Review:
A Song for a New Day, by Sarah Pinsker
| Publisher: |
Berkley |
| Copyright: |
September 2019 |
| ISBN: |
1-9848-0259-3 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
372 |
Luce Cannon was touring with a session band when the shutdown began.
First came the hotel evacuation in the middle of the night due to bomb
threats against every hotel in the state. Then came the stadium bombing
just before they were ready to go on stage. Luce and most of the band
performed anyway, with a volunteer crew and a shaken crowd. It was,
people later decided, the last large stage show in the United States
before the congregation laws shut down public gatherings. That was the
end of Luce's expected career, and could have been the end of music, or at
least public music. But Luce was stubborn and needed the music.
Rosemary grew up in the aftermath: living at home with her parents well
away from other people, attending school virtually, and then moving
seamlessly into a virtual job for Superwally, the corporation that ran
essentially everything. A good fix for some last-minute technical
problems with StageHoloLive's ticketing system got her an upgraded VR
hoodie and complimentary tickets to the first virtual concert she'd ever
attended. She found the experience astonishing, prompting her to browse
StageHoloLive job openings and then apply for a technical job and, on a
whim, an artist recruiter role. That's how Rosemary found herself, quite
nerve-wrackingly, traveling out into the unsafe world to look for
underground musicians who could become StageHoloLive acts.
A Song for a New Day was published in 2019 and had a moment of fame
at the beginning of 2020, culminating in the
Nebula
Award for best novel, because it's about lockdowns, isolation, and the
suppression of public performances. There's even a pandemic, although
it's not a respiratory disease (it's some variety of smallpox or chicken
pox) and is only a minor contributing factor to the lockdowns in this
book. The primary impetus is random violence.
Unfortunately, the subsequent two years have not been kind to this novel.
Reading it in 2022, with the experience of the past two years fresh in my
mind, was a frustrating and exasperating experience because the world
setting is completely unbelievable. This is not entirely Pinsker's fault;
this book was published in 2019, was not intended to be about our
pandemic, and therefore could not reasonably predict its consequences.
Still, it required significant effort to extract the premise of the book
from the contradictory evidence of current affairs and salvage the pieces
of it I still enjoyed.
First, Pinsker's characters are the most astonishingly incurious and
docile group of people I've seen in a recent political SF novel. This
extends beyond the protagonists, where it could arguably be part of their
characterization, to encompass the entire world (or at least the United
States; the rest of the world does not appear in this book at all so far
as I can recall). You may be wondering why someone bombs a stadium at the
start of the book. If so, you are alone; this is not something anyone
else sees any reason to be curious about. Why is random violence
spiraling out of control? Is there some coordinated terrorist activity?
Is there some social condition that has gotten markedly worse? Race
riots? Climate crises? Wars? The only answer this book offers is a
completely apathetic shrug. There is a hint at one point that the
government may have theories that they're not communicating, but no one
cares about that either.
That leads to the second bizarre gap: for a book that hinges on political
action, formal political structures are weirdly absent. Near the end of
the book, one random person says that they have been inspired to run for
office, which so far as I can tell is the first mention of elections in
the entire book. The "government" passes congregation laws shutting down
public gatherings and there are no protests, no arguments, no debate, but
also no suppression, no laws against the press or free speech, no attempt
to stop that debate. There's no attempt to build consensus for or against
the laws, and no noticeable political campaigning. That's because there's
no need. So far as one can tell from this story, literally everyone just
shrugs and feels sad and vaguely compliant. Police officers exist and
enforce laws, but changing those laws or defying them in other than tiny
covert ways simply never occurs to anyone. This makes the book read a bit
like a fatuous libertarian parody of a docile populace, but this is so
obviously not the author's intent that it wouldn't be satisfying to read
even as that.
To be clear, this is not something that lasts only a few months in an
emergency when everyone is still scared. This complete political docility
and total incuriosity persists for enough years that Rosemary grows up
within that mindset.
The triggering event was a stadium bombing followed by an escalating
series of random shootings and bombings. (The pandemic in the book only
happens after everything is locked down and, apart from adding to
Rosemary's agoraphobia and making people inconsistently obsessed with
surface cleanliness, plays little role in the novel.) I lived through
9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing in the US, other countries have been
through more protracted and personally dangerous periods of violence (the
Troubles come to mind), and never in human history has any country reacted
to a shock of violence (or, for that matter, disease) like the US does in
this book. At points it felt like one of those SF novels where the author
is telling an apparently normal story and all the characters turn out to
be aliens based on
spiders or
bats.
I finally made sense of this by deciding that the author wasn't using
sudden shocks like terrorism or pandemics as a model, even though that's
what the book postulates. Instead, the model seems to be something
implicitly tolerated and worked around: US school shootings, for instance,
or the (incorrect but widespread) US belief in a rise of child kidnappings
by strangers. The societal reaction here looks less like a public health
or counter-terrorism response and more like suburban attitudes towards
child-raising, where no child is ever left unattended for safety reasons
but we routinely have school shootings no other country has at the same
scale. We have been willing to radically (and ineffectually) alter the
experience of childhood due to fears of external threat, and that's
vaguely and superficially similar to the premise of this novel.
What I think Pinsker still misses (and which the pandemic has made
glaringly obvious) is the immense momentum of normality and the inability
of adults to accept limitations on their own activities for very long.
Even with school shootings, kids go to school in person. We now know that
parts of society essentially collapse if they don't, and political
pressure becomes intolerable. But by using school shootings as the model,
I managed to view Pinsker's setup as an unrealistic but still potentially
interesting SF extrapolation: a thought experiment that ignores
countervailing pressures in order to exaggerate one aspect of society to
an extreme.
This is half of Pinsker's setup. The other half, which made less of a
splash because it didn't have the same accident of timing, is the company
Superwally: essentially "what if Amazon bought Walmart, Google, Facebook,
Netflix, Disney, and Live Nation." This is a more typical SF
extrapolation that left me with a few grumbles about realism, but that
I'll accept as a plot device to talk about commercialization, monopolies,
and surveillance capitalism. But here again, the complete absence of
formal political structures in this book is not credible. Superwally
achieves an all-pervasiveness that in other SF novels results in
corporations taking over the role of national governments, but it still
lobbies the government in much the same way and with about the same
effectiveness as Amazon does in our world. I thought this directly
undermined some parts of the end of the book. I simply did not believe
that Superwally would be as benign and ineffectual as it is shown here.
Those are a lot of complaints. I found reading the first half of this
book to be an utterly miserable experience and only continued reading out
of pure stubbornness and completionism. But the combination of the
above-mentioned perspective shift and Pinsker's character focus did partly
salvage the book for me.
This is not a book about practical political change, even though it makes
gestures in that direction. It's primarily a book about people, music,
and personal connection, and Pinsker's portrayal of individual and
community trust in all its complexity is the one thing the book gets
right. Rosemary's character combines a sort of naive arrogance with
self-justification in a way that I found very off-putting, but the pivot
point of the book is the way in which Luce and her community extends trust
to her anyway, as part of staying true to what they believe.
The problem that I think Pinsker was trying to write about is atomization,
which leads to social fragmentation into small trust networks with vast
gulfs between them. Luce and Rosemary are both characters who are willing
to bridge those gulfs in their own ways. Pinsker does an excellent job
describing the benefits, the hurt, the misunderstandings, the risk, and
the awkward process of building those bridges between communities that
fundamentally do not understand each other. There's something deep here
about the nature of solidarity, and how you need both people like Luce and
people like Rosemary to build strong and effective communities. I've kept
thinking about that part.
It's also helpful for a community to have people who are curious about
cause and effect, and who know how a bill becomes a law.
It's hard to sum up this book, other than to say that I understand why it
won a Nebula but it has deep world-building flaws that have become far
more obvious over the past two years. Pinsker tries hard to capture the
feeling of live music for both the listener and the performer and partly
succeeded even for me, which probably means others will enjoy that part of
the book immensely. The portrayal of the difficult dynamics of personal
trust was the best part of the book for me, but you may have to build
scaffolding and bracing for your world-building disbelief in order to get
there.
On the whole, I think
A Song for a New Day is worth reading, but
maybe not right now. If you do read it now, tell yourself at the start
that this is absolutely not about the pandemic and that everything
political in this book is a hugely simplified straw-man extrapolation, and
hopefully you'll find the experience less frustrating than I found it.
Rating: 6 out of 10
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