Page 6, 27th January 1989

27th January 1989

Page 6

Page 6, 27th January 1989 — Bleak and cruel in a cheerless new world
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Bleak and cruel in a cheerless new world

Kairos by Gwyneth Jones (Unwin, £1 2.95)
Cristina Odone THERE are moments in life when you suspect yourself of harbouring old-fashioned notions: modern fashions that raise your eyebrow, current modes that appall you, wellpraised books that leave you cold — such encounters jolt you, much like a train whistling at a station, into fear of being left behind.
Reading Kairos, by the widely-acclaimed sci-fi authoress, Gwyneth Jones, stirred all those familiar feelings of anachronism. Here is a futuristic world where men are called Luci and women Otto, where war is in the air and pollution in the streets, where children are loathsome critters with loathsome names like Vixen (!) and Candide.
The Britain that emerges from these pages makes one Icing for the co-operative cheer of 1984 or Clockwork Orange: gun-toting policemen, swordcarrying angels, censors, veiled figures and a drug called Kairos that makes heroin look like milk. Add to this a Si Paul's that has been emptied of its interior, an EEC-Israel pact, and an organisation ("Breakthrough") whose rightwing extremism is enforced by guardian angels in gold paint and leather, and you can see why Mrs T doesn't seem so bad after all.
Yet it is not this dire picture, this bleak and cruel world that proves so indigestible for the hopelessly outmoded like myself. Equally ominous landscapes had been conjured up by Orwell and Burgess (and, more recently by Margaret Atwood in her Handmaids Tale, and had held me captive, quaking and awed in their gruesome worlds. My difficulty with the apocalyptic vision presented in Kairos lies not in the squalid backdrop, but rather in the characters who move against it.
Here is a brief run-through of these amiable protagonists: Otto, a strong-willed (and self righteous) crank, who happens to be a lesbian single mother running an "alternative" bookshop; Sandy, her lover, capable of great selfishness as well as great love but, when push comes to shove, always somewhat overshadowed by either Otto or Otto's son, the tough little Candidate; James the Nigerian homosexual model whose weakness catapults Otto into troubled days and nights; Luci (short for Lucifer) a nasty narcissistic bag of bones whose fecklessness loses its (always dubious) charm by page 75.
Now, I am not arguing that these characters hold no interest for me because of their homosexuality. God forbid: some of the most exciting and unforgettable figments of literary imaginations have, after all, been gay — from Homer's Achilles to Proust's Baron de Charlus. These were universal types, more-real-than-real, fully flawed but virtue-laden as well. A far cry from the uninteresting, unredeemable trendy caricatures that Ms Jones throws upon us.
As it is, I find myself as incapable of embracing these personages as I am of donning a puff-ball skirt, as loathe to spend time with them as I am to keep a crystal in my pocket for good luck.
The reviewer is Washington correspondent of the Catholic Herald.




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