New Zealand Listener - 09.07,2019

SEPTEMBER 7 2019 LISTENER 51

red car that’s torn into a green car, leaving

a door sprayed with blood. By the end, the

girl understands that you’re judged and

sentenced wherever you go and accepts

that the cicadas don’t sing only for her.

That metaphor typifies a style of shift-

ing syntax, pressing present tense and

punchy short sections and meticulous

naming seamed with unsettling images.

A telephone “is ringing sadly behind the

door of a house”; the fat lady “has put so

much meat on herself, it has gone hard”.

Just occasionally, specifics slow the

story. Do we need 10 lines on how the

shop girl cuts meat

sandwiches? But

Tiffany’s tale is a

remarkable harmony

of opposites: dark and

mordantly funny, quo-

tidian and rhapsodic. l

EXPLODED VIEW, by

Carrie Tiffany (Text

Publishing, $35)

for reshaping eternity.

Dodge’s postmortem odyssey isn’t the

epic conflict Fall has to offer. Bitworld

might be humanity’s best assurance of

eternal life, but it’s also a commercial ven-

ture, the result of haphazard legal wording

and an ethically dubious computer-sci-

ence experiment, and subject to familiar

tech-giant imperatives: scalability, cost to

serve, and the need to keep the overall

package attractive to new customers.

Like today’s social-media magnates, Bit-

world’s nominal guardians can barely keep

up with the momentum of what they’ve

created, occasionally reaching in to stir

things up and not realising the degree

to which it’s begun to reach back and

reshape the world on which it was based.

S

tephenson riffs freely on Paradise Lost,

Dante’s Inferno and any number of

religious and philosophical systems,

all played off against futurist thinking on

the scope of human (and post-human)

possibilities and the free-wheeling irony of

gaming and digital culture.

The genius here isn’t so much the wild

brew of ingredients as the way Stephenson

delivers them with apparently effortless

skill, across multiple levels of storytelling

and numerous shifts in time, perspective

and setting. Fall’s characters and events

share some of the anarchic spirit common

to cyberpunk works, a genre Stephen-

son largely defined, but its borrowings

and reference points aren’t cynical or

one-dimensional and there’s a genuine

emotional core with a surprising punch.

In lesser hands, Fall might have grown

into a cautionary tale about the presump-

tion of wanting to live forever. Nothing

here is close to being that clear-cut or

obvious, but what comes through is a note

of qualified, cautious optimism, emerging

from the chaos of technology, culture and

human behaviour nudging each other in

unexpected directions.

At the same time, Fall leaves two rather

lovely questions in its wake that bridge

futurist ideas about technical possibility

with ancient hopes and fears about eternal

life: in some future existence, who would

we still be, and what would we still mean

to each other?

It may take Stephenson nearly 900

pages to leave us pondering those

thoughts, but the

epic scale of Fall and

its cyberspace here-

after is more than

worth the price of

admission. l

FALL, OR, DODGE

IN HELL, by Neal

Stephenson (Harper-

Collins, $36.99)

A left turn

at Hanging

Rock

Debut novelist nails

the gulf between

what kids know

and adults see.

by TINA SHAW

T

here are echoes of Picnic at Hanging

Rock in any story about girls going

missing in Australian bushland. In

her debut novel, Felicity McLean, a jour-

nalist and ghostwriter, takes the trope and

gives it a new twist.

It’s set in Aussie suburbia during

the scorching summer of 1992, where

11-year-old Tikka Molloy, the novel’s

precocious narrator, is working on her

blackly hilarious skit (“A dingo’s got my

baby!”) for a school concert. She and

sister Laura are mates with the three Van

Apfel girls – Ruth, Cordelia and Hannah,

ages seven, 13 and 14 – who live in the

same cul-de-sac. On the night of the con-

cert, the three sisters disappear.

The novel opens 20 years later, and

Tikka is still “seeing” Cordelia on the

street, still dreaming about the girls.

When she goes home to visit Laura, who

is getting chemotherapy, it’s obvious that

the events of that summer have defined

Tikka’s life. McLean really nails that

yawning abyss between what kids know

and what parents see. Should Tikka and

Laura have spoken up back then? Told

the police what they knew? Laura swore

Tikka to silence, and both of them have

had to live with that choice.

It gives nothing away to say Ruth

comes back. Yet it’s not clear what really

happened to the girls – not that it matters.

Funny and haunt-

ing in turn, this is a

coming-of-age story

with a strong sense of

before and after. l

THE VAN APFEL GIRLS

ARE GONE, by Felicity

McLean (Fourth Estate,

$35)

Carrie Tiffany:

challengingly gifted.

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