Monday, October 5, 2020

Foe

Title: Foe
Author: Iain Reid

Junior and Hen, a couple living on an isolated farm in the near future, are suddenly informed that Junior is being conscripted into a two-year space exploration program. During his absence, the agency will provide a synth/replicant that looks just like him, to take care of Hen and keep her company. As the government agent regularly visits the couple and peppers them with strangely personal questions, Junior starts to suspect the program is not what it claims, and something more sinister is happening. At that point, I was figuring either (A) the protagonist, Junior, would turn out to have been a synth the whole time, or (B) he’d go away and when he came back his wife would have been replaced with a synth. I must be some kind of goddamn genius, because ladies and gentlemen: It’s both. For all the predictability of the twists, this is still a neat little novel that packs a punch, particularly when you go back and review the interactions between notJunior and his wife in a new light, realizing that despite Junior being the “I” of the novel the main character is actually his wife, Hen, grappling with living with this replicant imposter of her husband, with the dissatisfaction that comes when you feel your life is in a rut, everything is routine and one day blurs into the next. It’s essentially a married woman having a mid-life crisis, dressed up in SFnal trappings. The writing is sharp and snappy at first but starts to wear after a while, as all Junior’s three-word declarative sentences get to be a bit monotonous after a bit, and you kind of wish Iain would vary the pace every once in a while. The blunt droning of Junior’s inner monolog isn’t helped by the fact that aside from the two big twists, this short novel is essentially plot free, nothing much happens except !Junior argues with his wife and gets confused and irritated with everyone and everything else and—just as an aside—I empathize 1000% bro, I really do. People are all malfunctioning robots, my guy, there’s no telling what is going on in their faultily-programmed brains. Seriously, I’ve given up trying to understand my fellow human beings, you’re all aliens to me. Anyway, real Junior comes back, unJunior gets deactivated, but then real Junior and his wife fight because he’s a real selfish asshole who really left her to go off on a real two-year space program and she kind of liked the replicant better. So she ups and leaves him, but before Junior realizes what’s happened, the agency quickly subs in a replicant for his wife. Real Junior and unHen waltz off into the sunset, happy in their comforting irreality, their artificial facsimile of a happily married life. I’m not sure the plot makes a whole lot of sense once you know the ending—why tell the replicant about the space program? Why tell him that he is going to be replaced, when he already is the replacement? Why not just have it live a normal life until the real guy comes back? But I get why it’s structured that way, for that little dopamine rush when you figure it out. It’s not a book built for the CinemaSins crowd, and I get that structurally the point is to mislead the reader about what’s going on so you get that Eureka! Moment and all those weird conversations between notJunior and Hen suddenly make sense. Is the real horror the way our lives dissolve into drudgery, the way we exist in order to keep on existing, that any change no matter how dramatic eventually becomes mundane, routine, boring. Is the numbing comfort of the familiar the real foe? I don’t know, you’re the robot aliens. You figure it out.

2 comments:

  1. Dude, I'm telling you. Death of Stalin. Trust me.

    P.s I've been binge reading Dresden Files. It's so good to just get away from all the high falutin philosophy and subtle "this is what I think of this political hot topic" and go with some good ol fashioned pure fun that just stays on track, yknow?

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