Dichotomous flow of flawed, fatalistic protagonist (4/5)
John Brunner does spaceships. John
Brunner also does terraforming and alien sociology. Oh, by the way, John
Brunner does vivid future history, generation ships, and psychology, too. Yea, he
is sort of my hero when it comes to science fiction authors. Quicksand is my twenty-third Brunner book and once again, Brunner has showed me
that the he has no limits; he is always reinventing himself, always breathing
new life into old material, and always surprising me (90% of the time that is
good, but he’s not perfect). Quicksand has psychological elements also
found in The Whole Man (1964), but I think Brunner has done his homework
and penned an intriguing novel, not merely for its pop psychology meanderings,
but for its singular focus on the protagonist—Brunner turns the table on the
observant protagonist by making him the whipping boy of his own regretful
choices from the past and present.
Rear cover synopsis:
“She appeared in our world
naked, defenseless, unable to say a word anyone could understand.
Her origin was at first simply
a puzzle, then a scientific enigma, and finally a series of terrifying surmises
that her most fascinated investigator was afraid to probe.
But probe he must, for somehow
he know that this strange girl was a key to the kind of information science had
sought for centuries. But the more he uncovered from the depths of her mind,
the deeper became the quicksand into which his own was sinking.”
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Paul Fidler is a psychiatric evaluator
at a small asylum in England; his position in its internal rakings is
blossoming, yet his depression mulls even his highest achievements. The dehumanizing
bickering that his wife initiates mars their childless marriage; a perpetual
air of hostility hangs over their home life yet even after she leaves him, the
proceeding divorce adds another layer of failure onto Paul’s strata of
depression. Objectively, Paul evaluates himself with a professional demeanor: “Humanity’s
in the mind, in the tangle of thoughts spun by the brain, and once that’s gone
what remains is human only in outward shape” (24).
Paul knows about the fragility
of the human mind because he has had a breakdown once before and had been
institutionalized. Though the specific reason for his breakdown is unnoted,
Paul seems to struggle with his alter ego, a persona which manifests
itself when his attention is turned away from his clinical observations.
Reflective of his dehumanizing
home life, Paul is a humanistic healer at the asylum where he shuns the
clinical detachment of “treating a patient as a thing instead of a person”
(38). When one case of a young naked and feral woman reaches him, he situates
himself at the mercy of her alluring mystery yet grudgingly resists her
physical comfort. The woman, nicknamed Urchin, doesn’t speak English and even
the professional examination of her written and spoken language is
indecipherable. Her origins are unknown but she continually points to England
on the map as her home. Her facial characteristics and ability to fight are
indicators of a foreign origin, but no other signs point to a specific
location.
His interest in the case causes
staff and patients to gossip about his relationship with Urchin, one on the boundary
of professional and personal. His with marriage gone and his friendships
stagnant, only Urchin remained as his source of inspiration, as his impetus to
change his future which seems to be spiraling out of control. With this fantasy
comes his ideas of divergent histories, of parallel lives of different versions
of himself where things are worse than they seem to be: “he had had that
curious notion about another, somehow more real, version of Paul Fidler
diverging from a moment of crisis down another and more disastrous life-line,
so that what was to the alter ego real experience provoked these
recurrent vivid imagination” (96-97).
Through her months in the
asylum, her only place of shelter and learning, Urchin slowly develops her
language abilities yet only finds comfort in Paul’s kind words and professional
actions. With all her progress, she still exhibits seemingly irrational fears
and sulking moments of personal pain. But through the technique of hypnotism
come a few of Urchin’s revelations which meet Paul’s objective tact with
indifference and disbelief. Paul is steeped in misery, feeling alone at work,
at home, and alone beside himself—the history spun by Urchin is rich,
captivating, and appeals to Paul’s idea of utopia. The more he understands
about her unlikely past, the more Paul succumbs to the fantasy: “he might sink
without trace in the quicksand of his troubles” (163). This is when Paul’s alter
ego begins to seep through and immerse his daily life, his routine.
However, Paul maintains his humanistic
healing even though his misery is rotting him from the inside out. He’s
sympathetic with Urchin’s plight and understands her view as “the whole world as
a prison” (132). Giving into an impulse to allow her a few extra freedoms away
from the ward, Paul sets himself up to cut off from the past and make do with
his present situation. He gives in to the romanticism of Urchin’s history
realizing that she holds the key to his happiness… all this through his
subjective rationalization.
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Quicksand is written through Paul’s perspective, which
may lend credence my “unreliable narrator” suspicions about the novel. There
are many passages which the reader glimpses the internal thoughts of Paul, from
his cold observations to his even more frigid self-pity. There is no outside
reference to Paul’s world so the reader must rely solely on what is read to
understand how Paul grapples with his downward-spiraling life. This is
interesting for one reason and one reason only: it allows the reader to
dichotomously read the novel with two trains of thought.
(1) The first train of thought regards
Paul’s professional nature. He listens to Urchin but intrinsically disbelieves her
and aims to benefit the appealing girl by disallowing her to speak of her
fantastic history when others are around. If he can detach himself from his
previous psychosis and remain objective in his investigation of Urchin’s
history, then his ultimate fate lays in the realm of simply fatalism. He quits
because he sees it as his only option.
(2) The second line of reason
considers his past breakdown playing with his grasp on reality. Paul creates
his utopia through the words of Urchin, he believes that a utopia exists and
that she is able to lead him back to it. His alter ego manifests itself in
the persona of his, possibly, imaginary friend Mirza, who is a noted womanizer.
When his divorce is sure, his friendship with Mirza also begins to fail When
Paul gets his chance to act through his once-reigned alter ego, his professional
world ends and he chases the fantasy that subjectively exists.
There is much more to Urchin’s
history than I am mentioning in this review. I think the less you know the
better. Her history, as referred to above, is rich and utopian, which is either
her reality or Paul’s imagination. In the closing pages of the novel, Paul once
again confronts this reality/imagination and attempts to analyze it to its
extremes. It may seem like another one of Brunner’s poor abrupt endings but Paul
tries to subjectively rationalize Urchin’s history/his imagination. While dichotomously
assuming both truths of Paul predicament, the conclusion is pure fatalism for
either thread the reader follows.
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The conclusion is a capstone of
uneasiness; it is tragic for both Paul and Urchin whose relationship was based
on an inaccessible utopia. It is difficult to establish who is more of a victim—Urchin,
the naïve little woman from another time or place, or the flawed doctor who simply
seeks solace after a series of unfortunate events. Like mutually assured
destruction, the proximity of Paul and Urchin can only end in tears. This is
Brunner’s most devastating novel and one that the reader must engage, which
probably accounts for its devastating effect.
