New at Splice, here’s my review of Jaimie Batchan’s début novel, Siphonophore, which is narrated by a man named MacGregor who knows himself to be a character in a book written by another man referred to as “the Creator”. Although the novel begins as a fairly straightforward account of the disastrous Darién settlement of 1699,
Siphonophore [eventually] metamorphoses into something more interesting than historical fiction, if still recognisable: a metafiction of the sort in which a character tussles with an omnipotent author. The conceit, so far, is nothing new. Take it as the stuff of philosophy and you get Luigi Pirandello. Take it as material for playfulness and you get At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and Mulligan Stew (1979). Or bear down on the stasis of the narrator’s situation — his awesome displacement combined with his stationary existence — and you get something like Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama (1956) or Gerald Murnane’s ‘The Battle of Acosta Nu’ (1985). But Batchan deftly avoids walking the same path as these forebears by introducing a new element, a new source of tension. A third of the way into Siphonophore, MacGregor learns that his Creator has been diagnosed with an illness that will slowly, agonisingly, drain the life from him. The illness is known as Prionic Fatal Insomnia, a real condition that causes sufferers to stop sleeping until, over time, fatigue compounds fatigue and finally results in cognitive failure, organ breakdown, death. So, on one level, Siphonophore straddles two distinct periods in time as well as two consciousnesses — although, rather than permitting the Creator a chance at narration, his twenty-first century worldliness is sort of imported into MacGregor’s thoughts as prior knowledge which he feels to be alien to his experience. But then, ambitiously, Siphonophore introduces a ticking time bomb that brings these two characters into conflict.
Infinite Patience 