Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (21 page)

But if you start with
Faceless Killers
and work your way chronologically forward to the end of the series, you will get something else besides. As with the Martin Beck mysteries, you will be treated to the unfolding of a life over time. In the first novel, Wallander is forty-two. He has been separated from his wife for only a few months, his daughter is barely speaking to him, and he is just beginning to worry about his bad eating habits, his loneliness, his disillusion with police work, and the other concerns that will increasingly plague him over the long term. By the time we get to
Firewall
, it is 1997 and Wallander is fifty years old. His old father has died, but not before taking an important final trip to Rome with him. Wallander himself is by now suffering from diabetes but still can’t seem to control what he eats. Though he is proud of his professional achievements, he is more than ever aware of his shortcomings and feels himself slipping behind: computers, for instance, have taken over the police station, and Wallander is the only one who still doesn’t know how to use them. The crimes he has to deal with have become more impersonal, more violent, and more widespread. In the course of the seven years and nine books, one colleague, a reliable if somewhat dull and underappreciated police officer, has been murdered; another, who started out as a promising, fresh-faced cadet, has turned out to be an ambitious backstabber. So Wallander, always a bit of a loner, now has fewer people than ever to confide in. On the other hand, he has grown closer to the one female detective in his squad, and his daughter, now on cordial terms with him, is talking about joining the police herself. So there is, if not hope, at any rate a future.

Henning Mankell, having created this paragon of quotidian survival, eventually became anxious to distance himself from Kurt Wallander. “If we met, we’d never get on,” he told an interviewer from
The Guardian
, shortly after the English-language publication of
Firewall
. “I’d prefer to meet Sherlock Holmes. Wallander has a strange attitude to women. He is lazy in his personal life.” But then he added, as if disturbed by it, “Women readers adore him. Perhaps they sense he is needy. What interests me is the way he is thinking. You can have six or seven pages when that’s all he is doing.” Perhaps that’s what interests the women readers, too. Adoration, in any case, does not seem the appropriate word here. We have enough literary figures who arouse our strong passions, the kinds of characters who flame up with a brief intensity and then die before their novels are over. Sometimes—maybe especially in these times—we just need someone who can endure.

But Mankell, unfortunately, has other plans for us. We are not to be allowed to ask for Wallander again and again; we are not to depend on him forever. The final book in the series,
The Troubled Man
—which came out more than a decade after
Firewall
, a period during which Mankell obviously tried unsuccessfully to ignore Wallander—is quite emphatic about that. In the course of resolving this book’s mystery, Kurt begins to lose his memory and have serious blackouts. At the very end of the novel, the narrator tells us, in an uncharacteristically distant voice, that what we have witnessed are the early stages of Alzheimer’s, a disease which will eventually obliterate character (and, as it happens,
this
character) entirely. This kind of authorial destructiveness, I might point out, is the same pattern acted out by Arthur Conan Doyle in relation to his detective, Sherlock Holmes. In each case, the despairing writer realizes he has invented a character who has grown larger than himself, an uncontrollable figure who clambers across the supine authorial body as he makes his way into the arms of the demanding public. And the writerly impulse at this point is always the same: to eliminate the detective in order to make his return impossible. I am sorry Mankell felt he had to end the series so vehemently. It would have been better just to leave us hanging—unsatisfied, perhaps, but also unpunished.

*   *   *

There is one other kind of “elsewhere” I want to glance at before leaving this chapter, and that is the realm of science fiction. Science fiction writers, it turns out, are also translators of a sort. They take the reality around them and exaggerate it, or imagine it, into something else, and in doing so they produce a tale that is often an allegory of their own times. This is, in a way, the opposite of the transparency that the mystery translator pulls off. The writing in a science fiction novel, though generally undistinguished as writing, points to itself as a symbolic code, a scrim between the reader and the “real” story that lies behind. Interpretation is a given: the science fiction story begs to be unraveled as social commentary or philosophical message, even as it also amuses us on its own grounds. So, although the form is billed as a kind of escapism, we cannot simply immerse ourselves in the science fiction novel. Instead, we need to be constantly withdrawing from it and considering it from the distance of our own lives.

Where other translators transport us geographically, to places we may never have visited but instead come to know largely or entirely through their works, science fiction writers move us through time. This is a place we
have
all visited, if we have lived any number of years. So the feeling of time travel, as rendered in a work of science fiction, can seem oddly circular to a reader inhabiting the multiple dimensions of the remembered past, the actual present, and the writer-prophesied future. And because of the peculiar way we read science fiction—with one foot in our own time and one in the imagined world’s time, the better to perceive the inevitable allegory—we are more than usually aware of the traveling that is being required of us.

Let me give an example of what I mean, using a novel by Isaac Asimov that was published nearly sixty years ago.

We inhabit a world in which weekly newsmagazines, printed on paper in columns of type, are considered primitive and profoundly obsolescent; in which an entire bookshelf of bound volumes can be stored in a gadget the size of a fingertip; in which a mechanical device that is only about four inches long and a fraction of an inch thick can record whatever we like, play it back to us through a tiny earpiece, and rest comfortably in a pocket when not in use; in which space flight has been invented but is rarely used by humans, who have lost interest in it after the initial decades of excitement; in which handheld or easily portable computers are a commonplace item; in which literature can hardly be distinguished from film in the public mind; and in which some members of society long fruitlessly for a past era when all such developments were unknown and almost inconceivable.

We
do
, in fact, live in such a world, but I mean something else. The sentences I’ve just written are intended to characterize the world of Asimov’s
The End of Eternity
, a science-fiction novel which is set in the 482nd, 575th, and 111,394th centuries, and which first appeared in print in 1955.

For those of you who were not around then (and I barely was: I was three at the time), let me assure you that none of the present-day realities mentioned above was even a mote in a scientist’s eye. In 1955—which was the year my family, having come north from Los Angeles to San Jose, moved permanently to Palo Alto—my father was working for IBM, where he helped invent the huge mainframe computer that would eventually become the great-great-great-grandfather of Macs and PCs alike. By 1966 or 1967, when I first began reading Isaac Asimov novels, a version of that mainframe had recently become available for use in the high-school computing classes of a few advanced communities, so that some of us in the Palo Alto school system were instructed in the laborious inscription of punch cards to be fed into the mechanical maw—a process so inhuman and alienating and difficult, so resolutely
digital
in its outlook, that I was determined never to have anything to do with computers again. This resolve disintegrated in about 1983, when I purchased my first “personal computer,” a boxy Kaypro whose 74-kilobyte brain, laughably minute by today’s standards, was nonetheless more powerful (or so the salesman told me) than the mainframe that flew a man to the moon in 1969. And this is not to speak of laptops, cellphones, flash drives, iPods, DVDs, e-readers, and all the other devices which only came into widespread use in the last two decades or so. Asimov thought all this would take many centuries; instead, it took less than a generation. And yet if he was wrong about the timing, he was fantastically right about not only the inventions themselves, but the effect they would have on society.

Part of the pleasure of reading old science fiction is precisely this: with the special powers vested in you by historical hindsight, you can compare the playfully visionary forecasts with what actually took place. This puts you somewhat in the position of Asimov’s “Eternals,” the characters in
The End of Eternity
who stand outside of time, observing and controlling the vast majority who still live within it. The Eternals, contrary to what their name suggests, do not live forever; they age and die just as normal people do. But they have such extensive powers of technical analysis that they are capable of predicting what will happen to any individual human or group of humans. And because they also have at their beck and call an easy form of time travel—consisting of “kettles” that whiz along preset pathways in the fourth dimension, taking them many centuries “upwhen” or “downwhen”—they can actually enter into history at specific points in time and repeatedly change it. These so-called Reality Changes might involve something as small as moving a container from one shelf to another, or as large as engineering the deaths of a dozen people in a crash. The aim is always to produce the Maximum Desired Response (M.D.R.) with the Minimum Necessary Change (M.N.C.): to insure, in short, that the unpleasant or antisocial or generally disruptive event does not occur, and to keep mankind in a state of comfortable if slightly dull equilibrium.

Though technology is what makes this kind of reality control possible, only a human being is capable of finding exactly the right moment and method of change. “Mechanical computing would not do,” Asimov’s typically invisible, intangible narrator tells us. “The largest Computaplex ever built, manned by the cleverest and most experienced Senior Computer ever born, could do no better than to indicate the ranges in which the M.N.C. might be found. It was then the Technician, glancing over the data, who decided on an exact point in that range. A good Technician was rarely wrong. A top Technician was never wrong.” And then, in the kind of portentous single-sentence paragraph in which science fiction delights, Asimov adds: “Harlan was never wrong.”

Harlan is our hero, a man whose “homewhen,” or time of origin, is the 95th century, but who as a teenager was lifted out of Time to become one of the Eternals. (The capitals, I hasten to note, are all Asimov’s.) Like all Eternals, he can never go back to his own century—not only because the rules forbid it, but because if he went back he would, like Jimmy Stewart in
It’s a Wonderful Life
, find everything horribly changed. He would learn that he had never had a home or a mother or an existence of any kind, because the ongoing series of Reality Changes (some, perhaps, implemented by himself) would have wiped him off the record. So instead he travels light, moving from one century to another, putting in the fix as needed, obeying his superiors, and only occasionally wondering why life is structured the way it is and whether Eternity really lasts forever.

I won’t go any further into the plot of this novel. If you have never been a science fiction fan, I will long since have lost you anyway. But if you ever
were
a fan—as I was, quite obsessively, in my teens—you cannot do better than to return to the works of Isaac Asimov. Cheesy as the love story inevitably is, and inconsistent as some of the time-related logic turns out to be (why, for instance, does Harlan have to cancel an appointment in the 575th century in order to go to the 3,000th and see a man who is “free this afternoon,” when normal logic tells us he could have gone and returned in a matter of minutes, or even seconds?), the essential storyline has a deeply compelling quality that is, at least to me, irresistible. As I approached the end of this novel, I found myself agitatedly turning pages in the way I always do in the last hundred pages of a Henry James novel. And, as in the James novel, the propulsive force was a desire to find out how things turn out for these deeply knowing but finally helpless characters, who are up against moral dilemmas they can’t easily solve, and who are impeded in their attempted solutions by people who are often socially and economically more powerful than they are.

(In case you feel yourself preparing to get into an argument right about now, let me just say that I am
not
insisting Isaac Asimov is as good as Henry James. That would be absurd, just as it would be pointless and silly to assert that Henry James is a better writer than Isaac Asimov. Reading is not a ratings game, and to treat it as one is to diminish its pleasures and powers. Very little in the world can compare with the experience of reading, or even rereading,
The Golden Bowl
, but we cannot always be reading
The Golden Bowl
. Our moods and our tastes require other diversions, other satisfactions. The inveterate reader is not always looking for the Top Ten, the winnowed winners; on the contrary, she is likely to be seeking out precisely those kinds of immersive experiences that allow her to forget all about such invidious comparisons. And Isaac Asimov’s novels, at their best, are good enough to accomplish this.)

The End of Eternity
may be one of Asimov’s better novels, but it follows the same essential pattern as all his others, as I discovered when I went back recently to reread
Foundation’s Edge
and
The Robots of Dawn
. Like all obsessive writers, including Henry James, Isaac Asimov is the victim of a repetition compulsion, reproducing a single novel over and over again in all its myriad forms. His goes something like this: An individual with good powers of analysis and logic, as well as a great deal of modestly worn courage, confronts a gigantic system that is out to thwart him because he threatens, wittingly or unwittingly, to bring about its downfall. In the course of his efforts, he has to rely on other people without knowing for sure which ones are his friends or lovers and which his enemies or betrayers. He is good at crossing cultural boundaries and even interacting with other life forms (some of Asimov’s most touching relationships are those between human and robot), but he retains a stubborn, almost curmudgeonly affection for the values and sensations of his own home place. Generally this place is Earth, and even when it is not, he and his entire culture have a kind of residual fondness—though also a civilized man’s anti-primitive aversion, or an adult’s anti-infantile one—toward that long-lost homeland, that long-gone birthplace of the human race.