with the Fourth Branch) and its implications with regards to Campion’s theory that the VR system will reveal something about what happened to the ship’s crew.
in terms of what it’s doing with / how it’s thinking about the Fourth Branch, I really like Lewis’s approach. it’s slightly marred by an occasional recourse to ideas about goddess-worship and primeval matriarchy, but broadly I think Lewis has a really good grasp on the family dynamics (and I don’t just mean the incest) at work in the Fourth Branch — the politics of inheritance (and the possibility of matrilineality, though not — as Lewis sort of implies — matriarchy), Gwydion’s relationships to everyone, Lleu, Blodeuwedd, Lleu and Blodeuwedd, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy’s animal children…
that Campion and Nona are constantly moving between characters opens up some really interesting dynamics re gender. this follows from rape that opens the Fourth Branch, which becomes their first indication that this is something other than an ordinary VR, when Nona, playing Goewin, is raped by Gilfaethwy before Campion, playing Gwydion, realizes he needs to (try to) intervene. while Campion doesn’t fully understand what happened, he’s nonetheless forced to admit that Nona clearly experienced something that shouldn’t be possible in this kind of VR — that she was, in fact, raped. following this, for a long while Campion takes the female roles, first accidentally and then intentionally, as he discovers that, for example, he enjoys giving birth. (while they’re both initially mortified by the animal sex they both ultimately find the years of animal punishment almost soothing.) Nona, meanwhile, finds it satisfying to take male roles, and especially — and troublingly, something she’s conscious of — Gwydion’s role.
things go completely off the rails once Blodeuwedd shows up, of course, but they were already only hanging on to the rails by their fingernails when Lleu arrived on the scene. one of the most striking moments in the book to me was, in fact, about Lleu, when Campion momentarily enters Lleu’s perspective during the arming trick:
The clamour stops suddenly as if switched off at source. I enter the room of his mind. It’s a blank, a whitewashed cube. Outside I hear birdsong. Four walls, a floor, no furniture. It’s hardly human.
along with the subsequent reminder that Lleu is barely different from Gwydion and Gilfaethwy’s animal children (and knows it). while some aspects of Lewis’s reading of the Fourth Branch are more psychoanalytic than I’m normally interested in, I still found it really compelling — all the more so in the context of a book that says, what if the Fourth Branch is both fully mythical and fully literal simultaneously? (would that be fucked up, or what?)
I also want to note that while this is perhaps not groundbreaking science fiction (though it’s somewhat formally experimental) it’s nonetheless solid science fiction; it’s just hard to talk about the direction it goes without giving spoilers. I’m always wary of Poets writing novels, but Lewis clearly has a strong grasp of both prose fiction (though there’s certainly a poetic sensibility at work here) and of science fiction generally and the specific intervention she wants to make in the genre, as well as in the reception of the Fourth Branch.
beyond a certain tendency to fall back on older ideas about Mythology — mitigated by the fact that some of this is coming from Campion and may be just his own biases — my biggest hesitation here is that in spite of the free movement between genders, there remains a certain amount of essentialism here. again, this is partly mitigated by coming primarily from Campion, so I think we should take his insistence that he needs Nona to make sure he doesn’t miss any “female” narrative cues when he’s embodying Aranrhod as, at least in part, an intentional indication that patriarchy is still with them in the early 23rd century. still, though, there were times when I found myself having to wonder to what extent the characters’ ideas about gender were intentional and to what extent Lewis was carrying over certain essentialisms without meaning to. this was brought to the foreground especially by Campion and Nona moving between characters of different genders.
in spite of this, though, I really enjoyed and would recommend this book. the dialogic structure is fast-paced and engaging, the interpretation of the Fourth Branch is really cool, the characters are compelling, the setting — both the pseudomedieval VR world and the science fictional future — is well-executed. good stuff.
moods: dark, horny, mysterious, reflective