Customer Reviews

Signs of Life

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

M. John Harrison first published the story that would become Signs of Life in Omni magazine. You can find the original story (titled "Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring") online at Infinity Plus magazine, and I think it might be a better use of your time. Just about everything that is good and moving about Signs of Life can be found in that earlier work. Harrison's additions - in particular two secondary characters who grate and annoy and end up doing very little - drag the story down. The result is slow and at times too mannered - the kind of writing that works in a short form but bogs down a novel.

Whichever version you read, the story at the core of Signs of Life is profoundly disturbing, and not a little bit depressing. In Harrison's world, dreamers are sad, dangerous people, consumed by their desires and all too likely to turn destructive. The world's survivors are the ones who don't want too much, or the ones who kill their dreams - and the better part of themselves. Again, this is a point better made in a short story - in the longer novel form, it becomes strident and less credible.

Signs of Life is the second of Harrison's novels that I've read, after the superb and justifiably lauded Light. Perhaps I was doomed to be disappointed by the forced comparison, or perhaps this is simply a lesser effort. Interested readers should probably search out the short story rather than read the book.

More than anything else, Isobel Avens wants to fly. That desire, not always shown openly, quietly chips away at her beneath the pages. At times it seemed Isobel's story was being told indirectly, using profound parts of other character's lives and personalities to explain her own. Everything felt important - every statement, every event, every visual. In some way, they all related back to Isobel and her desperate yearning for flight. Harrison is a master at sculpting deep characters and significant moments. In Signs of Life he has created an atmosphere heavy with a sense of wanting more than what is possible: from lovers, from friends, and from life. I can't say I fully understand what this book is about: unattainable dreams - maybe. Dependent personalities - could be. All I know is that is was beautiful to read, very memorable, and certainly worth recommending.

I really liked Harrison's gloomy '70s novels, the Viriconium stuff as well as _The Committed Men_, and _The Centauri Device_. I'd all but lost track of him, though, except for a few short stories, before _Signs of Life_ was published.

It's a strange novel, ultimately quite affecting, though I admit I didn't quite "get" it all. The genre is rather odd: sort of an SF analog to Magical Realism: that is to say, SFnal things happen (or, rather, one SFnal thing), but the explanation might as well be a typical Magical Realist explanation for Fantastical events.

Anyway: the story is the first person narrative of one Mick "China" Jones, a middle-aged Englishman. It seems to be set in the early '90s. China is involved with a very unpleasant character named Choe Ashton: the two of them run a shady biological courier and toxic waste disposal business. China falls in love with Isobel Avens (a significant last name, that), a much younger woman. After some happy years together, her dreams of flight, as well as possibly her unhappiness with China's dealings with Choe, begin to drive her away, finally she leaves him for a doctor who does some advanced bioengineering (here is where the SF theme sneaks in). All comes to a believable and moving and depressing end.

i have not yet read this book but i have a feeling it is going to be good

A disturbing book about a woman who wants to become a bird and her amoral lover. Picked by Graham Evans as one of his favorite books of 1998. It's short enough to be read in 1 night if you have insomnia. If you didn't finish, you'll automatically have insomnia until you do. It was probably designed to be read in the bathroom, and that's where I'd leave it.