'Brasyl', the excellent new time and genre-splicing novel from Ian McDonald,
bills itself as “BladeRunner in the tropics.” The
comparison is disingenuous (and clichéd): where BladeRunner
married a noir sensibility with dystopian manga visuals, McDonald’s
novel exults in a bigger-brighter-faster cyberpunk ethos. It is also
unnecessary. 'Brasyl' presents a world (in fact a world of worlds) completely
of its author’s own messy, fractal imagining – a rainforest
society poised between fecundity and rot where Indios shamans
let slip the veils of reality, Portuguese priests establish their own
earthly Cidade de Deos, reality TV producers rake the slums
to slake the public thirst for exhibitionist depravity, and the cyber
angels of perpetual surveillance stream the skies, watchful, recording
all. There are many sights to see in 'Brasyl'.
The novel consists of three distinct stories in which connections increasingly
appear. The first occurs in present-day Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Marcelina
Hoffman, an ambitious reality TV producer looking for her next great
show after such hits as Filthy Pigs, Kitsch and Bitch, and The Real
Sex in the City, decides to track down a soccer goalkeeper blamed for
Brazil’s loss of the 1950 World Cup. Her boss, a pretentious technophile
who spews faux-hip IM-speak such as IPTRB (It Presses the Right Buttons)
and IRTAMD (I’m Ready to Announce My Decision), gives her the
green light. She begins to trace the former goalie’s whereabouts
but is interrupted when a doppelganger emerges bent on sabotaging her
career.
Twenty-five years in the future, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas is
also encountering doppelgangers. He falls in love and goes on the run
with one of a woman named Fia Kishida, “just a plain quantum-computing
postgrad specializing in multiversal economic modeling,” who is
murdered. It is difficult to hide, they find, when nanobot surveillance
drones swarm the sky and coordinate with ubiquitous RFID chips on the
ground. Fia II explains that her world is “less paranoid. We don’t
watch each other all the time. But it’s more . . . broken . .
. . . We leave bits of ourselves all over the place: memories, diaries,
names, experiences, knowledge, friends, personalities even.”
The third story takes place in the 18th century and follows Father Luis
Quinn, a Jesuit with a violent past and a facility with languages, on
his mission to find a renegade priest who is building his own church
in the rainforest’s heart of darkness. Quinn has requested a difficult
task and his prayer is answered. He meets a French scientist who shows
him the science-ruled future: a primitive Governing Engine. “A
universe ruled by number, running like punched cards through the loom
of God.” Earlier, he witnesses the conquistadores, after a plague
exterminates all beasts of burden, reduce the natives to human mules
– a repudiation of the Enlightenment creed that nature had not
contrived to have some men born with saddles on their backs and others
“booted and spurred” to ride them. Father Diego, Father
Luis’s prey, is no more forgiving: “Citizens of heaven,
subjects of Christ the King . . . . They come to me as animals, deceptions
in the shape of men. I offer them the choice Christ offers all: Accept
his standard and . . . become men, become souls. Or choose the . . .
inevitable lot of the animal, to be yoked and bound to a wheel.”
While there is enough material here for a quite longer book, McDonald
knows that not every meal need be a banquet. 'Brasyl' is, thus, a repast
meant to delight and surprise not to sate the senses. Those appreciative
of the author’s flair but harboring larger appetites may enjoy
McDonald’s 'River
of Gods' – twice as long but just as deep.
As the novel progresses, the different characters with their stories,
their lives, their settings, and their worlds swirl together across
space and time. This is a tricky task, but McDonald succeeds because
of his ability to ground the reality of his foreign locales with evocative
descriptions. “Rio had always been a city of shifting realities,
hill and sea, the apartment buildings that grew out of the sheer rock
of the morros, the jarring abutments of million-real houses with favela
newlywed blocks, piled one on top of another. And where the realities
overlap, violence spills through.” Nor is life easier for those
exiled to the jungles of “green and mold, water and heat and broken
light, mists and vapors, and the flat, gray meanders of endless rivers.
Canoes and bows and creatures heard but seen only in glimpses, a world
without vistas, its horizon as distant as the next tree, the next vine,
the next bend in the river. A vegetable world, vast and slow.”
Like the characters, the reader comes to realize that “the flimsiest
of girder works over the deepest of abysses, that this world, these
streets, the skirt of rooftops spread out beneath like a first Communion
frock, the blue sea and the blue sky and the green forest of the hills,
even the soccer ball . . . carried with the clumsiness of a geek-boy,
were a weave of words and numbers . . . . An improvised found-source
favela solution.” With his shimmering visions and sprawling prose,
McDonald is both a creator and destroyer of worlds. It is a pleasure
to watch him at work.