Monsters, anonymous: Helene Wecker's The Golemn and the Jinni

Must we be who we are?

We like to think we make choices all through our lives, but mostly we make the same choice over and over again. So many of our inclinations are baked into us from before we can remember, and we either surrender to our nature or struggle against it our whole lives. In Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni this dilemma faces not only the eponymous monster protagonists, but the Jewish and Syrian immigrants of turn-of-the-century New York they find themselves among. 

Chava, a golem, was made to be the obedient and faithful wife of a European Jewish man named Rotfeld. But Rotfeld died less than a day after bringing her to life on a boat to America, so she soon finds herself alone in the Jewish community on the Lower East Side. Her nature is to serve and obey, and without a master she is assaulted by the needs and wants of everyone around her. She is only saved when the kindly rabbi Avram Meyer recognizes what she is and brings her home.

Ahmad, a Jinni, springs from a lamp when it is repaired by the tinsmith Boutros Arbeely in the now-vanished Little Syria in the West Village. After more than a millennium of imprisonment under circumstances he can't recall he finds himself in a weakened state, bound by an iron band around his wrist to an unknown master. This goes against his nature, which is to drift in freedom above the desert, with no allegiance to anyone. 

Every monster in a book is at least partially a metaphor for something else. Godzilla was partially the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Lestat was partially a gay man in the time of AIDS. Chava and Ahmad are partially newcomers to America, dropped in a bustling city that is only a little bit stranger to them than to the thousands of other immigrants around them. Among other things, this book is a well-researched portrait of its time and place, reason enough to enjoy it. 

But every monster should also be a monster, something other than human, and Chava and Ahmad are. Even their names are simply conventions to allow them to relate to the humans around them; neither being feels especially attached to this central identifying aspect of the human experience. It is a challenge particular to the author of speculative fiction to create a being that is not human but nevertheless possessed of will and desire and needs that engage the reader and drive the plot. And this is Wecker's real strength.

The golem and the jinni have desires and needs, but they are not people's desires. Neither, however, are they stereotypical straightjackets, for each questions and struggles against their urges, just as all the other characters struggle with their own. They each have superhuman strengths and weaknesses, and they fight not to be confined by them. Most of all they live in danger of their inhuman natures being revealed.

Ahmad, a being of fire, can melt metal at a touch, quite a useful skill to the the tinsmith Arbeely. But he has an artistic temperament and struggles against the boredom of day-to-day craftsmanship. His free spirit constantly leads him to put himself in danger of being discovered as an inhuman being, for example when he seduces an uptown socialite.

Chava, a being of clay, has no such urges. She has a boundless work ethic and endurance and puts it to work as a baker and a seamstress. She has to resist the urge to work all night, which would reveal her own superhuman nature. Her drive is to serve and obey anyone, and she instinctively knows what everyone wants. Worse, she has the potential to go into a killing golem rage which would be catastrophic given her superhuman strength.

As the book progresses Ahmad and Chava find their stories intertwined with each others and many other people, among them a demon-possessed doctor, a passionate social worker who has rejected the faith of his rabbi father, a mysterious rabbi-magician and a mute orphan. In addition to being a portrait of its time and place the book engages us in the life of each of its characters, while also plotting them tightly into a fast-moving adventure which unfolds with mysterious secrets about the past of each monster.

The balance that keeps the book alive is that neither of the monsters is entirely bound by their nature, but nor do they entirely escape it. And in that way they are human after all.

See you on the other side, Vern: The World of the End by Ofir Touche Gafla

About a month ago I attended a 5th birthday party for Tor.com, mostly just to see some friends I expected to be there. At some point they handed out Stubby the Rocket canvas bags, and I grabbed one quickly before they were gone. The bag contained a copy of John Scalzi's "The Human Division," a Stubby the Rocket pin, and an ARC of a translation from Hebrew of a bestselling Isreali speculative fiction book. This excited me for several reasons, not least because I'm not the sort of person who gets ARCs.

Ofir Gafla's The World of the End is an archetypal story: a man travels into the land of the dead in search of his love. The classical version of this story is that of Orpheus traveling to Hades in search of Eurydice. Orpheus travels to the land of the dead magically, and is preceded by his music. Ben, the protagonist of The World, has no magic. A year after the death of his wife Marian he goes the old-fashioned way: he blows his brains out. His suicide is as dramatic as he could make it, occurring at the end of a posthumous birthday party for Marian to which he'd invited all of their mutual friends.

A better precedent for TWOTE might be Richard Matheson's What Dreams May Come. But unlike Matheson's work, there is no divide between Heaven and Hell: everyone goes to the same place. Whether that place is more like the latter or the former is open to question. The newly dead are presented with an orientation in which the eternity they have to look forward to is presented as a perfect paradise: You don't need to eat or sleep unless you want to; everyone has a free place to live and public transportation; there is unlimited free entertainment of every type, including a "Vie-deo" of every moment of your lifetime, and you have a special "Godget" that allows you to set your own personal weather.

But in Gafla's novel nothing is what it looks like, and the cracks appear pretty quickly. Ben's first day in Heaven is ruined particularly when the wife he killed himself for doesn't show up to greet him. In fact, she's nowhere to be found; she might not even be dead at all. What happened to Marian is a central mystery of the rest of the book.

I say a mystery, but far from the only one. Ben's story is interwoven with that of many other people, living and dead. All of them are connected to Ben's story, though how they're connected isn't always immediately obvious. Many of them are more entertaining than Ben is. There is the cranky old artist Kolanski, who hates to draw portraits. There is the nurse Ann, known behind her back as AnnPlugged because she gets off on disconnecting people from their life support. There's the Mad Hop, an afterlife private dick of questionable talent that Ben takes on to help him find Marian. There's the twins Shahar and Adam, an asexual method actor and a pedophile video game designer. There's Yonatan, a man who lives a lifestyle that keeps him on the edge of death not because he thinks it can't happen to him but because he knows it will, and who is drawn into an online romance with a mysterious woman over a shared obsession with Salman Rushdie.

Gafla comes back to Rushdie frequently, and it's clear that he's a model. Like Rushdie Gafla writes in a distant third person with a lot of authorial interjections, in a style that John Gardner called the "essayist narrator." Like Rushdie Gafla's not afraid to go off on long tangents. And like Rushdie Gafla favors a tumbling manic storyline with a million dominoes all tumbling towards a mysterious end.

I have twice called the book a mystery, but that doesn't fully describe it. Neither Ben nor the Mad Hop seem to be making any particular progress on figuring out what happened to Marian, and Ben's story  is more of a posthumous picaresque. He stumbles across all kinds of strange people's afterlives, not least of which is Marilyn Monroe because she shares his dead wife's initials.

Nevertheless a mystery is being uncovered, one that goes beyond what happened to Marian. It turns out whole branches of family trees (literal trees, in this case), are being prematurely lopped off. The agents uncovering it are among those known as an "alias" (what is the plural of that?), which is the closest thing this version of heaven has to an angel. What exactly an alias is is not revealed to us until much later.

The World of the End is rollicking and playful, hilarious in some places, painfully sad in others, and frustrating and boring in more than a few places as well. It should be no surprise that a novel about life after death is a novel of loss. But the loss of this novel is much more than the loss of the dead to the living, or the loss of life to the dead. As Ben uncovers more and more about Marian he learns that there is no greater loss than that of the way things were for us just yesterday, or at least the way we thought they were. Again and again characters in this book cling desperately to the past, only to cause it to drift further and further away. For other characters the loss is getting what you think you want, only to discover that it's not what you thought it was at all.

Though no one really gets what they want in this book, it's not hopeless. But the hope in it is a painful kind, the kind that comes after you accept you've lost everything you cared about. Then again, if there is an afterlife, that's exactly what it would have to be.