What’s the difference between a book being classified as literary and a book classified as genre? What makes me consider Never Let Me Go, for example, literary while I place A Calculated Life firmly in the sci-fi/dystopia genre pile? Of course, a slight variation of this question is central to both novels: what makes one human versus some sort of copy? What is real versus what is cloned (although A Calculated Life is quite clear that Jayna is not a clone, she is a simulant)?
So why is this a genre book, other than the publisher telling me it is? There are ellipses everywhere. There is over-explaining of day-to-day minutiae that hardly needs to be explained, i.e. take this musing on dreams:
…a dream that served, as ever to purge, shuffle, and juxtapose the day’s events, before spewing crazed stories that, surely, she could never have imagined in waking hours.
Yes, you mean like a dream, that thing that happens to the majority of the population when they are asleep? Explanation not necessary. And the simulants, when they are speaking to each other, talk like stilted robots, which are kind of what they are, but I don’t want to read stilted robot talk. There is only one instance where I am interested in stilted robot talk and that involves Flight of the Conchords, not as dialogue in a book.
But then, there are also all the little touches that make me feel happy. Jayna works in a building named after Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (when Tesfa inevitably has to do that grade school project on a scientist, I’ve told her she has the choice of Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper). Jayna has an analytic brain, great at math (well, statistics, but we’ll pretend math), and is often mystified by people around her, feeling left out and alone – just like me! And the book has an idea for the greatest children’s invention ever: a marker that changes colour when shaken.
But (another but) the book doesn’t have enough emotion in it. I read it and kept thinking how much more heartrending the clones struggle in Never Let Me Go was compared with the simulants’ struggle here. But that’s the struggle, almost the purpose of Charnock’s book (both books actually): how to make humans care about almost or quasi humans? Interestingly, the bionics (humans with some sort of robotic or computer implant; it isn’t explained in detail) seem more distanced from the simulants than the organics (unmodified humans that aren’t simulants). Charnock tries to explain this by invoking class and the juxtaposition of the airy suburban life of the bionics versus the hard-scraggle tower-block life of the organics, but then it’s dropped without any in depth examination. That’s another mark against A Calculated Life: Jayna examines. Most of the book is observation, and when she does act, especially near the end, it doesn’t work out necessarily the way she wants – although, having written that, now I’m thinking that maybe it’s a sort of parallel to 1984 when Winston is finally reprogrammed. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it.
I don’t read much sci-fi, so it’s nice when I read one that annoys me here and there rather than making me want to find the author and strangle him (I’ll use him here because the majority of sci-fi authors I feel like strangling are men). There will likely be sequels to this book. This book was a quick read, and I’m guessing the sequels will be as well. There’s about a 45% chance I’ll read the sequels, or at least, synopses of them to see what happens next. But I just can’t help feeling how much stronger this book was if it was a first-person narrative, like the Sonmi chapters in Cloud Atlas. That reminds me that once I tried to write a story from the point-of-view of a clone/replicant/something like that. Maybe I should dig that story up and have a go at it so I get an idea of hard it is really is to do what Charnock tried to do here.
A Calculated Life by Anne Charnock went on sale September 24th, 2013.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
