What follows is a recording of that session, edited for time. (Sorry for the rough audio in places. I did what I could, but needed to grab the audio straight from our video conference.)

*Sasha would like it to be known that she had to print out that sign in Comic Sans to make sure she got the bad kerning just wrong. She describes this, with glee, as one of the worst experiences of her life.

Many thanks to the players, Sasha, Eric, and Colin (in addition to myself, Michael), as well as a couple of audience members who make brief cameos. It was a blast. You may hear us use various alternate names for each other over the course of the recording. What can I say, we’re a bunch of nerds who’ve played various games together online for years going by various silly names, and habits die hard.

Many thanks as well to the makers of Fiasco. As you can tell from this session, Fiasco is an amazingly good time and easy to pick up with little to no prep. We used the new Roll20 module available for purchase here. Roll20, by the way, is a great resource for creating a flexible shared tabletop to play all sorts of games, spanning the spectrum from old-school tabletop RPGs like D&D, all the way through to party games like, well, Fiasco, even if the people you want to play with live scattered across the world. Or if you are living through a pandemic.

Listen to the Rapture of Beef Wellington in your podcast app of choice by pointing it to this single use feed:

https://stalebreadlunch.net/granary/2021/rapture-of-b-w/the-rapture-of-beef-wellington.rss

If you would prefer a direct link to the audio file, download it here.

Intro and outro music credit:
“I Knew a Guy” by Kevin MacLeod.
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3895-i-knew-a-guy.
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license.

My hazy confusion is informed by the hour and also by the fact that my own left hand is clutching a now empty glass of Rowan’s Creek Bourbon. “I don’t have a drinking problem” is the sort of thing people say when they have one, so I won’t. Unlike the protagonist I am failing to control, however, alcohol has not ruined any portion of my life. Still, it seems significant that I like to play Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero like this: alone, way past my bedtime, and a little drunk on bourbon.

I finished Act III, the middle and thus far most ambitious act of this so-called magical realist adventure game some months after its release. That it took me so long is largely due to this habit. But while it might be insensitive to drink Kentucky straight bourbon while playing a game centered on the end of a life ruined by it, I stand by my method. Kentucky Route Zero is a smoky sort of game, viewed best from a haze at the end of the night when you’ve just barely enough energy left to go on. It invites you to be distracted. To sit and contemplate the scene before you, even though it has little to do with the path ahead. Or so you think. Because it also invites you to begin believing that it’s all connected, that each random bit of someone else’s story is a fragment of your own.

Games have been struggling to come into their own as a narrative platform for many years. Their inherent interactivity makes them well suited to producing a sense of immersion, but it’s also a trap. Few stories stand up to the prodding of player choice, and it is nearly impossible to pace a story that must wait on the player to progress. So for years, most games that tired to tell a story did so by dividing into two, the game you play, and the movie you watch, via cutscenes.¹ Add to that the relative expense of making a game and the hit-driven business model of most publishers, and you’re lucky to ever transcend a summer action blockbuster.

Recently, however, digital distribution, together with greater accessibility of game-making tools has lead to a flowering of smaller projects created by one to a small handful of people. These don’t need to attract the millions of players most traditional publishers require to justify making a game and so are free to explore more niche subjects. They can make choices likely to be adored by some, hated by others, and met with general indifference by most. Many of these games stake out territory closer to installation or performance art than most people’s concept of a game.² Freed from those constraints, some games are making strides in advancing narrative forms, trying to find new ways of telling stories that are enhanced by, or wouldn’t even be possible outside of, the context of a game.

When you start up Act I, Kentucky Route Zero looks, and to some extent behaves, like a ’90s era point and click adventure game. For those who didn’t spend hours Questing with Kings or Monkeying with Islands, a point and click adventure game presents you with an avatar you can move around within a diorama by clicking on the ground. Adventure games have always been well-suited to narrative. They evolved, after all, from text adventures which share some DNA with choose-your-own adventure books and whose modern branch is often referred to as interactive fiction. And even when point and click adventure games were still a staple of the main stream, they were host to some of the first and, to this day, most successful attempts at humor in games.

The greatest strength of adventure games has always been in creating a sense of a living world. Perhaps because they avoid the uncanny valley, adventure games have a much easier time at this than first person 3D games that allow you to walk through an invented world as if seeing it with your own eyes. Instead, you discover the world by poking and prodding it, seeing how it reacts and where it takes you. The typical adventure game player clicks on everything, tries to open every door and combine every item, just to see how the world will respond, learning about the world like an infant who keeps dropping different objects to see how their parents will react. Classic adventure games had obscure puzzles that encouraged this behavior, but exploration has always been the primary drive for me, with puzzles being less the core of the game than an obstacle to prevent you from rushing past it.

And yet successful and laudable as these games were, until Kentuky Route Zero, I never played a game that I thought of as a form of literature.³ And, let me be clear, games don’t have to be literature to be worthwhile. Games are games and literature is literature, neither is more or less worthwhile for how closely it approaches the other. But what Kentucky Route Zero manages here is to approach storytelling through a set of constraints completely different from those imposed by the form of the traditional novel.

When you start up Kentucky Route Zero for the first time, it isn’t entirely clear what you’re looking at. Not knowing yet what sort of beast this game is, it is easy to see the first act as an extremely simple adventure game. In fact early reactions were tepid, with some complaining that it seemed deliberately obtuse and rather thin. There are no puzzles. Possibly the only choice with lasting impact that you make is to name your dog. On a future play-through, though, you can see the foreshadowing from the very start.

Very nearly the first words the game presents you with are these: “JOSEPH: Damn! Did you hear that wreck? Truck full of bottles — I dunno, beer bottles? Whiskey? Lost a tire or something, and spilled booze and glass all over the interstate!” To say it’s implied that it was you in that wreck would be too direct. That’s not the sort of story being told, where a single twist brings it all together. But the theme sure keeps coming back up. It isn’t so much that you were really in that accident as that the sound of shattered bottles of booze haunts Conway, the main character of the game.

The aesthetics of the game are spare, with flat-shaded, notably non-antialiased polygons forming the world. But that spareness makes the little touches stand out. The text is uniformly presented in the form of a play with descriptions reading as stage directions: “JOSEPH sits between gas pumps in a Queen Anne armchair. His hair is gray and his glasses darkened.” This is reinforced by the flash of title cards that introduce each scene: “ACT I, SCENE I. EQUUS OILS.” And yet for all the hints of a proscribed order to things, the scenes aren’t so regimented. If you leave Equus Oils and return again later, you may get a new scene or, if you never do return, you may not, with future scenes simply taking one number lower. So you are acting out a play, but not a fixed one. Rather, it is a play that forms itself around you as you walk through it.

Much of the choice you have presents itself this way. Dialog options aren’t opportunities for story branching or a matter of choosing different approaches, like deciding to be friendly or angry. They don’t change the story, or even seek to create that illusion. Instead they offer a choice between areas of backstory to fill in. They let you chose what other thing this present moment calls to mind or which character is the one to speak up. In a few memorable cases, they ask you to participate in the creation of a poem from constituent blocks. This conspires to craft the impression that you are drifting, unable quite bring to mind the details of your waking life, but as the events unfold before you, a piece or two comes to mind, and you can’t help but spend a little time following the thread.

Likewise text in the game isn’t simply the presentation of static words, but something more alive. Words relayed from a computer screen flicker with scan lines, and when The Zero is mentioned it pulses and shimmers as though the word itself, even when presented in this world, isn’t quite a part of it. It’s little touches like these that begin filling in the story before any of it is addressed directly. An early heart stop-inducing moment comes when Conway tries to log onto Joseph’s computer. If he gives his own name instead of Joseph, the computer replies with the simple and existentially terrifying, “User Conway is not real.” This, it turns out, is the way the computer has of telling you it doesn’t have a record of something. When you request to play a game, it also responds (perhaps somewhat cheekily), “‘Games’ is not real.”⁴ This phrasing is significant, if not directly revelatory. After all, from the computer’s point of view, if something isn’t in its data banks, it isn’t in the world. And to say something isn’t in the world is another way of saying that it ins’t real.

Like works of magical realism in other forms, much of the power in Kentucky Route Zero comes from these sorts of unremarked coincidences or conventions that seem just a few degrees off. At times more than a few, when the game veers off into outright absurdism. At one point in Act II, you are faced with a multi-story office building that is normal enough given the strangeness that surrounds it. Yet one floor is labeled, simply, “Bears.” And sure enough when you ride the elevator past, you see them, lumbering in an indoor forest, bears. It isn’t so much the bears themselves that are noteworthy as that no one other than the player, not even the main characters themselves, feels this warrants any sort of comment.

Given the dependance on an accumulation of vignettes to paint the larger picture of the story, it isn’t a surprise that the game took a couple of acts to really show its depth. What is, perhaps, somewhat of a surprise is that it has so far avoided being weighed down by them. It would be all too easy for a game like this to become a scattered collection of random events whose novelty wears off when you see one too many and begin to feel that they are strange only for strangeness sake. On the flip side, in their desire to tie everything together and make a point, it would be easy to go too far into moralizing. The events of Act III come closest to this with their direct exploration of alcohol’s grip on the characters, but (and beyond the anecdote I presented at the start, I won’t spoil it) it has managed, so far, to walk that tightrope and remain, simply, poignant.

There are so many open threads left for them to explore, that I’m not sure where to guess Cardboard Computer will take the story in the final two acts. Things presented as early as the first scene (Xanadu gets mentioned in an email on Joseph’s computer long before it becomes a central, if baffling, part of Act III) have come into steadily sharper focus over the course of the acts. They might chose to continue filling in those details, making it clearer how Xanadu and Joseph and The Zero relate to the more mundane characters of the world. But I sort of hope we never really find the answers and instead get bored and wander off in some new direction. Because no concrete answer could match the vague beauty of the questions posed in these first three acts. Whatever path they choose, I can’t wait to continue to wander along that aimless loop of The Zero that never seems to take me where I’m going, but never fails to bring me somewhere that reflects where I’ve been.

Never Let Me Go is a tragedy of another sort. A more painful sort. But one that is no less inborn. It’s there in the background from the start. In spite of the movie, I managed to come to the book without knowing the premise. (The Library of Congress catalog data did tip the book’s hand, which is what I get for being the sort of person who reads copyright pages, I suppose.) But even without knowing what it was, the sense of it seeped through from the beginning. Like the students, I didn’t know what I knew, but I knew.

It’s the creeping sense of dread that makes the book. This won’t end well. This was never going to end well. And you’ll watch. But if there’s one flaw that leads to the doom of the characters in Never Let Me Go, it’s that they accept their mortality. Like we accept ours. Like us, the greatest ambition of the clones is to put it off for a few years. Maybe if they love enough, they can get three more years. Toward the end, I thought about how I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I’d kill myself. Or kill them. Why go peacefully to have my organs harvested? Why should they deserve to extend their lives when reaching thirty-five is so much to ask? But they don’t. It doesn’t even seem to occur to them.

And I suppose it doesn’t really occur to me, either. I’ll die, someday. And probably without the satisfaction of relieving someone’s suffering by the way. And unlike the normal humans who drift in the background of Never Let Me Go, I’m not about to go violently to my end, taking someone else out in the hope that I might buy myself a few more years. Maybe that’s tragic. Or maybe it would only be tragic to an outsider, someone who hasn’t known since birth that they were going to die sometime before the end of their first hundred years.

But if it were really that simple, it wouldn’t be so human. I do mourn my own death. And the clones of Never Let Me Go may not fight their creators, but they know. They know they were made to suffer and die. And though they may abet their creators in little ways, they know their deaths are a plan that someone made. Maybe it would be something like believing in god but not the afterlife.

The creeping knowledge of what it is comes on slowly and makes me wonder when, exactly, it was that I became aware of the inevitability of my own death. I don’t recall ever not knowing. There was no big childhood moment of loss. One grandparent of each sex from each side died before my own birth, and the remaining two survived to see me reach adulthood. I do remember a moment of dread as a child when I became aware of environmentalism and the implicit threat that the world might not outlive me. I suspect that, like much else, I became aware of the concept of death through osmosis, overhearing conversations between my parents that I was not quite old enough to appreciate, so that death was never a concept absorbed full-force. There was no single moment of transition from ignorance to realization. I processed it, instead, in steps, ranging from blind acknowledgement to the ever more concrete understanding that my body will one day fail.

I wonder, though, if it is even more innate than that would suggest. Perhaps there really is something about being mortal that sows seeds of that realization without need of any explanation. Maybe we learn through observation as infants that people are not infinitely varied in age. Maybe we are smart enough, even then, to observe that few, if any, exist beyond our grandparent’s generation. And we begin to figure it out from there. Or maybe there is something wired into our brains through eons of evolution that sets up the concept. After all, as impossible as death may be to contemplate, infinity is the harder to grasp by far.

If, like me, you go into Never Let Me Go without preconception (excepting my unfortunate encounter with the label “Cloning—Fiction” on the copyright page), your understanding of what it is evolves along with the students. You start with the somewhat ominous words “carer” and “donor” dropped on page one along with the implication that a career ending at thirty-one is, if anything, on the long side. In what follows, death paints an inevitable backdrop, but for a time, it is only distantly relevant. The children have their lives. Their concerns, for the most part, have nothing to do with their fate, and as a reader you forget to be concerned with it. The failure to mention parents does stick out, and along with the lack of any concept of holidays, it obviates any need for confirmation via copyright page spoilers that cloning is involved. But while the combination of “Cloning—Fiction” with “carer” and “donor” is enough to void any doubt, the why is left unsaid. And for a while, you, the reader, get to pretend along with the students that there might be some more innocent source to that pattern. But you know better. And they know better. And you know they know. And so you become implicated along with the guardians at Hailsham, sympathetic, but ultimately, like Miss Lucy, burdened by the knowledge that these happy children whose lives you are enjoying exist only to be slaughtered. And that tension—whether and how much do they understand how unfair that is—coats everything.

If I have one qualm, it is in the way the book allows itself a moment of uncharacteristic release. Kazuo Ishiguro is unable to resist a climax, allowing a voice for the guardians to lay it all out and explain, in stark terms, how there is no hope, not even for three more years. Not even for those in love. We get to have that moment of satisfaction, the chance to explain why. Why Hailsham, why nothing will change, why make an effort to raise students instead of simply breeding clones. As little satisfaction as the answers hold, they break the tension. They let us sympathize with Tommy when he gives a last tantrum. And they give us more than we ever get by way of answers about our own mortality.

I can’t help but think that the book would have been more powerful without that last bit of resolution. If they never knew, for sure, the why of it all. If they decided it would be too painful to learn they couldn’t get a deferral. If they went calmly to their fate, not because they knew all other paths were closed, but because it was the one path they knew. Because following that one path, even through pain and death, was less frightening than contemplating the possibility that their hope was futile or, worse, that all they had to do to be spared was ask.

But as every teenager knows, this makes posturing more than a game of affectation. The little signs by which we signal what category we belong in are our one way to influence how people will interpret what we do. We’d all like to think that we can change our mind about something, but once you’re slotted away there’s usually little you can do. So you declare it loudly without saying a word, and probably without even being aware you are doing it, “This is the sort of person I am!”

It’s the same with books. Genres are just tools we use to explain what to expect out of a book. I don’t mean to be dismissive by saying that. They are powerfully important marketing tools, and marketing, for all the bad connotation the term sometimes gets,¹ is how books get read. But it’s also important to remember that there is no law of the universe that declares a book to be of a certain genre. We can (and probably will) argue about what defines different genres until language ceases to exist, but at the end of the day a book belongs to a genre because people perceive it to be so.

With that definition in mind, The City & The City is clearly science fiction. It won the 2009 BSFA Award, the 2010 Hugo,² and the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award. With that pedigree, I’d wager most people pick up the novel expecting science fiction. But what it dishes out isn’t exactly staple genre. It doesn’t take place in the future or on a different planet or involve much in the way of technology at all, beyond crappy eastern-block government office PCs. It doesn’t have fantasy trappings either. It doesn’t take place in the past, feature mythical creatures or magic. It doesn’t even have the common trappings of magical realism. An apt (if tonally different) comparison is to the television show, Louie. Louie is presented as comedy, but it often verges into absurdism more surreal than comedic. Nothing that happens is, strictly, something that couldn’t happen in the real world. It just wouldn’t.³

Likewise, there’s nothing physically impossible about the premise of The City & The City. In fact it presents itself as a rather run of the mill murder mystery with a dash of political intrigue. The protagonist, Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad reports to the scene of a crime, a young woman murdered and dumped in a slum. His investigation turns up connections to organized crime and anti-government groups. And when he uncovers potential connections to the neighboring city of Ul Qoma, he finds his investigation challenged by the possibility that a higher branch of special police might swoop in to take the case away from him.

Except Ul Qoma isn’t a neighbor, not as we would term it. The two city states coexist in the same physical location. The first real clue that something strange is going on comes as early as page 12⁴ with the conclusion of the first chapter as Borlú takes a final look around the crime scene:

As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrász, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStráz at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStráz, that depressed zone.

“It might be anywhere.” The significance of that statement doesn’t sink in at first, seeming an innocent observation that the view is one you could see anywhere. But there’s nothing innocent or casual about about the act of noticing where things might be seen in Beszel or Ul Qoma. The signifiers by which people and things declare their allegiance to one or the other aren’t a matter of adolescent posing. They’re the borders of life that separate the cities. And if you momentarily fail to observe those boundaries and see something that is elsewhere, you must, and must be seen to, unsee it. If you don’t, Breach will come.

Because the book is introduced as science fiction, I found myself receptive to all sorts of explanations for how this separation worked and for the nature of the feared Breach who police it. Is this really taking place in a fictional Eastern European country near the Balkans? Or would the curtain pull back to reveal a fishbowl world in a science fictional universe? Were Breech simply secret police, feared for all the reasons authoritarian power is feared? Or were they an alien power possessed with magic? But for every hint that something deeper might be going on, further examination reveals only more human, more mundane explanations. If perception is reality, and you can convince yourself that you have unseen what is elsewhere, then it really is elsewhere. Perhaps you secretly have a little trouble convincing yourself that you really can’t see the towers of Ul Qoma from your window, but you’re the only one who seems to have this trouble, and you’d never admit it. Strange as it seems to live in a world where everyone denies what is in front of their face, you’d never challenge it. The price is too high.

This playful dancing around the possibility of the supernatural extends into the text itself. Rumors of a mythical ur-city, between and of the two drive speculation about the mythical origins of the twin cities, and even at the end of the book there is an archeological artifact with rumored power never explained. But, as in the real world, everything examined turns mundane. Members of Breach are able to disappear or coexist in two places at once by manipulating the perceptions of natives trained their whole lives to unsee, and the primary antagonist is similarly able to manipulate people’s perceptions by careful study of the signifiers, the ways of moving and holding yourself that declare, “I am in Beszel” or “I am in Ul Qoma.”

The book reads like science fiction. Not because of the subject matter, but the way it is discussed. We may argue over whether such a bifurcated city could ever be brought into existence, and I certainly have my own doubts about how long it could sustain itself, but there isn’t anything fundamentally impossible about it. There are other things that do exist in the world that I would have trouble crediting if I didn’t know they were real because of how foreign they are to my own experience. But like much of science fiction, The City & The City uses a fictional city to comment on real forces in the world, in this case governmental oppression and the way in which we can be complicit in maintaining it over ourselves. Moreover it reveals the nature of the world over time through passages like the one I quoted above, not setting out to directly discuss the setting which is so important to the nature of the book, but revealing it piece by piece through the eyes of a native who doesn’t find the world strange at all.

In that way, The City & The City manages to pull off the same trick performed by Breach. It exists simultaneously in two worlds, able to be seen from each, but existing in neither and both. It is a science fiction novel, wearing a science fiction novel’s clothes and adopting a science fiction novel’s mannerisms. Yet it is also a novel about fictional people in the real world, tackling a subject no more fantastic than most crime dramas. And by being so, it is visible to people of both worlds and calls into question the rationality of believing in the division between them.

The narrative is told in the first person by Anthony Webster, a British man who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, looking back over his life. From the beginning it is clear that there is a story being told, some greater point to the anecdotes, but exactly what that is doesn’t come into focus until much closer to the ending (and while it’s far from the point of the book, I won’t spoil the details here). The narrator begins with a few flashes of memory. Images. The kind of tokens you hold onto that aren’t memories per se, but have come to represent them. The sense of them, as the title suggests. Much of the novel focuses on the snap judgements we make when telling ourselves someone else’s story, and these led me to one of my own. In those first few lines, I assumed we were hearing the story of the arc of a man’s relationship with his wife. Like so many of the Tony’s own assumptions, mine was quite wrong.

Over the first half of the novel, there isn’t even a narrative as such. Instead the flashes of memory spread out and become anecdotes as if living out the transition from memory to story. This sounds as thought it might be tiresome or dull or fail to hang together, and perhaps it might be if the book weren’t so short. As it is, the memories expand into vignettes that give the impression of a life. We’re led along to extrapolate from these an impression of the narrator’s formative years, his boyhood friends, and his first love affair. It’s an impression, perhaps, something like what the man holds of himself.

But it isn’t the story of his life. What you’d think would be most important, meeting his wife, his career, his daughter, his divorce, his grandchildren, all pass by in a glancing mention. “I’d left home, and started work as a trainee in arts administration. Then I met Margaret; we married, and three years later Susie was born.” By the end of the paragraph, they are divorced. By the end of the next page, we’re brought through grandchildren and retirement to the present, all stated as a matter of fact.

Perhaps to Tony all of that is simply the present. No need to think too hard on the realities of life. It is what it is. You don’t reminisce about today. Who he is now is self-evident.

Instead of bringing his portrait into the current moment, Tony doubles back on the past. The beginning of the book paints a portrait, through remembered anecdotes of Tony’s school friends, most particularly Adrian who became, in memory at least, the focal point of their little group. The next part is a portrait of Tony’s first, failed love affair in college with a girl named Veronica. She never seems to like him all that much, though that is, of course, tinted by his knowledge of where it all goes, and it’s all tied up in adolescent sex, or the lack of it. The infra-sex, as he terms it, that he’s thrilled to have, and the ever-near presence of the full-sex that he doesn’t. He takes her to meet his friends. He stays with her family for a weekend and meets her mocking, disapproving father, her sly, indifferent brother, and her kind, reassuring mother. Then it ends, through one last bout of sex, and before long he learns she’s dating his friend, Adrian.

After pretending everything is fine, he writes them, or rather writes Adrian, addressing them both, and tells them exactly how he really feels, which is hurt and not very highly of either of them. Then, feeling good about having the last word, he writes them out of his life and turns to a new one, the one he so matter-of-factly portrays. When he returns from his first step, a trip around America, it’s to learn Adrian has committed suicide. It isn’t, it seems, out of depression, but because he decided it was his right and the right thing to do and so it would have been a moral failing not to. Tony and his surviving friends meet and mourn Adrian, but he doesn’t think much about Veronica, and without Adrian at its center, their group disperses to live out the rest of their own lives.

Then, years later, in the present day, Tony learns he’s been named in Vernoica’s mother’s will. She’s left him £500 and Adrian’s journal. When at last he gets in touch with Veronica to try to figure out why she left him the money and to claim the journal, she calls the former blood money refuses to turn over the latter. What he gets instead is a copy of the letter he had sent them. It isn’t witty. It isn’t even passionate. It’s just cruel and petty and, in light of Adrian’s suicide, tragic. And so he’s forced to reconcile his vision of himself, who has hardly thought of Veronica in years, and scarcely remembers what he wrote, with the one Veronica remembers, the man who sent that letter. And the Veronica he remembers, the capricious, posh, even cruel woman, with the one he’s now met again, who won’t tell him anything of her life, but seems to still live in that past he left behind.

So his goal shifts from claiming what is his to making sense of who she is, going back over his assumptions about her and about her family. Is her brother the sneering aristocrat he assumed or a disappointed man, saving face? Was her mother a kind woman, looking to shield him from her capricious daughter, or a jealous woman in competition with her? Was Veronica a bitter, cynical opportunist who attached herself to the brightest around her, or a woman who never got to have a life of her own and lived out the remainder of her days taking care of Adrian’s legacy? And who, given all that, is he? The patient, complacent man, on good terms with his ex-wife even though she left him for another man? Or the hurtful man who is only there when there is something to be gained, be it sex, £500, or absolution?

We all have moments we look back on and cringe. And times when we wonder if we aren’t the sympathetic figures we imagine ourselves to be and are, as it turns out, the assholes of the story. And all but the least empathetic of us have had moments when our self-righteous indignation at someone else’s behavior has turned to shame when we get a better peek at their situation.

I have this one particular moment I flash back to when my brain decides I need a reminder of my imperfection. The film American Beauty came out shortly after I started my sophomore year in college, and I recall getting into the stupidest of pretentious arguments with a handful of my classmates (whose names I don’t even recall) in the dining hall. I hadn’t seen it yet. I’m fairly sure none of us had. Yet somehow I found myself defending the possibility that it might have artistic merit against their contention that Hollywood was, by definition, incapable of making something worthwhile. So far, so good, except insomuch as even participating in the argument makes me feel like I ought to have been calling things “philosophically self-evident.”

Where things went off the rails was the fact that I had recently heard something on NPR about Sam Shepard and managed to leave with the impression that American Beauty might have been an adaptation of a Sam Shepard play. I don’t know why I chose to bring this up. I wasn’t, and am not, terribly familiar with Sam Shepard’s oeuvre, and judging from the fact that they weren’t immediately sure I was wrong, they weren’t either. It’s an odd thing to fixate on. It’s trivial. It had no discernible direct consequences. And I’m sure it doesn’t crack the top ten of things I have reason to be ashamed of. But to this day, I’ll sometimes be walking along with my wife and out of nowhere, I’ll groan. And I won’t be able to explain to her what’s wrong, because what a silly thing to fixate on fifteen years later.

But the past works like that. I have little doubt that I have casually crushed people’s feelings, but I don’t remember those times. If someone from my past approached me with an accusation, or even just a rueful memory, how would I react? Would I feel ashamed? Or would I get angry because that person is trying to make me into someone I don’t believe I am? How many people, met briefly on the phone or in the street, or remembered in the past, am I doing that to right now? There’s the obvious case of ex-girlfriends who I can’t help but see with all reasons we would never have worked out hanging in a cloud around them. But worse are the people I don’t even know well at all, don’t even remember. The infuriating couple at the next table, the douchey guy on the train. It took only a comment or a look or someone’s bad day to paint a back story for them they wouldn’t recognize.

A couple months ago I saw this play out a few times in quick succession online. The most prominent was the so-called “Diane in 7A” incident where a reality TV producer named Elan Gale live-tweeted his interaction with a misbehaving middle aged woman who was throwing a tantrum over a delayed flight. It was perfect, too perfect, and it wasn’t long before everyone was discussing it, whether laughing at Dianne’s behavior or expressing disapproval of the crass way that Elan responded to it. Soon a man came forward claiming to be a relative of Dianne. He explained that she was facing a terminal cancer diagnosis and that this would likely have been her last Thanksgiving, explaining some of her overwrought behavior. And for a moment, reading along, I felt ashamed. It was easy to imagine at first an entitled over-privileged air-traveler, something we’ve all seen plenty of. Then, equally easy to about face and imagine a woman dealing with crushing personal tragedy, caught up in a miniature media circus. Of course it unsurprisingly turned out that the whole thing was a hoax. What else did we expect from someone who makes his living manipulating the supposedly real into dramatized stories? What story do we imagine for him?

As the internet brings us together, making it more likely that any two people in the world will have a fleeting interaction, we see this sort of thing happen more and more. Someone posts a picture or an anecdote (one I recall was of an older kid in a stroller) they think represents some trend they bemoan only to have someone who knows more background to come forward to plead for understanding (in this case stating that the kid in question had autism and that this was a coping mechanism). We’re simultaneously invited more and more frequently to guess at each other’s stories and given greater opportunities to know that our stories are being guessed at and to set the record straight. Or to have someone try to make us feel bad by making up a story.

So what are we to do? Judge not lest ye be judged? Stop trusting everything we believe about people? It’ll never happen. To function in society we need to make quick decisions about what to expect from people, lest we offend or be put in real danger. And we do it remarkably well, usually without realizing what we are doing. We read the little smiles, the twitches of the eyes and decide when it’s time to ask a question or when it’s time to keep your mouth shut. We guess who is going to lie to us because they can and who we can trust. We’re not always right, but giving up just means leaving human society. So perhaps all we can do is periodically sit back and reflect on our own lives and how little we know about our own stories, much less the stories of the people we meet along the way. And to be willing to listen to how different their story is from what we assumed, even if they keep telling us that we would never understand.

The story they tell might not agree with the one an observer from their left-facing Esso tiger, single moon world would give, but it is how they experienced it. Does that makes their story an allegory or some form of fabrication? Perhaps that’s a foolish question when it comes to fiction. It’s not unlike asking whether Dorothy’s trip to Oz really happened. Of course it didn’t, and then of course it did. It’s a fiction, and so a sort of lie, but then again a story, and so a sort of truth, and it’s status as both isn’t really affected by an author’s statement about the reality experienced by Dorothy in bed or Tengo in a hotel room in Tokyo. Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road had her adventures regardless of whether that Dorothy exists as a past version of the Dorothy in the “real” world. (Which world, of course, is just as fictional as Oz for all of being named Kansas.) Of course it’s a great deal more subtle in 1Q84, where the fantastical elements of that world are few, and where even those are not widely seen. This only serves to emphasize the foolishness of the distinction. After all, our memory of the past is always a fiction.¹

The place Tengo finds himself at the end of the book isn’t so strange. Or, rather, it is very strange, but also commonplace. Tengo, like so many of Murakami’s protagonists is just over edge of thirty. Like many at that age, at the start of the book his life has settled into a period of perpetual transition. Not a lot changes, but there is little solidly established about it. He rents a small apartment with few worldly possessions. While he displays great talents as both a mathematics teacher and an author, he’s made little mark in either field. No doubt some students remember him fondly, but he isn’t even a full time professor, only teaching courses to help students cram for their entrance exams. In the context of 1980s Japan, with a culture of lifetime employment, this temporary status is all the more profound.² Likewise he seems to lack commitment to his writing. He considers it his primary ambition, but he seems content to take it slow, wandering about trying to find his style, doing petty tasks for his mentor, Komatsu, an editor at a literary magazine.

His social life isn’t much more grounded. He has a few friends, it seems, but they don’t play any active role in his life or the novel. His family consists of his father from whom he is estranged. Even his romantic life seems designed to avoid commitment while simultaneously preventing change. He sees an older, married girlfriend exactly once a week. He seems genuinely fond of her, and she expresses a possessiveness toward him, but he can’t even contact her directly. The relationship is tailor made to satisfy his minimum needs for intimacy without any danger of developing further.

By the end of the novel, Tengo has, essentially, a family. You could imagine a much more mundane path from here to there than occurs in the book. Tengo, lonely, even if he doesn’t quite realize it himself, meets a woman he shared a moment of innocent intimacy with when they were children. They rekindle their feelings for each other almost immediately, and before he knows it, she is pregnant and they are starting a life together. Like I say, a familiar story, but one that surely feels world-changing when it happens to you.

It is worth, also, considering the significance of that moment when they held hands as children, and the way they each fixate on it. How much was their fixation with each other something that preexisted their romance, and how much is it a part of the narrative that they weave after the fact? A piece of magic when viewed as the foundation of their new lives and the life of their child, a fleeting memory, otherwise. After all, the mutual fixation seems to appear out of nowhere mid-story. Though they both take it for granted and carry it forward into the new world where they are a couple, it has the contrived feeling of an element from the 1Q84 world, not the original, right-facing Esso tiger world. Perhaps the extra significance both Tengo and Aomame place on that moment is a part of the fictional world Tengo has created.

How do you explain such a profound change in your life? When you can’t imagine what your life would be if you hadn’t met someone? When it seems like some great force in the universe must have arranged the chances just so, in order to make your life possible? (When, of course, any other life you might have had would also have been a sequence of seemingly fated events, because they are the events that happened.)

Most of us do it by telling a story, even if we don’t realize what we are doing. It’s not usually so fanciful. Even if we use the word “fate,” we rarely put a face to it. But we do invent a story, picking out the events we see as significant after the fact, simplifying them, putting them in order, and speaking of how we looked across the room and knew, or, even if we didn’t, we will at least speak of that party, that glance, that holding of hands, that kiss. And while we might not have the imagination to invoke a conspiracy of little people or to explain the suddenness of going from a loner to expecting a child with a virgin birth,³ sometimes that is how it feels.

As an aside, I was convinced for a while early on that the Aomame portions were written by Tengo. That they were, perhaps, actual excerpts from his draft. So Tengo, reminded of Aomame when he sees the mother and daughter Society of Witness members on the train, comes to wonder what happened to her over the years and invents a life for her. He makes her the protagonist of his story set in the world of Air Chrysalis and falls for her, imagining that she might be out there remembering him. Of course this doesn’t fit with his assumptions about her later on when he starts actively seeking her, but it’s an interesting idea within the context of her being pulled into the 1Q84 world.

So I appreciate the way in which 1Q84 paints the way the great changes of life can feel. How unreal, and overwrought, and also deeply, crushingly, mundane it can all be at once.⁴ Unfortunately the way it gets there isn’t without its flaws. For the record, since this is the first article of this type I am writing, I don’t see the need to write literal book reviews in the sense of appraisal of quality (and I’ll never hand out a score). Either there is something worth writing about or not. But I can’t see writing about 1Q84 without discussing what a frustrating book it was to read. When it’s good, it’s really good, but there were times when the force driving me to keep turning the pages was a desire not to get to the next bit, but to be done with the current section more quickly.

It’s not that the book is too long, though it is a long book, or even that it starts slow, though it does. I rather felt that the deliberate pace of most of the book contributed to the mood, and while I found the setup of the whole “literary conspiracy” to have Tengo ghost-rewrite Air Chrysalis a bit strained,⁵ the initial introductions of Tengo, Aomame, and Eriko were all intriguing enough to make me want to read more. And while there are a number of digressions throughout the book, such as the discussion of the Gilyaks, even those aren’t the problem and when they work, they add depth and texture to the world.

Where it falls down is in repetition. The whole book felt badly in need, ironically, of an editor’s rewrite. It isn’t enough to mention the stakes should their fraud in rewriting Eriko’s novel come to light. They have to do it again and again, taking what is a somewhat contrived situation as it is and throwing it, repeatedly, to the foreground where it’s flaws stand out. We are reminded repeatedly that this might be dangerous to the point that when the cracks do begin to show it produces anticlimax more than a building of dread. Whole sections of (admittedly important) character background are introduced only to be largely repeated not half the book away, but in the very next section. For an author who seems to generally trust his readers to either pick up on things or not, this book seemed uncharacteristically blunt in places. Tengo’s childhood Sundays going door to door with his father and their similarity to Aomame’s are repeated to the point where one feels little need to ask whether it will be on the exam.

And that’s all unfortunate, because the world that Murakami builds is a compelling one, and if he had trusted readers to pick up on those important bits of Tengo’s history without the many retellings, he might have had more time to explore any number of bits of beautiful strangeness that he only hints at. In the end, we’re left with a flawed but worthwhile read. No, the threads don’t all tie together at the end, and you are left with little understanding of the mechanisms by which the 1Q84 world operate, but those elements aren’t the main point of the book. The point, in my mind anyway, is to induce that eery feeling of not knowing your place in the world and to explore how your view of the world changes as you decide what that place should be. And on that score, 1Q84 succeeds.

Maintaining a constant stream of interesting posts, even when you define interesting within the narrow context of friends and family is a real challenge and takes real talent. Yet without that steady stream there is little point to a blog. The chronological stream of brief posts is tailored to the assumption of a regular drip of new content that is relevant when fresh and fades from interest over time. Social networks solve this problem, to some extent, but the space never really belongs to you, and over time the contributions fade away, rather than collecting into a body of work.

As hinted by the name, Stale Bread Lunch is not that sort of website. My goal here is that each article should be able to stand on its own, not simply be a part of a stream. That means I’m not particularly interested in being timely or responding to events as they happen. Instead, I hope to produce fewer, but higher quality articles.

At launch I’m focusing on one of my primary interests, novels, though I intend to broaden out into other subjects with time. I have prepared three articles (beyond this introductory note) on three novels, each dealing with themes of perception, memory, and reality: 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, and The City & The City by China Miéville.

These aren’t reviews, per se, at least not in terms of an evaluation of quality. I struggled some finding a label and landed on the term “book club.” That is the atmosphere I’d like to foster, more a discussion of themes in the book I found interesting than a recommendation about what to buy. On that note, a word about spoilers: While I don’t go out of my way to spoil anything, these articles aren’t directed at people trying to decide whether to read the books discussed, but at people interested in discussion about them. My own attitude on spoilers is one of caution. I certainly don’t like it when anyone intentionally or maliciously tries to spoil something for me because they don’t understand why someone might want to be surprised. That said, avoiding spoilers neuters any real discussion. So in my own reading, I play it by ear, asking only that I’m not ambushed by spoilers so I can make my own decisions. That’s the policy I intend to follow here. I’ll keep the front pages clear, but once you get to the article itself, all bets are off. You have been warned.

Along with full length articles, I have the “Breadcrumbs” section. That is where I intend to put anything that doesn’t rise to the level of an article. Breadcrumbs aren’t so fully-formed, are more time-sensitive, or are the kind of thing I simply wouldn’t say if I had to put the level of thought or preparation that goes into an article. In other words, it is the blog portion of the site.

Any other questions are, I hope, answered here in the FAQ.

Welcome to Stale Bread Lunch.

—Michael James Boyle

March, 2014