Wednesday, March 01, 2017

2017/22: Occupy Me -- Tricia Sullivan

With clever beaks and wingtips the beings who made me compile masks made of human skin, made of feathers, made of biological circuits: mitochondrial turbine engines and electron pumps. Their masks are made of darkness pregnant with radio, the slow deep turning of long wavelength light. They wear these masks and they hop around a ragged fire that drinks up the foreign atmosphere.

Pearl is a flight attendant: also, an angel, though her wings are usually hidden in a higher dimension. She doesn't need to eat or to sleep, but she does need to move heavy things: the heavier the better. She works for the Resistance, a shadowy movement that tries to advance humanity by tiny, targetted acts of kindness. Pearl had another mission once, but she can't recall what it is. She's lost something, or something's been stolen from her.

Dr Kiri Sorle is a respected orthopaedic surgeon who's currently employed as personal physician to Austen Stevens, a dying oil tycoon. Sorle grew up in -- and was 'rescued' from -- one of the African states most severely affected by the oil trade: he hates Stevens. But he has other problems: for instance, the sudden appearance of a briefcase he can't open, which he doesn't remember acquiring. And the sense of someone stepping into him from deep within, as though he's 'no more than an extra set of clothes'.

Sorle's story is part of Pearl's, or vice versa: also involved are an extinct pterosaur and a rather charming Scottish vet. The story swoops from a plane over the Atlantic, to the deep past, to a junk yard, to a North Sea oil rig: from colonialism and exploitation to higher dimensions and hypercivilisations. Sullivan's imagery is striking, and I was impressed by her use of first-, second- and third-person narratives.

Occupy Me is clever and funny and moving (and needs Muse as a soundtrack: 'Love is our resistance ...') And it's splendidly, vividly inventive. But I have to admit I didn't fully engage with it -- possibly due to illness -- and finished it with a sense that the multiple plot strands hadn't quite woven together.

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