Reading Geoff Ryman's Air.
I know: it's a bit silly to talk about a book you've only started – I've read about three chapters. It's also the kind of book that is deeply involving; a somewhat dangerous distraction when I've had so much to do – on the other hand many things are done, perhaps I can take a breath for a few days. A book that pulls you into a world... actually certain shows have the same problem, they are too distracting, and working on those two Sondheim shows to finish writing the article was just as emotionally difficult.
However.
The sheer realism of it – and the sense that Ryman has actually gotten much more inside everyday Chinese culture than I ever did, in four years of living in Hong Kong – there is such a sense of understanding people from the inside, and how they understand each other.
And the fear, and the complexity, of what Mae (the main character) is going through – a middle-aged Chinese woman in a tiny village in the middle of Asia, trying to keep from poverty, suddenly faced with the shock of a universal, mind-based version of the Web. Trying to keep her balance between past and present, and an utterly confusing future....
So many passages in this book that make me think: I didn't pay enough attention when I lived in Hong Kong – the memory of walking up one of those steep hills along a street at night, garish streetlights and quiet as it was where my apartment was (sah wan ging, Yee Sap Sam Ho – that was my address in Cantonese, I needed to know it for taxi drivers, including the right intonations). The barking dogs (dogs that had escaped their owners), the eroded tracks, the huge, isolated apartment buildings. The beaches, the hills, the rocks....
Perhaps I'm writing about it to record the reaction to being in the midst of the book: not being finished, not some book review or post-reading reflection; but the sheer vividness of being drawn into another world, and so very well, so honestly.
Comments