Chris Beckett's Marcher, Reviewed
A New Novel by the Edge Hill Prize-Winning Author of The Turing Test
Aug 20, 2009
The second novel by the author of The Holy Machine and the Edge Hill Prize-winning collection The Turing Test, Chris Beckett's Marcher (Dorchester Books, December 2008, 304pp, ISBN 978-0843961973) overlaps with several stories in the latter book and in his most recent Interzone appearance.
Marcher
Seen through the eyes of immigration officer Charles Bowen, Marcher is a novel in which borders, both physical and behavioural, are at the heart of the story. Charles works for the Orwellian-named Department of Social Inclusion (Motto: "Let's tackle this together!" [p25]) isolating `shifters,' migrants able to move between alternate universes by taking a drug called `slip'.
Charles' job is to gather information and to advise local offices on the best way of dealing with the societal hand grenades that have begun to appear in their midst and more importantly to contain this unsettling phenomenon (Beckett implies that any phenomenon that cannot be contained or controlled by a government is a threat).
Marcher opens with Charles meeting Jazamine at a party. Their immediate attraction is complicated both by her job as a social worker which overlaps uneasily with Charles own duties, and by her ability to pierce his convresational defences. Jazamine quickly realizes that Charles would like to take Shift and 'find' his parents who died in a hit-and-run when he was young, but represses this knowledge, even to himself. He refers to himself as a Marcher, from the fact that he lives in a metaphorical equivalent of the borderland between England and Wales, but also as a subconscious pun on his repressed desire to march across universes.
One of Jazamine's clients, Tammy, steals a Shifter's stash and flees our world, arouses the ire of a faction called Dunners, who come from a universe where Christianity never took hold, and instead worship the Norse gods. The Dunners use local converts to kill in an attempt to spread anarchy, then take slip to evade the consequences of their actions. The Dunners' appearances on housing estates gives the authorities a pretext to further dis-enfranchise the underclass who dominate the estates (allowing Beckett to examine the lingering effects of class boundaries, and to show the consequences of a descent into anarchy when the Dunners' converts begin to infiltrate upper class areas such as Clifton in Bristol.)
The Year's Best SF
Beckett has been edging up to this novel for years. A short story with the same name appeared in Interzone in 2001, and was reprinted in the Nineteenth edition of Dozois Year's Best SF, although Charles was called Huw in that story. When an alternate Charles Slips into a universe where the Bowens survived in the novel, they have two sons, one called Huw. Neither is called Charles. By changing the protagonists and point of view but keeping the storyline, Beckett further reflects the mirror theme running through the novel.
Karl the assassin's story also appeared in Interzone as 'To Be A Warrior' which appeared in the next year's volume of the Dozois, but again Beckett changes point of view -- the short story is 1st person narrated.
As he often does in stories Beckett provides echoes of other stories, even when not directly using them; when Jazamine Shifts without Charles, her journey is shown from another perspective in 'Jazamine in the Green Wood.' Tammy's subsequent meeting in the novel with Jessica --an alternate persona-- reprises 'We Could Be Sisters,' in which a woman in one universe who owns an art gallery meets her itinerant Shifter self from another, and they contrast the small choices that they made, and the huge differences in their lives that those decisions led to. Another fragment of Tammy's flight into alternaties also features in 'Poppyfields' in Interzone.
With its twin themes of boundaries and mirrors, and the dizzying effect of these multiple views of the same events, Marcher --and its short story cohorts-- perhaps reflect better than any other SF work extent the true complexity of alternate universes, a setting all too often over-simplified for story purpose.
Slip
The novel is firmly grounded -perhaps too much so, for it is only when Charles himself begins to experiment with Slip that the novel loses some of that feeling of reality, as Charles begins to question his place in the universe -- when he meets his parents he realizes that crossing universes changes nothing and that he will still be as happy or unhappy as he is at present.
Beckett's unexpected and convenient introduction of a psychosis that allows Charles to share his thoughts with other people allows him to explain the alternate Charles, but it's an unnecessary explanation, and with its lack of adequate foreshadowing, feels as if Beckett has shoehorned the idea in.
Despite these minor qualifications, Marcher is still one of the best SF novels of the year, and is highly recommended.
 |
