Personally, i struggle to ‘relate’ to literature. It’s not a way of engaging with books that comes naturally to me. The last character i remember finding ‘relatable’ in a book was John Grimes in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain, the tension between ego and anxiety and sex in a small church world reaching out to me vividly at the age of 16-17, about to leave a small church world of my own. Now i suspect a lot of Baldwin’s concerns and nuances probably flew over my head, but honestly, it’s been nearly a decade, i don’t really remember. i do remember the sense of spiritual breakthrough at the novel’s climax, like a storm breaking, John stepping out of his father’s long shadow. Without revisiting the book, i would bet that this says as much about me as the text; i was probably looking for something like that when i found it.
In reality though, the storm rarely seems to break, does it?
The events of Serious Weakness take place against the backdrop of extreme climate events, both as background - Trianon’s work as an art conservator is made possible by numerous galleries moving their collections inland to escape rising sea levels; “Old stuff is so much harder to get now” - and as narrative, forcing the events of the novel, driving the characters out of penthouse party onto the road and up to secluded woodland cabins. Piling up on the page like uncollected bin bags, the disasters of the past snowball as you’re dragged from scene to scene;
Rain without end, massive snow melts, relentlessly sweeping the state clean, the worst disaster to hit the state in colonial memory, and that was a small flood compare to the devastation hinted at in sedimentary layers, ARkStorm, but no one wants to hear that hydrodoomer floodfag shit, and maybe he’ll die before it happens, which looks more likely with every minute—
The effect is beyond atmospheric. Trianon’s world is shrinking all around him, battered from all sides, between the floods and the brutal violence enacted on him by his kidnapper, Insul.
When i say Trianon is the first character i’ve encountered in nearly a decade that i ‘relate’ to, i want to be clear about what i do not mean. i don’t want anyone (especially not strangers) drawing equivalencies between plot events and my life experiences. My dad was not a right-wing podcaster; i have never worked in modelling, or acting, or art; i have never been kidnapped. But my response to Trianon as a character is visceral. i instantly recognised in him something real, if not ‘myself’ (i’ve never had a very tight grasp on my own identity) then maybe a kind of archetypal condition, a different kind of everyman - his mental and physcial awkwardness, his thinly veiled helplessness, his clumsy projection of masculine cool and confidence so easily shattered and surrended to any outside force with will enough to mould him.
Insul is that force. And force is the only language Insul really speaks. As the novel’s undercurrent of sexual violence blisters to the surface, Heartscape writes;
Finally, he manages to speak. “Are you gay?”
Insul finishes scrubbing the floor and tosses the towel aside. “There’s no such thing as gay or straight. There’s only who gives pain and who has to take it.”
“I’m tired of taking it.”
If the core of romance (like its twin sister, abuse) is isolation, there is something deeply romantic about Trinsul. Romance is, in a sense, isolating. The nature of the couple form is such that lovers are, at least at some level, enclosed off from the world, and romantic convention affirms this; “he had eyes for no-one else but me”, “it was like I was the only other person in the room”, etc. Romance, by these conventions, shelters the couple from the storm of social life, and gives them the strength to succeed in society at the same time (“behind every powerful man…”). But Insul is not interested in convention.[1]
And if romance makes a private world for the lovers, then Insul’s cocktail of intoxication, physical brutlity, rape, and coercion, combined with extreme weather events, fuses the two of them together in irreversible damage, apocalyptic in scale. (It is worth adding the context that the world of Serious Weakness is near future, and all the characters in some way refract the intense crisis-fascism of the United States settler colony that exists in that near future.) i don’t want to give spoilers for the ending, because i think it is worth encountering first hand, but it is the closest thing to hope i can imagine, the most brutal kind - not an end to alienation and exile, but a total commitment to it, reciprocally alienated and brutalised, and so endlessly caring in the midst of it. An endless dependence, consumptive, parasitic, but togther. Maybe not very satisfying for a lingering Christian or Hegelian optimism that hopes that all things may be well, but intensely moving for me as someone far too jaded to accept most liberatory promises i encounter.
In the hands of a lesser writer, this would be almost impossible to pull off; how to craft something beautiful from all the violence without justifying it, just another mirror to the brutality of mainstream romance. But Heartscape’s prose is oozingly vivid and endlessly surprising, and her confident use of shifting narrative perspective offers a unique intimacy to the novel’s violence, and to the new worlds and new selves that emerge from it.
You’re scary now. But you didn’t used to be. When you were soft and small, they separated themselves from you, to prove they were human. To prove you weren’t.
They acted like you were scary until you were.
I think there was an age where someone could have done whatever they wanted with you. And they did. And now I’m going to do what I want with you. But not like they did. I hope it’s different enough to end another way.
i hope my words do justice to how much i loved this book.
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[1] i‘d be lying if i didn’t say a significant reason why i read this was this thread from Heartscape’s twitter;
in the way a trad straight romance takes the fear of sexual danger and sublimates it into a noble barbarian/hypnotic pretty boy, hannibal is an autistic romance that takes many aut’s primary experience of relationships (manipulation) and primary deficit (socialization), and sublimates these into a highly aesthetic, sensitive manipulator who doesn’t want to socialize you outward into the normie mainstream but inward into a unique and private socialization just for you centred around a common special interest (amazing gay murders)
This has rolled around my brain at least twice a week since i first encountered it.
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Thank you for reading.
For another, very different piece of fiction playing with themes of love, violence, and alienation, can I recommend, ‘Dear Comrade Winter’, by Yoshimired. It’s about a romance between two old comrades during the transition to communism and the abolition of the state. [link]
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