Author Archives: Alison

The House Tibet

This is one of the novels I’d take with me to a desert island. It’s also a worthy addition to my “Attack of the Zombie Girls” thread, featuring as it does a girl who is not passive, though she is, at the beginning of the book, a victim. I dislike the cover of the Graywolf Press edition, much as I appreciate their publishing the book. Those distorted, blobby figures in vaguely erotic grapplings have little to do with the story. I looked for the original cover, a red, green and white twining of vines and blossoms, but could not turn it up, since publication predated the pictoral web by several years.

The setting is Australia, and the novel starts, jarringly, with the rape of thirteen-year-old Victoria by her father. Unable to get the women of her family to listen to her, she runs away, renames herself Morgan Le Fay Christie, and lives on the beach/streets, in squats on land and at sea, in a brothel (as a laundress), and finally in a rented room left her by a friend. Along the way she finds friends and protectors amongst a group of homeless kids, the laundrymistress and madam of the brothel, and most importantly Xam, an eighty-year-old English lawyer living in the boarding house Tibet. Her fellow travellers are her brilliant, silent eight-year old brother, James, renamed Max, and in time, his cat, Bobby Deerfield. At Tibet, encouraged by Xam, she starts to write down her story, which is the novel.

A few days ago, it occurred to me how much the themes of silencing and story weave through this novel. In the first few chapters, Victoria is repeatedly silenced, by her own inability to describe what has happened to her, by her mother’s first reflex rejection, by her grandmother’s prim denial, and by her aunt’s appropriation of Victoria’s story for her own psychodrama. Angel, Allie, and Marcelle, the street/beach kids who do hear her, are all silenced in turn: Angel by the drug addition that takes her away into new and chancy company, and Allie by the corrupt hospital administration that claims she signed her newborn baby over for adoption. Marcelle’s silencing is the cruellest of all: she drowns, and the
drowning is covered up by the man she was sailing with. The teenagers are not alone in being silenced. The father of the young Asian runaway, Josh, has been sent to prison on false charges when he refused to pay protection money. Victoria’s mother, a potter, has endured a creative silencing in her marriage to a man who denigrates her work. And then there is Max, who has been rendered literally mute by the tensions in his home.

But the characters still tell their stories, creatively and literally. To amuse themselves on the dark beach at night, the young runaways elaborate a “screenplay” featuring an heroic female Resistance fighter. Allie finds a place with a theatre troupe who perform a feminist version of the creation myth (in mime) entitled “Careful what you call your daughters”, warning against female submissiveness. Victoria’s mother begins creative work again, inspired by the theme of a mother’s search for her lost child.

Max discovers language, his first word a warning to his sister to flee as they are discovered in one of their squats. Faced with the threat of returning to the home that oppressed him, he so convincingly enacts his distress that their mother relents. Allie tells the story of her kidnapped baby to her daring theatre troupe friends, who take action, and to Xam, who ensures her the protection of the law, and thereby regains her son. Although there may never be a legal case made against Marcelle’s boyfriend, between Xam and the youth worker who eventually gains Morgan’s confidence, he will not escape the damage to his reputation. And Victoria’s story is finally told, to her street friends, to Xam, to Ingrid Frew, and to the reader. It’s a splendid book, told in a distinctive, colloquial young voice.

No Cure for the Future

As someone with a background in medicine and bioscience, I am beginning to develop the same testiness about Frankenstein that I did about The Lord of the Flies as a teenager. That book seemed to be constantly thrust on us as approved reading, with a persistence that to skeptical sixteen-year-old me suggested my elders’ disguised hostility. See, said the subtext, you’re all savages. Sometimes it seems the way Frankenstein keeps coming up in literary discussions of medicine suggests a similar hostility.

Which is all preamble to No Cure for the Future, a collection of essays on the subject of medicine and science fiction, edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser, in which, yup, Frankenstein comes up once again.

I do wonder whether a collection on, say, space exploration, would give quite so much prominence to the nineteenth century’s balloons and cannons, as discussion on medical SF gives to its equivalents: Maupassant, Conrad. The one author who definitely looks forward as opposed to back or sideways is Greg Bear, in describing the future he posited in \ (Slant), and Queen of Angels, where he came up against the implications of psychiatry’s potential perfectability of mental health. My reading of \ will await a future entry.

In their interesting “No Cure for the Future: How Doctors Struggle to Survive in Science Fiction”, Kirk Hampton and Carol MacKay argue that the portrait of the doctor in SF is of an impotent, compromised individual. The doctor in the future is an anachronism – a helpless primitive, baffled by miracles, or alternatively protected by a local “time bubble”, an environment or circumstances in which their particular (old fashioned) skills are useful. Stories involving doctors invariably involve what they characterize as “an energy vacuum, a time-lock and a state of social ostracism” – their environment is extremely confined and jeopardized, they are working against time, and they are usually in an isolated or adversarial role. Westfahl’s article on the Sector General stories, “Doctor’s Ordeals: The Sector General Stories of James White”, extends this theme, taking an alternative read of stories that are generally regarded as optimistic, and interpreting the working environment as chaotic and crazymaking!

I wonder if Bear doesn’t have the right of it, though, and the reason that the doctor in SF has to be constrained is not because of their weakness, but of their potential power to defeat the limitations of the fundamental human condition. Pain, disability, weakness, illness, madness, mortality are an intrinsic part of the stories we tell. Can one tell a story without them?

The secret is manganese

I’m intrigued by extremophiles – bacteria that push the limits of the survivable – and a recent research article in PLOS Biology turned up something unexpected behind the mechanism of the radiation resistance (2000x the lethal dose for humans) of Deinococcus radiodurans. Initial work assumed that it had exceptional DNA repair mechanisms, which allowed it to repair the breaks in DNA produced by irradiation. The sequencing of the genome showed DNA repair was no more or less complex or sophisticated at the genomic level than those in other, more fragile, bacteria. The difference may well be in the bacterium’s ability to protect its proteins from radiation damage, so that the DNA-repair enzymes can do their job. D radiodurans has an extremely high manganese concentration, which detoxifies the reactive oxygen intermediates produced by ionizing radiation, combined with a low iron concentration. The combination protects against oxidative damage to proteins.

Imaginary countries

A while back, while in Bolen Books to no good purpose, I expect, I happened on a copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Tales of Angria, a recent edition of the last of her extensive juvenilia, or, alternatively the first of her mature work. The sober cover and Heather Glen’s scholarly introduction suggest that they are to be considered the latter. Glen offers the tales as the response of a sharp, sardonic writerly intelligence to prevailing literary conventions. As a new undergraduate, going wild on my various enthusiasms amongst stacks far removed from my major (Physics, at that time), I worked through much of the collection of books on the Brontës before going on, in zig-zag fashion, to feminism, Ibsen’s plays, Scandinavian women writers, and the films of Ingmar Bergman. Being fascinated by the workings of the imagination, the geography of fantasy, and indeed geography itself, I was intrigued by the Brontës’ imaginary countries, Angria (Charlotte and Branwell), and Gondal (Emily and Anne).

If there were a prose literature for Gondal, as Emily and Anne’s time-capsule diary papers suggests, it has not survived. What has come down to us is the lyrics and ballads written in the voices of the lovers, schemers, fugitives and mourners of Gondal, which include such poems as the elegy that begins, “Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee,” titled “R. Alcona to J. Brenziada.” Various scholars have tried to fit the poems into a linear narrative, on the basis of internal reference, echoes of style and image, references in the scant diary papers, and cryptic titles laced with abbreviation. Frances Ratchford in 1952 published Gondal’s Queen: A novel in verse, in which she proposed that three of the major female voices were in fact one, that Rosina of Alcona was also Augusta Geraldine Almeda, Queen of Gondal. The reconstruction of Gondal that I find transcribed amongst my papers, in tiny handwriting, was WD Padner’s, from A Brontë Companion, which distinguishes the Queen (AGA) and her lover’s wife and rival (Rosina of Alcona). Ratchford’s justification for conflating the characters was reinforced by analogy to the plethora of names and titles in Angria, but I would like to think that the writer who wrote Wuthering Heights, a novel with such gratifying symmetries underlying its structure, would not be so untidy. Then again, she might well have been, as the extravagance of names captured in the diary papers suggests.

The reawakening of interest has caused me to take out of the library Stevie Davies‘ first book on Emily Brontë, and languish once more in envy of her beautiful prose. On my bookshelves I have Jane Gardam’s quirky coming-of-age novel The Summer After the Funeral, in which the self-controlled, clever, “excellent” daughter of an elderly parson finds a likeness to herself in Branwell’s portrait of Emily and decides she has lived before; it makes an intriguing, moving read. I regret not keeping in my collection Ursula Le Guin’s delicately didactic short novel A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else about the passionate friendship between two gifted young people. Ambitious teenage composer Natalie uses Emily Brontë’s poetry to communicate her vision, and emerging scientist Owen had his own imaginary country, named Thorn. I would venture to suggest that Le Guin’s imaginary country was Orsinia, of the Orsinian Tales (also re-borrowed – “An Die Musik” is no less painful to read, and “The Barrow” no less barbarous) and Malafrena. And I have to find a copy of the recently published Emily’s Journal, which gave rise to a radio play aired last year on Radio 4, “Cold in the Earth, and Fifteen Wild Decembers” that posits the origin of Wuthering Heights in a doomed adolescent romance between Emily Brontë and a local weaver’s son. It seems to be an idea that people like, but which leaves me baffled. The complex, cryptic and potent process of transforming the matter of experience into the matter of the novel is much more interesting. Heathcliff was in all likelihood an immigrant from Gondal.

Adrift amongst the mangroves

Back in 2001, on my first trip to New Zealand, I had a chance to go kayaking amongst the mangroves in the Bay of Islands. Recently, I found my notes on mangroves, particularly upon how they handle salt water – I’m always intrigued by life pushing the margins.

The New Zealand mangroves, according to my guidebook, are among the southernmost examples of these trees in the world.  Avicennia marina var resinifera – but the resinifera is a misnomer arising from the finding by Joseph Banks, Captain Cook’s scientific observer, of resin among the roots, resin that comes from kauri trees.  To the Maori they are manawa.  In NZ they’re near their southern limit, a single species out of 55 worldwide (54 in Hogarth, 1999). Around Auckland they’re stunted and impenetrable, but in the bay of Islands they grow up to 15 m.  According to Deanna (the guide), they filter seawater through their roots, but seawater is too salty for them, so they concentrate the salt in certain of their leaves.  The salt is either washed away by a heavy rainfall or the leaves die and drop off.  Mangroves shed constantly. They obtain oxygen through their leaves and through air-roots, which jut up from the mud and are submerged at high tide, so are sealed.  The roots are wide and shallow extending horizontally to up to five times the tree’s upper radius, since the aerobic layer in the mud is very thin.  Mangroves have no rings, and presumably do not have seasonally dictated cycles.  Mangrove seeds, which float, already contain a seedling consisting of two leaves, a stem and a root, so if they fall during low tide and strike solid ground, the seedling can root before the next tide.  If not, if the seed/pod falls into water, it can float for months until it comes to rest.  Among the roots are mangrove seedlings, planted, which can wait in a state of arrested growth for years until one of the trees around it dies.  Mangrove growth is self regulating. Nothing nests in the NZ mangroves, though they do in other mangrove species; however 36 species of fish use the mangroves as a nursery. As the tide receded we could hear the sharp little clicks of exposed shrimp.

Worldwide there are 55 species (54 in Hogarth) of mangroves, of which NZ has one (not exclusive to NZ). They are facultative halophytes, that is they can survive in freshwater but prefer diluted saltwater; in freshwater they are likely to be out-competed. They’re almost exclusively tropical, being frost-intolerant with vulnerable (vivaporous) seedlings, they rarely occur north of the winter position of the 20 C winter isotherm and the number of species decreases as the they approach their northern limit. They grow further south on the eastern margins of landmasses than the western, which reflects ocean circulation and the pattern of warm and cold currents. The highest-latitude species found is a species of Avicennia, in Australia.

Typical mangrove habitats are have periodic tidal inundation, waterlogged soil and fluctuating salinity. The diffusion rate of water is 10 000-fold less than through air, and oxygen movement into the mud is severely limited; mangrove soils are virtually anoxic. Ferric ion is converted to ferrous ion, with release of iron and inorganic phosphates, sulphate to sulphide, carbon dioxide to methane, and there is bacterial conversion of nitrate to nitrogen. Since they live in anaerobic mud, they take in oxygen through arial roots or pneumatrophores.  Black mangroves and white mangroves (including Avicennia), have pneumatophores, red mangroves have prop roots.

There are two principal adverse effects of salt in plants – osmotic stress and the toxicity of Na+ and or Cl-.  Glycophytes are salt-intolerant, whereas halophytes grow fine, and sometimes better, in
salt; there is a continuum from extreme glycophytes to extreme halophytes. Salt avoidance strategies minimize the salt concentration in cells.  Salt tolerance includes physiologic mechanisms and adaptations for maintaining viability with accumulation. Plants can protect themselves by salt exclusion or by ridding themselves of the salt. Exudatives have glandular cells capable of excreting excess salt. Succulants grow where there is no restriction on water – they use increase in water content within large vacuoles to minimize salt toxicity.  Obligatory halophytes require salt; facultative halophytes can live in fresh water.

Various mechanisms are involved in mangroves’ salt tolerance:

  • Salt exclusion – ultrafilters in the plant roots reduce uptake of salt.  This is less efficient than salt excretion: red mangroves, which rely on salt exclusion, require salinities < 60-65 ppt.  Black and white mangroves, which use salt excretion, can tolerate salinities up to 80-90 ppt.
  • Salt excretion – salt is excreted through specialized salt glands in leaves.  This is an active process, involving ATPase activity in plasmalemma
  • Water conservation under conditions of high stress.
  • Mangroves may also accumulate or synthesize other solutes to regulate and maintain osmotic balance – eg mannitol, proline, glycine betaine, aspartate, stachyose.  They also deliberately slow their water intake to prevent excluded salt from accumulating around their roots.
  • Low transportation and slow water uptakes is not characteristic of all mangroves.

There is a great deal of interest in salt resistant plants as a means of extending arable ground, water supplies and reclaiming land ruined by over-irrigation — this is well-represented on the web.