{"id":895,"date":"2011-02-23T01:57:52","date_gmt":"2011-02-23T01:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=895"},"modified":"2014-06-24T18:17:51","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T17:17:51","slug":"895","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=895","title":{"rendered":"LAND OF THE HEADLESS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Do you want to know how smart Adam Roberts is? His latest novel, Land of the Headless<\/em> takes its name from a story you don\u2019t know by a writer you\u2019ve never heard of, whose lasting claim to a footnote in history is mostly that he went to school with Pushkin, someone you\u2019ve probably never read. Not that your ignorance, or mine, matters. Because even if you knew that The Land of the Headless<\/em> was an early dystopia written by Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, romantic, Decembrist-revolutionary, failed assassin and buddy of Pushkin, I\u2019m not sure it helps cast any light on this story.<\/h3>\n

Roberts, genre historian and professor of literature with an interest in the nineteenth century, plainly intends some of his study of two-hundred-year-old books to show beneath the sf veneer of his new novel. There are echoes of earlier literary forms throughout the book. There is the stiff formality of his narrator, who addresses the reader directly as though writing a letter \u2013 giving the story the flavour of an epistolary novel. Then there is the heavy reliance on misunderstanding and sudden revelation \u2013 moments that might not have been out of place in Dickens or Austen, had their novels featured headless protagonists enlisted into brainless armies on alien planets. There\u2019s even a section that begins with a close paraphrase of Jane Austen\u2019s most famous punchline, \u201cReader, I married him\u201d.<\/p>\n

Other reviewers, more learned than I, have suggested Proust as an influence for Land of the <\/em>Headless but I thought I got a whiff of Thomas Hardy in the semi-tragic self-flagellation of a protagonist who allows an early lapse of judgment to haunt him until a brief period of hard won happiness is torn apart by a nexus of chance meetings and unlikely revelations.<\/p>\n

Adam Roberts is amongst the cleverest of current British sf novelists. He is perhaps the most technically ambitious and certainly the most aware of the context in which he writes. But there is something missing. His words lack penetrating power. He peppers his targets with sharp phrases but none have sufficient force to bring down the great beasts that he has in his sights.<\/p>\n

The blurb on the back of Land of the Headless<\/em> calls it a \u201csearing and supremely timely satire of religious fundamentalism\u201d but it is no such thing. The reviewer in The Times<\/em> presumably saw the word \u201csatire\u201d and, like Pavlov\u2019s puppy, invoked Swift and Orwell. Land of the Headless<\/em> can\u2019t bear such weight.<\/p>\n

Roberts has none of the bitter, venomous precision of Swift and none of the righteous fury of Orwell. Both these writers possess an almost fearsome clarity in their writing. Their targets were tracked with laser-like accuracy and every volley of sentences battered home their larger points. This precision is entirely absent from this Roberts\u2019 novel. Facing the massing forces of religiously-inspired intolerance, I would as happily be armed with a wet lettuce leaf as a copy of Land of the Headless<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s not because Roberts lacks the capability as a writer or even that this book is particularly badly written \u2013 it\u2019s not, there\u2019s much to enjoy. In Roberts\u2019 other work he has demonstrated that he can write passages of real power. Here he, very successfully, creates a pompous, self-delusional protagonist that every reader would happily throttle, if he hadn\u2019t had his neck chopped off in chapter one. True the narrator\u2019s constant whining won\u2019t ingratiate Land of the Headless<\/em> to the casual reader, but Jon Cavala\u2019s universe, dominated by a theocracy that reserves the same punishment for sex outside marriage as it does for murder, is engrossing. As a simple tale of war, love, loss and a kind of redemption, Land of the Headless<\/em> works well enough.<\/p>\n

But, any novel that persistently claims to be a \u201csimple tale\u201d clearly wants to be much more than that. Roberts isn\u2019t spooling out all these words just to distract us with a bit of bonce-free Mills & Booning.<\/p>\n

Land of the Headless<\/em> has a memorably absurd discussion about \u201cGod particles\u201d making a spaceship travel faster than light and an intriguing but unsatisfactorily explored moment when Cavala mistakes a computer virus for heaven. Throughout the novel Panglossian characters, bouyed by faith, display a passive acceptance of dreadful events and fierce cruelty and this is obviously meant to prick the reader\u2019s conscience. But Roberts\u2019s critique of religion is too shallow to support the broader edifice of his story. The splodged together hodge-podge of Islam and Christianity that he welds onto the world he creates is too vague to be convincing and there\u2019s no sense that Roberts has a genuinely specific axe to grind with the religious tyranny in which he places his characters.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no indication of how this planet-wide (indeed galaxy-wide) religious tyranny has been enforced. People wander around from place to place without surveillance or apparent hindrance. There are police, but they are easily avoided. The clergy make no appearance at all. Military authority is arbitrary, and stupid to the point of farce, but there\u2019s no sense of it extending beyond the barracks. There\u2019s no indication of fear or oppression in people\u2019s everyday lives and no sign of how a rigid order is enforced, though the characters seem to take for granted that they have no way of offering resistance.<\/p>\n

To return, briefly, to the comparison with Swift or Orwell, both of these men saw great wrongs in the social order of their times. Their rage at these wrongs forced them to write. Their books were born of consuming anger and were launched against powerful targets.<\/p>\n

By contrast, in Land of the Headless<\/em>, there\u2019s the sense that Roberts\u2019 story has been dragged from a rather comfortable dislike of some rather blurred vision of religious practice and belief. There\u2019s not much sense of anything being really at stake. The satire feels synthetic. The motivation seems to stem from an intellectual exercise rather than out of a deeply emotional response.<\/p>\n

Because Roberts can\u2019t construct a plausibly fierce orthodoxy or a realistic government capable of imposing a rigid order on the most intimate parts of human life, nothing else that flows from his story has real bite. Given the evidence on display, and apart from the apparently random acts of beheading (which are never satisfactorily explored), Cavala and his companions in Land of the Headless<\/em> might as well be trapped in the cloying bosom of an over-keen Vicar of Dibley as beneath the boot of the ravening hordes of modern fundamentalism.<\/p>\n

Effective satire requires not just intellect but focus and fury, Land of the Headless<\/em> lacks either. It wastes its energy on an unsatisfactorily rambling narrative and, if Roberts really is angry about religion, he keeps his emotions too tightly reined beneath stylistic tricks and his protagonists missing stiff-neck.<\/p>\n

Adam Roberts \u2013 Land of the Headless<\/em>
\nGollancz, 2007, 288 pages, 10.99, ISBN 978-0-575-07799-7<\/p>\n

(Originally published in Vector <\/em>253, Jul\/Aug 2007)<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you want to know how smart Adam Roberts is? His latest novel, Land of the Headless takes its name from a story you don\u2019t know by a writer you\u2019ve never heard of, whose lasting claim to a footnote in history is mostly that he went to school with Pushkin, someone you\u2019ve probably never read. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":896,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[8,15,10],"tags":[69,43,46,71],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/landoftheheadless.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s27AP7-895","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=895"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":898,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895\/revisions\/898"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}