[book post] The Membranes by Chi Ta-Wei

Ohhh this one was such fun.

The Membranes is a slim, mid-1990s, Taiwanese dystopian sci-fi novel. The premise: the hole over the ozone layer got bad enough that you can't live on the surface of the planet anymore, so humanity moved to the ocean floor to escape the sun's harmful cosmic rays. By the year 2100, the ocean floor has been thoroughly colonized by every nation of the earth powerful enough to project their influence downward (yielding charmingly goofy phrases like "the New San Francisco Accord (signed in the new, underwater San Francisco)").

The story is not particularly interested in the physics of how that works (not least because the answer is "lol it wouldn't;" think about the pressure at that depth and the Titan implosion). Rather, it's more interested in the cultural implications of this move to the sea floor—for instance, even with the ocean floor mostly blocking the sun's rays, skin cancer rates are high & people's skin tends to degrade more rapidly, so "skin technicians" (a sort of hybrid dermatologist/masseuse/skin-artist) are highly trained and highly paid so they can keep people's skin looking young.

I called it a dystopian novel earlier, but that's not quite right. Ta-Wei isn't interested in doing a prolonged, incisive examination of the power structures in this society, and instead pulls a tight focus on a single character: Momo, a highly successful, 30-year-old skin technician who owns her own practice and lives alone in a nice apartment. At the story's opening, she receives a letter from her mom after twenty years of estrangement; the "action" of the novel is a couple skin technician sessions that play out while Momo's trying to decide whether or not to meet with her mom; the end happens when she makes a choice and plays it out. That's all. (And I loved that tight focus, that confidence!)

And I was just so completely fascinated by this Momo chick, and the slow, patient way the story reveals more and more about her. Here's a girl who never goes out, never takes a partner nor has any interest in one, yet has chosen such a tactile, intimate line of work. She's got some technology-aided voyeuristic tendencies—not necessarily in a sexual sense, in an everything sense, in a content-to-experience-other-lives-secondhand way—that, as described, felt simultaneously so so alluring and so so claustrophobic. The slow reveal of the long-term consequences of a horrible set of surgeries she went through at a young age is satisfyingly well done, and also, there's some wonderfully unselfconsciously queer happenings, lots of unexpected eyebrow-raising chemistries between some interstitial characters—I loved it all.

I did find the ending a little... deflating? Without spoiling too much, it has that kind of rug-pull and-then-it-was-all-a-dream feel that I feel like smacks of... idk, a particularly tacky Twilight Zone episode. It's not totally out of nowhere, and I can see the buildup to it a bit in hindsight... but I mostly found myself longing for what the novel would have been, if Ta-Wei had kept to that tight, close focus on Momo, if, instead of zooming the camera out to a "damn wouldn't it be crazy if" kind of scenario, he'd let Momo's choice at the end stand on its own, and shown us what, if anything, changes about Momo afterwards.

But overall, what a romp. I'm glad I read it.

[book post] The Patrick Melrose novels, books 1 & 2

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn (Patrick Melrose #1)

This book started out so delightfully and totally and completely my shit that they may as well have stamped "FOR LUA INTERNETPERSON" on the cover. All of these characters are screwed up in ways ranging from "severe" to "absolutely god-awful." The narrative voice is witty and snarky as hell.* It's all even pointing toward culminating in a godawful dinner party. Yes!!! Yes!!!

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Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn (Patrick Melrose #2)

This one I liked rather less. It's another quick read, playing out over the course of either twenty-four or forty-eight in-universe hours—my memory of the exact timing is a little fuzzy, as it is to the protagonist himself. You see, young Patrick from the first novel is now twenty-two, hates his father (very understandably), is pretty well fucked up from his childhood, and now is a kinda-functional drug addict. Luckily his family's rich, so he can simply use money to avoid some of the worst possible pitfalls (he's dropping money on fancy dinners and nice hotels without so much as a blink), but it turns out even the life of a rich drug addict is a fucking mess. The book opens with Patrick on a flight from London to New York—his father's died, and he's tasked with crossing the Atlantic to bring back the body. While in New York, Patrick spends that bewildering twenty-four-or-forty-eight-hour period briefly visiting the funeral home with his father's remains and a friend from the first novel... before promptly calling up his old drug dealer, failing to track down his old drug dealer, taking a taxi to the sketchy part of Manhattan in an attempt to score some drugs, being high, coming down from a high, fucking up a few interpersonal relationships, doing yet more drugs, and finally flying home.

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