Reviews and Comments

Finished Sower

Rereading along with Shelved by Genre

Finding time to read together is more difficult than I would like.

It's inventive, sprawling, packed with insights big and small, capable of some direct attacks on the ways of the world while still sentimental and touching. Lanark is not unlike other novels I've liked, for sure, but hard to place: not as highfalutin or poetic as Solenoid, not as dreary and alienating/ed as Kafka, funny and self-mocking like A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius but genuinely political, and less psychologizing or trauma-centred than one might expect of something sometimes raw and (obviously) autobiographical.

(The introduction, by William Boyd, is so empty and vapid as to seem a joke. It must be.)

There's nothing that hasn't been there since the beginning, but it's all made new and alien, while still resonant, disturbing, ephemeral and eternal—so hard to place.

"These are the safe parts… Back in the day, entire sections would go missing. They'd be one thing when you lost them, another when you found them again. In circumstances like that, you have to understand that your perception is what's fragmentary, not the space itself. At some level an organising principle exists, but you will never have any confirmation of it. It will always be unavailable to you. Then, just as everyone's stopped trusting themselves, someone finds their way through a trap, the expedition gets a little further in."

I took the novel's first two parts as interesting feminist sci-fi. Appreciated how well it set up contrasts in how societies deal with sex, gender, relationships, as well as their inability to address their blindnesses and collapse.

In the third part, however, the society is described to have faults that, to me, felt made only to emphasized Mark's superiority as an individual. They are not as considered, do not seem to follow from certain events of premises as well as in the previous parts. Instead, the novel turned to something more like like Ayn Rand's: full of straw men acting too stupidly and stubbornly, there to only to illustrate the superiority of one with an individual will and self-sufficiency. How disappointing.