As well as continuing with my occasional crime blog (next up, Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me) I intend to run an irregular series of posts throughout 2014 on Women in SF. I want to kick off by talking just a little bit about Joanna Kavenna’s 2010 novel The Birth of Love, an exquisitely written four-stranded narrative that has a strong science fictional element within the text itself but more importantly – and this is always a key thing for me – whose overall effect is speculative, through its author’s willingness to experiment with form, and with ideas.
In spite of her being named as one of 2013’s Best of Young British Novelists, Kavenna is not nearly so well known as she should be. Her prose is unshowy and concise, direct and often forthright. It is also some of the most seamlessly well crafted and elegant prose I’ve encountered in ages. There is no attempt at gimmickry or what Chris always refers to as ‘funny voices’. Reading her, you come away with the inescapable conclusion that Kavenna has shared the information, the ideas, the emotions that were most on her mind at the time of writing, and the word ‘shared’ is important here, because that’s how intimate and intense the Kavenna reading experience feels.
This is a writer who was born to write. I’ve been drawing real inspiration from her clear aversion to anything resembling ‘rules’ in writing – she’s not afraid to expound ideas, to chart her thinking process, to let the novel take the form it needs to take. I have the feeling there’s a stubbornness behind the elegance, and that gives me great pleasure.
The first of the four narrative strands in The Birth of Love deals with the story of Dr Ignaz Semmelweis, a nineteenth-century physician who changed the face of obstetrics and indirectly saved the lives of millions of women. We also meet Brigid, a woman in her forties about to give birth to her second child in the year 2009, Prisoner 730004, a reluctant political dissident in the year 2153, and Michael Stone, a middle-aged writer who lives across town from Brigid and whose debut novel The Moon is based around the life of Dr Semmelweis. When we first meet Michael, he’s being dragged along to a ‘celebratory’ literary lunch by his agent Sally, who is at pains to impress upon him how difficult it will be for an ‘unpalatable’ writer such as himself to find a wide audience:
“Men are unlikely to read a book about childbirth. It’s unfortunate, but there’s not much to be done. Women might just, but they’ll get put off by your obscure doctor. And the title, too – the title is rather awkward” But he didn’t want to change the title. “It sounds like a dreary symbolist novel,” said Sally. “And this rambling narrator, who seems mad himself. It’s as if you want to talk about everything, in one book. You can’t talk about everything in one book. It’s boring and it bores the reader.” (p103)
Reading this, you can only suppose that Kavenna is drawing heavily upon her own experience of such depressing – and depressingly common – encounters between writers and the literary infrastructure that purports to support them. This chapter is very funny but it’s awful too – and Michael’s fumbling yet passionate defence of his work is in a weird kind of way a hero’s solliloquy:
“I was trying to write about conviction…” – and the table nodded – “… about those who propose something that is not generally thought, and how they are dealt with. About those who are convinced of what they say, to the point that they continue to speak, even when everyone has turned away. And I thought that… all things being unknowable, all real things, all real mysteries, then…well, who can stand, really, and say: ‘I know: I understand’! I wanted to write… something about this… impulse… to tell others what is true.” (p99)
This ‘impulse to tell others what is true’ is what lies at the heart of all serious fiction, the idea that is served by all four narrative strands of Kavenna’s novel and that forms its core.
In Brigid’s strand of The Birth of Love, we observe her young son Calumn learning to speak, as we all must speak out to preserve our integrity, as every writer must struggle to express themselves in creating true work.
SF should welcome Kavenna’s interest in speculative themes with upraised hands and shouts of joy. She is so exactly the kind of writer we want and need on-side.