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| Beautiful, retro cover |
The Flame Alphabet
has one of the most impressive openings I’ve read in a new work of literary fiction
for quite some time. Ben Marcus’s novel begins with a father and mother fleeing
their home because their teenage daughter has become toxic to them.
Specifically it is the girl’s language which makes them both sick. And it’s not just her. In this
dystopian nightmare, all adults are being made sick, and fatally so, by language, written and spoken. Children
are mysteriously immune. It made me shudder.
As the pages crept by, however, I had my yes, but moment. Well, several. Toxic
language? What were we getting here? Is this a genuinely interesting
alternative future? Or middle aged angst about teenage slang, text speak and
the verbiage of Fox News pundits? Of all the problems facing humankind today, toxic language sounds a
bit too first world, a bit too hypothetical.
Who is Ben Marcus anyway? As the chair of creative writing
at Columbia University he has become a champion of the experimental – and
a critic of the novelist Jonathan Franzen for suggesting that literature should
be fun and accessible.
Marcus’ writing can be dense and occasionally
difficult, but it is nevertheless interspersed with some genuinely inspired
moments.
There are echoes of Orwell’s 1984. The narrator, Sam, is
in the Winston Smith role, tormented by the figure of LeBov, a pseudo-scientist
version of Orwell’s fascist O’Brien, eager to take advantage of the new reality.
But while the elements are there for a challenging yet satisfying novel I found
Marcus’s vision quickly became too deeply idiosyncratic and plain odd.
I get it that this isn’t strictly sci-fi, more a
thought experiment, but felt the book is undermined by the lack of anything
resembling scientific fact, or, at times, coherent logic.* This is an abridged version of my books column, in June 18 edition of The Big Issue
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