Review:
The Past is Red, by Catherynne M. Valente
| Publisher: |
Tordotcom |
| Copyright: |
2021 |
| ISBN: |
1-250-30112-2 |
| Format: |
Kindle |
| Pages: |
151 |
Tetley is nineteen and is the most hated person in Garbagetown. That's
kind of horrible, but life is otherwise great. As she puts it:
I'm awfully lucky when you think about it. Garbagetown is the most
wonderful place anybody has ever lived in the history of the world,
even if you count the Pyramids and New York City and Camelot. I have
Grape Crush and Big Bargains and my hibiscus flower, and I can fish
like I've got bait for a heart so I hardly ever go hungry, and once I
found a ruby ring and a New Mexico license plate inside a
bluefin tuna. Everyone says they only hate me because I annihilated
hope and butchered our future, but I know better, and anyway, it's a
lie. Some people are just born to be despised. The Loathing of
Tetley began small and grew bigger and bigger, like the Thames, until
it swallowed me whole.
Garbagetown is a giant floating pile of garbage in the middle of the
ocean, and it is, so far as anyone knows, the only "land" left in the
world. Global warming has flooded everything until the remaining Fuckwits
(as their future descendants call everyone who was alive at the time) took
to the Misery Boats and searched hopelessly for land. Eventually they
realized they could live on top of the now-massive Pacific Garbage Patch
and began the Great Sorting, which is fifty years into Tetley's past. All
of the types of garbage were moved into their own areas, allowing small
micronations of scavengers to form and giving each area its own character.
Candle Hole is the most beautiful place in Garbagetown, which is the
most beautiful place in the world. All of the stubs of candles the
Fuckwits threw out piled up into hills and mountains and caverns and
dells, votive candles and taper candles and tea lights and birthday
candles and big fat colorful pillar candles, stacked and somewhat
melted into a great crumbling gorgeous warren of wicks and wax. All
the houses are cozy little honeycombs melted into hillside, with
smooth round windows and low golden ceilings. At night, from far
away, Candle Hole looks like a firefly palace. When the wind blows,
it smells like cinnamon, and freesia, and cranberries, and lavender,
and Fresh Linen Scent, and New Car Smell.
Two things should be obvious from this introduction. First, do not read
this book looking for an accurate, technical projection of our
environmental future. Or, for that matter, physical realism of any kind.
That's not the book that Valente is writing and you'll just frustrate
yourself. This is science fiction as concretized metaphor rather than
prediction or scientific exploration. We Fuckwits have drowned the world
with our greed and left our descendants living in piles of our garbage;
you have to suspend disbelief and go with the premise.
The second thing is that either you will like Tetley's storytelling style
or you will not like this book. I find Valente very hit-and-miss, but
this time it worked for me. The language is a bit less over-the-top than
Space Opera, and it fits Tetley's
insistent, aggressive optimism so well that it carries much of the weight
of characterization. Mileage will definitely vary; this is probably a
love-it-or-hate-it book.
The Past is Red is divided into two parts. The first part is the
short story "The Future is Blue," previously published in
Clarkesworld
and in Valente's short story collection of the same name. It tells the
story of Tetley's early life, how she got her name, and how she became the
most hated person in Garbagetown. The second part is much longer and
features an older, quieter, more thoughtful, and somewhat more cynical
Tetley, more life philosophy, and a bit of more-traditional puzzle science
fiction. It lacks some of the bubbly energy of "The Future is Blue" but
also features less violence and abuse. The overall work is a long novella
or very short novel.
This book has a lot of feelings about the environment, capitalism, greed,
and the desire to let other people solve your problems for you, and it is
not subtle about any of them. It's satisfying in the way that a good rant
is satisfying, not in the way that a coherent political strategy is
satisfying. What saves it from being too didactic or self-righteous is
Tetley, who is happy to record her own emotions and her moments of wonder
and is mostly uninterested in telling other people what to do. The
setting sounds darkly depressing, and there are moments where it feels
that way in the book, but the core of the story and of Tetley's life
philosophy is a type of personal resilience: find the things that make you
happy, put one foot in front of the other, and enjoy the world for what it
is rather than what it could be or what other people want to convince you
it might be. It's also surprisingly funny, particularly if you see the
humor in bizarrely-specific piles of the detritus of civilization.
The one place where I will argue with Valente a bit is that
The Past
is Red thoroughly embraces an environmental philosophy of personal
responsibility. The devastating critique aimed at the Fuckwits is
universal and undistinguished except slightly by class. Tetley and the
other inhabitants of Garbagetown make no distinction between types of
Fuckits or attempt to apportion blame in any way more granular than entire
generations and eras.
This is probably realistic. I understand why, by Tetley's time, no one is
interested in the fine points of history. But the story was written
today, for readers in our time, and this type of responsibility collapse
is intentionally and carefully constructed by the largest polluters and
the people with the most power. Collective and undifferentiated
responsibility means that we're using up our energy fretting about whether
we took two showers, which partly deflects attention from the companies,
industries, and individuals that are directly responsible for the vast
majority of environmental damage. We don't live in a world full of
fuckwits; we live in a world
run by fuckwits and full of the
demoralized, harried, conned, manipulated, overwhelmed, and apathetic,
which is a small but important difference. This book is not the right
venue to explore that difference, but I wish the vitriol had not been
applied quite so indiscriminately.
The rest, though, worked for me. Valente tends to describe things by
piling clauses on top of adjectives, which objectively isn't the best
writing but it fits everything about Tetley's personality so well that I
think this is the book where it works. I found her strange mix of
optimism, practicality, and unbreakable inner ethics oddly endearing.
"The Future is Blue" is available for free on-line, so if in doubt, read
some or all of it, and that should tell you whether you're interested in
the expansion. I'm glad I picked it up.
Content warning for physical and sexual abuse of the first-person
protagonist, mostly in the first section.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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