Guernica Night
★★★★★
What happens when a society loses all purpose? The invention of the transporter has enabled instantaneous travel around the planet, but as a consequence, the world has become homogeneous. Suicide, known as the Final Trip, is endemic among bored young people ruled over by an authoritarian government.
This is a dense, dark, and unsettling book. Malzberg’s existentialism is on full display as his characters wrestle to extract meaning from their dystopian society. Like Delany’s sensory-heavy prose, he writes very physically, focusing on temperature, texture, moisture and internal state, mixing in dream sequences and depressingly grim sexual encounters, creating an oppressive atmosphere that his characters inhabit.
The novel is packed tightly into just over 100 pages of surreal ambiguity. Historical figures counsel unhinged protagonists, off-kilter prose builds a sense of confusion, and details are glossed over so you never feel able to visualise a scene clearly. Eschewing descriptiveness and commentary, Malzberg focuses inwards, assembling his bleak society piecemeal from its dysfunctional inhabitants and its inept Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
His unlikable and unreliable first-person narrators continually disconcert with their turn of phrase: People ‘feed themselves’ into transporters in a way impossible to visualise, they live in cubicles, they put things away inside themselves. His dialogue is similarly dissonant and rhythmic:
She looks at it, counts it laboriously as I spread it in my hand, then hesitantly takes it. ‘It looks proper.’ ‘Good.’ ‘It is sufficient. You may go.’ ‘All right,’ I say, feeling myself being dragged into a gluey kind of stasis. ‘I will go now.’ She gestures through the curtains. ‘Yes’, she says, ‘you may do so’
Fans of the new wave existentialism of Disch, Delany, Ballard, and Spinrad, should feel at home with Malzberg’s relentless nihilism. For everyone else, you’ll probably find it a confusing and slightly grubby experience. It’s one of those books that feels like it would reward re-reads and analysis, but I’m not sure I’ll ever return.
