New Zealander Anna Smaill’s debut novel is an interesting choice for the Man Booker longlist. It crosses at least one, and I suspect, two, general Booker taboos – it’s genre fiction, and it also reads to me like a YA book. I’m not sure if that was Smaill’s intention, but I think it’s a book that could be read and enjoyed by good readers from 12 or so upwards, which is certainly not the case for most longlistees in the Booker over time. It’s not just the language – it’s that this is a book that mixes danger, personal agency, ideas, and hope, without a trace of the realist grimness that seems mandatory in serious literary fiction.
Being a debut, a dystopia / fantasy, and possibly a YA book is going to be three strikes against The Chimes when it comes time to pick a winner. The biggest strike of all, though, is likely to be its readability and engagement – like last year’s wonderful We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, I think The Chimes will fall over on the “not literary enough” hurdle when it comes to actually giving out the gong. This is in many ways a shame, because The Chimes is a skilful, gripping, and very enjoyable book, and deserves to be read widely.
The central device of The Chimes is the premise of memory erasure via sound. At some unspecified point in the recent past, a group of purists has managed to build a weapon which relies on soundwaves to effectively rewire human brains, wiping out existing narrative memory and the capacity to lay down new memories. Sounding twice daily, just after dawn and at sunset, the weapon, known as the Carillon, replaces individuation with an emoted group memory – the Onestory at Matins (in the morning), Chimes at Vespers (in the evening). The melody speaks to the people of perfection, abnegation, purity, beauty, peace; as Simon, the narrator protagonist says, “there is no space for any other thought.”
In this world – or, rather, in England, where the action takes place – people struggle to remember even their own names without their precious memorybags, which are filled with objects of personal significance. With the loss of cumulative memory, the ability to read is also gone, and written words are just “code”, meaningless scribble. In this society, having an occupation is vitally important, not just for physical survival, but because the Carillon does not affect “body-memory” (which Smaill never fully explains, but seems to be a cross between muscle memory and unconscious skill). Bakers emerge, dazed, from Matins, with no memory of their families, but hands that know how to bake bread.
The relative helplessness that this daily brainwipe instils into almost everyone leads to a society pretty comprehensively under the thumb of the ruling elite. Located in Cambridge, these musical aristocrats are themselves shielded from the wipes, and appear, as usual in these stories, to be composed of a mixture of those who genuinely believe that they are doing the commoners a favour, and those who love power and supremacy for its own sake.
From this relatively simple premise, Smaill builds a remarkably integrated and powerful dystopia.
As a world-building exercise, it’s an interesting mix of the standard dystopia playbook and some very original ideas. She employs some of the stock-standard tools from Dystopia Toolbox 101 – technology has been smashed, and an artisanal society based on apprenticeships and trades has replaced it; words are slightly twisted and countrified to suggest language devolution (“palladium” becoming “the Pale Lady”, “mettle” for “metal”); there is a ruling elite who believe in their goals and that any harm done to everyday people is justified by the outcome.
The Carillon also makes people sick – another tried and true device – although Smaill is annoyingly vague on the mechanism for this. At various points she seems to suggest that it is a physical response to the palladium that powers the weapon, or perhaps a brain disease induced by the assault of sound waves, or maybe a psychiatric illness induced by the loss of personality and memory. Not everyone gets sick, and symptoms are only cursorily described; this is one area where Smaill could have done much more to expand the premise, especially had she plumped for the most interesting of the possibilities – that humans, deprived of their memories, are less than whole, and therefore less than themselves.
Most familiar of all, the whole rotten structure can only be brought down by a raggle-taggle bunch of outsiders with special skills of which they aren’t fully aware. Her protagonist, Simon, is Young Hapless Hero Subtype Parental Loss as Driver, a character that will feel warmly familiar to readers of dystopias, or indeed Quest / Journey based fantasies. (The Chimes has a strong Quest segment as well, just to round out the set of familiar plot arcs).
However, for all that she’s using some well-worn tropes, Smaill achieves an affect that is both novel and compelling. Her use of music / sound as the anchor in the plot, and her co-opting of the language and rhythms of pre-modern Catholicism, allows her to play with ideas about what a society might look like if, rather than narrativity, memory and speech, melody and sound were the lingua franca and the frame within which the world is understood. (I particularly liked her exploration of the notion of “blasphony” in this context). Simon’s instinctive grasp of both the power of the song, and the danger of it, is beautifully explored. Simon has inherited from his mother an unusual ability to retain some memory in spite of the twice-daily assault of the Carillon, and Smaill makes him her vehicle for expanding on some interesting ideas about a society in thrall to a song.
One of the greatest successes of the book is in the moving relationship that Smaill builds between Simon and Lucien. Lucien is the boss of a pack of runners, teenagers who live on the outskirts of society, making their living by retrieving the thousands of scattered fragments of palladium buried in tunnels under London for sale to the elites. The palladium, it is said, was scattered in the Allbreaking, the precipitating attack which led to the current state. (Unsurprisingly, the weapon turns out to have been the Carillon all along, making the ruling elite not the saviours of the world but the destroyers of it. Not shocking, in the context of a dystopia).
Lucien is blind, which, in a society obsessed with sound, is rather a matter for pride than despair. His leadership of the pack seems at first strange, until his own unusual abilities are uncovered. Naturally, he has a vital role to play in the denouement.
All that, though, is standard fare; what’s new here is the delicate, affecting and lovely bond that Smaill builds between Simon and Lucien. Their love for each other illuminates the latter part of the book and lifts it out of what was teetering on the edge of becoming a paint-by-numbers Quest story. It’s that relationship that provides some depth and pathos to a second half that feels otherwise a little rushed, as if Smaill was charging forth to her conclusion in a tearing hurry and tying up loose ends precipitately on the way.
Overall, this is a clever, accessible, and highly engaging book. Smaill will be one to watch as her pacing skills develop and deepen in future works.