Xorandor

REVIEW

This marks something of a radical departure for Brooke-Rose: an experiment with straightforward linear narrative, a story with an easily identifiable beginning, middle and end, presented in that order! What's more, the opening has an unmistakable feel of E. Nesbit around it, as two unusually self-sufficient children, the twins Jip and Zab, describe their encounter with a mysterious - but profoundly intelligent - talking rock in a ruined Cornish castle.

Naturally, there's a bit more to it than that, as the story evolves into a kind of science-fiction "first-contact" structure with vaguely Doctor Who overtones, and Brooke-Rose has fun with the linguistic possibilities opened up by dialogue between a silicon-based lifeforms and a pair of computer-obsessed twins - we are constantly zig-zagging between the woolly logic of English and the more precise world expressible in a computer language rather like BASIC (although I've never come across a computer language that needed the ENDJOKE keyword...). And even in English we are in the world of the twins' private language, replete with computer- or tech-derived exclamations like "maxint", "boolesup" and "megavolt". Leaping leptons!

The rocks turn out to live off radiation, with a dangerous appetite for alpha particles, but they also like to tune into broadcast channels. The one they meet is named XORANDOR by the kids, but the scientists talk about alphaphagai and the press have soon turned this into alphaguys. Which brings in further possibilities for Brooke-Rose to bring the subject around to the problems of nuclear waste and atomic weapons, and the glorious opportunity for a rock that has found its way into a nuclear reactor to go rogue, identifying with Lady Macbeth...

Great fun, and probably the most accessible of the CBR novels I've read to date, if you can cope with 1980s-style program listings.

ENDREVIEW

Verbivore

This book takes up the story - for, yes, there is a story this time, too, if not quite such a straightforward one - about 25 years after the events of Xorandor (which would be just about now, I suppose...). It takes for granted that the reader has already read Xorandor, and also brings back Mira Enketai from Amalgamemnon, but you don't really need much previous information about her.

There have been a series of unexplained failures of radio communications around the world, which gradually build up into a total blackout. It seems that something is eating our words out of the ether, and it starts to look as though it might have something to do with the silicon-based creatures from last time: could the alphaphagai somehow have mutated into logophagai?

To make it more fun for us, Brooke-Rose goes back to the trick of using unflagged changes of narrator, as the story is told by Mira, the now grown-up twins Jip and Zab, the microwave engineer Tim (now head of the BBC), the playwright Perry Hypsos (formerly known as Perry Striker), and two fictional characters from one of Perry's radio plays (one of them a unit of measurement...). And a few other people...

It's an interesting idea, and Brooke-Rose was surely quite prescient in putting her finger on how ill-equipped a tech-based society is to cope with the failure of a basic technology that everything else relies on: the result of her verbivore-imposed radio silence is a bit like the panic we actually experience whenever there is an Icelandic volcano or an inconveniently-located war shutting down aviation. Or when LibraryThing goes down for half an hour.

But the core of the book seems to be about information overload and redundancy in the modern world. Do we really need to hear every news story a dozen times in slightly different wording, or every contentless pop song a thousand times? And what are we not listening to any more whilst our senses are bombarded with all that? What is all that negentropy costing us? Fascinating to see how Brooke-Rose develops that idea at a moment when the internet has not really got going (no, the Sir Tim in the book doesn't seem to have anything to do with that Sir Tim) and when mobile phones were only just beginning to be a concept. Neither play a role in the book: Brooke-Rose imagines us in the early 21st century reading ebooks on screen, but they come on diskettes.

As usual, the text is full of postmodern verbal jokes, there's a slightly updated version of the Jip/Zab twidiolect, and the alert will spot all sorts of other things flashing past. Just for instance, Zab has become an MEP (or "Euromp" in the language of the book): Brooke-Rose imagines that the eternal nonsense of the Brussels-Strasbourg-Luxembourg shuttle will have been solved by the creation of a European Capital District ("le Washington d'ici") in Charlemagne's old city, with a splendid new European Parliament "bubble" in the Soers district of Aachen. And if you read her description of the site attentively and look at the map, you'll realise that it's the very spot where, at the time she was writing, a splendid new prison was being built for the city of Aachen... ( )