Yellow Blue Tibia

[sawyl]

During yesterday's period of convalescence I passed the time reading Adam Roberts' novel Yellow Blue Tibia. The book comes with a mixed reputation. Kim Stanley Robinson reckons that it's good enough for the Booker, but Catherynne Valente reckons that it's patronising and mediocre. So I thought it best to read it for myself and make up my own mind.

The plot, set in the Soviet Union in 1986, is ostensibly the memoirs of the lapsed science fiction writer Konstantin Svorecky. After a brief period of success in the 1940s, when he and a group of his fellow SF writers were recruited to work on one of Stalin's secret projects involving a fictional UFO invasion, Svorecky has spent most of the last 40 years in an alcoholic haze, only finally sobering up after accidentally setting fire to his head in a vodka related accident.

The story proper begins when Konsty, fresh from a session translating between a grumpy Russian apparatchik and a pair of American Scientologists, happens to bump into a former colleague, Ivan Frankel, from his days working for Stalin. Frankel, now some sort of official, tells Konstantin that not only are they being invaded by UFOs but invasion is following the same form as the story they created for Stalin forty years before. Not surprisingly, Svorecky rejects this as absurd and attempts to continue with his life as normal.

But, this being an absurdist novel, he quickly finds himself at the mercy of events. His taxi refuses to taken him home, instead taking him to a chess club where he is forced to give a lecture on alien abduction; he then finds himself at the mercy of the militia and, later, the KGB, when a member of the chess club who also happens to be one of the two Americans he met earlier in the afternoon, is murdered by means unknown. After an unlike escape from custody and a farcical car chase across Russian and Ukraine, Svorecky finds himself frantically trying to stop a conspiracy he doesn't believe in. Things end with Svorecky's death. Or maybe they don't. Events jumps forward and back in time. There is metatextuality. Quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation are invoked. The narrator is unreliable. Thing may or may not make sense. And the centre most definitely cannot hold.

Despite enjoying the book, I find myself rather agreeing with Valente about the treatment of the Russian characters. Svorecky has a nice line in deadpan irony — surely the only way to deal with the absurdities of late Soviet Communism when looking the wrong way at a commissar could have you shipped off to Siberia at a moments notice — but his voice doesn't come across as terribly Russian. His word choices, particularly when he is speaking English, don't convince — although charitably, this might down to his second wife's copy-editing of the manuscript — and nor do some of his mannerisms. Saltykov, the taxi driver, is also very roughly handled. Suffering from what is supposed to be Aspergers, his inability to understand Svorecky's constant irony makes him a reasonable comic foil, but he has little character beyond that and feels underdrawn. And the less said about the use of Cyrillic, the better.

But it's not all bad. The narrative is consistently funny and there are some quite wonderful scenes, including a particularly delightful interrogation scene when an overstretched militia man finds himself forced to take both the good and bad cop roles, accidentally the tape off with every polite question and on again with every threat. And there are puns. Many puns. Some in Russian. Bad Russian. Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your prejudices...