1989
Awards: Campbell, Clarke
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
I’ll grant that the premise and some of the scientific and setting details are great potential sci-fi fodder. But actually reading the novel is like being dragged along on someone else’s disorganized, depressing, maudlin trip that you desperately want to sober up from.
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The Child Garden starts out well. It is set in a London of the relatively near future. The world lives under a single Marxist-Leninist regime governed by an amorphous body of pure thought called the Consensus. Citizens are “Read” by the Consensus at an early age, and their “Reading” determines where they will live and what their profession will be.
A revolutionary war in the recent past destroyed all electricity, most of the metal, and much of the other advanced technology on Earth. People use candles for light, walk as their main mode of transportation, and use couriers to deliver messages.
The only advanced technology society has left is biotechnology—but that is extremely advanced. Consensus-approved scientists have developed viruses that have not only cured all diseases, but are also used for assimilation and education: the viruses “infect” people with everything they need to know. Nobody needs to learn anything on their own anymore; they now learn everything—history, science, art, specific job skills, morality, happiness—through viruses.
As it turns out, one of the unfortunate side effects of curing all disease—specifically, cancer—is that it destroys something in the human body that had enabled people to live a long time. Now, people only live to be about 30 or 35 at the most. Children, with their brains pumped up by teaching viruses, start acting like adults and working at jobs when they are only 5 or 6, and don’t ever really have a childhood.
The book’s main character, Milena Shibush, is a Czech immigrant who lost her parents very young. She is also somehow physically unable to be Read. Her cells rebel against the viruses, taking them apart before they can teach her what she is supposed to learn. She lives in fear that she’ll be discovered to be Unread by the Consensus. And she is constantly made to feel stupid by smaller children who know more than her, because of their viruses.
The other disadvantage that Milena has is that she is a lesbian, which is not looked on kindly in this book’s society. If the viruses had worked, her lesbian orientation would have been programmed out of her, but of course it was not. So she lives in fear of being found out for that reason, too.
Milena’s Consensus-assigned job is in the theatre. Searching in a warehouse for a costume, she runs into a “polar bear:” a genetically modified woman who is large, furry, and engineered for cold, dangerous jobs in the Antarctic. She and the polar bear, whose name is Rolfa and who is also Unread, fall in love. Rolfa, as it turns out, is a beautiful singer and a brilliant composer. She has secretly set many famous manuscripts to music, including Dante’s Divine Comedy. But no one will listen to them or put them on, because they were composed by a genetically-modified polar bear who hasn’t been Read and whose artistic standards therefore don’t conform to those of the Consensus.
So far, so good, Child Garden. But the book becomes increasingly random and goes rapidly downhill from here on (with, unfortunately, about 250 pages still left to go). So, to try to make an agonizingly long remainder of a story short:
Rolfa runs away from her family. Her angry father sends a mind-reading “Snide” investigator after her to find her and Milena. Realizing there is no way for Rolfa to avoid being dragged back to Antarctica with her family, they strike a deal: the Consensus will be allowed to Read Rolfa, as long as they agree to put on Rolfa’s Divine Comedy. The Consensus agrees, and, to boot, will present the Comedy via hologram in the sky all over the world, so the entire planet can see it.
However, the Reading “cures” Rolfa so she is no longer in love with Milena. Rolfa runs away, leaving Milena heartbroken.
The rest of the book descends into a herky-jerky set of disconnected and seemingly pointless remembrances, flashbacks, and flash-forwards while Milena doggedly goes on preparing to force her production of the Divine Comedy on the entire world, and then after she gets cancer and doggedly prepares to die (which is drawn out over about the last 100 or so interminable pages).
Milena variously relives: her entanglement with a power-hungry rival holographer who makes her life a living hell for a while; glimpses of her very young childhood with her real mother and father; her friendship with an orphanage caretaker that is cut short simultaneously by a hurricane and the discovery of her lesbian nature; and her unique but caring relationship with the male astronaut who transports her into the upper atmosphere to project the Comedy’s world-wide holographic images and then later carries their baby.
In the end, the cancer kills Milena, but in this she feels victorious: she has brought back cancer so that people can live long, healthy lives, and children can be children again.
It is all told in a disconnected, free-associational, hazy style, which I think is meant to make us feel like we are in the same dream state as Milena. But it felt instead like a collection of unrelated, haphazard, groundless micro-stories. For the most part, all of the stories have uninteresting plots, dippy characters with little or no character development, little apparent connection to or convergence with the other stories, and no real resolution or meaning in themselves.
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As I said, this book definitely had potential. It had the elements of a groundbreaking science fiction novel, with its complex, Marxist-Leninist, Consensus-run dystopia and its highly advanced biotechnology.
One of my favorite details was that to solve the post-war food crisis, people had been genetically engineered to be able to use rhodopsin in their bodies to photosynthesize food—which made their skin purple. The more they sat in the sun to eat, the more purple they got. I also liked that Ryman developed a way for men to carry babies to term. And viruses as tools of education and assimilation always add a nicely sinister spice.
So it’s sad that the novel ended up being such a loose series of seemingly aimless, ill-defined flashbacks with such low dramatic tension. And, as the story went on, it became more and more preoccupied with death, which I found depressing and hard to read. As she was dying, Milena found solace in the biological evolution of the human race—including a set of people who eventually begin transforming into plants, and one boy who seriously thinks he’s a dog. I think these were supposed to make me feel as much at one with the universe as Milena did, but they only made me feel hopelessness and disconnection.
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Before reading this book, I’d just read the first three books of Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series—all three of which are filled with Zelazny’s characteristic surrealistic, mind-bending imagery. The Child Garden made me wonder how one author can write such trippy scenes and also make them so vivid and riveting, while another can try to do the same thing but it ends up vague, scattershot and hard to follow.
Certainly part of it is that Zelazny is simply one of the best at what he does, and it’s hard for others to match him. I think part of it is also because, in the end, The Child Garden tells a prophet’s story, about a central character saving the world through self-sacrifice and passive martyrdom. While Zelazny’s Chronicles tell a hero’s story, about a central character saving the world through direct action and fighting bad guys and overcoming tough odds. And I have to admit I find the heroes far more intrinsically entertaining.
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