tl;dr

A strange, surprising, provocative alternate history.

opening remarks

Goodreads told me that Simon Ings’ latest, The Smoke, wasn’t out until April.  When I saw a mate had purchased the novel at his local bookstore, I knew something was amiss.  That explains why I haven’t read the book until now because I’m sure you were all wondering.

I had a love-hate relationship with Ings’ last novel Wolves, but even when it annoyed me the book was never anything but interesting.  He’s the sort of author that likes to experiment, unwilling to make things easy for the reader.  This makes picking up a new book an exciting proposition.

knee-jerk observations

What I’ve learnt so far: The United States was destroyed in a fiery conflagration.  Spaceships are built in the factories of Yorkshire.  Alexander Gurwitsch’s discovery of the biophotonic ray has fundamentally changed civilisation in ways that have yet to be explained but might have something to do with the mysterious, technologically advanced Bund:

When Ings referred to the Bund earlier in the novel, I did immediately think of Yiddish speaking Marxists, though I dismissed the thought just as quickly.  I assumed he’d come across the term, like the sound of it, then borrowed it for his high-tech society.  I should have had more faith.

I’m still not a hundred percent sure what a chickie is.  I do know they are the product of Gurwitsch rays applied to the dead and dying during World War 1 in an attempt to revive and resurrect.  We got the chickies instead:

This is the second novel* I’ve read in the last month that abruptly shifts between second and first person.  Could this be a new trend?  On a side note, I’ve become so accustomed to the second person as a stylistic choice that I didn’t, at first, notice the change in perspective.

*The other book was Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Only Story.

This first-person character would appear to be the chickie who was led into the bar on a leash.  They happen to be a stripper, or at least that’s what they’ve been ordered to do for the clientele.  While they might be treated like animals, chickies are self-aware, intelligent.

And another epiphany; there’s something about chickies, the way they smell, that turns men on.

In Ings’ alternate history there are no Nazis, no Hitler, no Holocaust.  In their place, a group of Jewish Marxists have become the ubermensch.  It’s quite provocative:

Also fantastic is the development of a TV show called DARE that, when described, sounds suspiciously like Gerry Anderson’s UFO, including the skimpy outfits and moon bases.  The excerpt below is between Stuart and his influential Aunty discussing DARE:

And then there’s Fel, Stuart’s Bundist girlfriend, the daughter of one of the mover and shakers in the movement.  Brought up within the Bund community she has a unique perspective on the world, one that sets her apart from us ordinary folk.

Now that is fascinating; I had wondered whether the Bund still considered themselves Jews.  There’s something chilling in Stuart’s reference to the word Jew as the “old, unhappy name”.  Did the Bund extinguish Orthodox Jewry?  Or did they merely make it redundant?

Body swapping and immortality are two mainstays of science fiction.  Ings take on the subject – Chernoy’s process – is both surreal and troubling.  Essentially he manufactures babies which he then implants with the memories of the recently deceased. Stuart’s mother, who was dying of cancer, has gone through this bizarre process:

Another suggestion that Judaism, as I recognise it, has become a thing of the past:

Now we know what happened to Hitler:

Ings is the sort of author who will introduce a walking, talking “grey plastic miniature rendition” of Stuart’s dead brother Jim because he thinks his novel about Yiddish socialists, Yorkshire spaceships, and mad scientists is not batshit crazy enough.

The Gist Of It

In The Smoke, Simon Ings takes familiar science fiction ingredients – alternate history, immortality, genetic manipulation/mutation, space exploration and body swapping – and bakes a magnificent, albeit utterly insane, cake.  If you were pitching this novel to a Hollywood executive… well you wouldn’t… but if you were you’d say it’s set in an alternate history where the Second World War never happened, and Yiddish socialists took over the world.  That’s without mentioning the truly weird stuff, a toss-up between the creation of a new species from dead first World War soldiers or a piss-take of Gerry Anderson’s UFO.

The remarkable thing is all these elements come together.  Yes, the chickies (the name for the mutant species) are a little underdeveloped, I felt there was more to their story, but overall it’s astonishingly coherent.  It’s because each of these elements is in service of telling a story about the wonders, the drawbacks and the existential crisis of post-humanism.  Rather than apply a utopian gloss where humanity transcends to the next stage of evolution, Ings argues that, as is often the case with progress, good people will be left behind, except this time it’s all of us, or at least those of us who aren’t Bund.  This is very much a novel about class, about the haves and have-nots, about the imposition of a new paradigm on a world that wasn’t expecting it.

There’s also something confronting about the substitution of Nazis with ubermensch Jews.  Yes, the Bund is very different to the rabbinical Judaism they’ve repudiated, they don’t resemble me in any way shape or form and yet even in Ings counterfactual, the Bund face garden variety anti-semitism.  No matter how much they distance themselves, no matter that the word Jew is no longer spoken, the Bund are identified as Jews by those who loathe them (which appears to be many people).  And given how far the Bund will go to impose their vision of the future, you could certainly read the novel as saying that we would have been better off with the Holocaust, unless, that is, you see the Bund’s version of post-humanism as something to strive for.  (Not that it’s an either-or equation, but the novel does lend itself to this sort of comparison).  I did joke (to myself) that The Smoke might, be the most anti-semitic book ever written.  It certainly a provocative book that’s worthy of a much deeper analysis then I provide here.  Again, Ings has left me perplexed, excited, horrified and thoughtful.