Recent Reading: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

Reading Ballingrud's first novel—after a long career as a writer of short fiction—one finds oneself collecting references. Charles Portis's True Grit, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, and Edgar Rice Burroghs's A Princess of Mars are only a few obvious influences. It's a combination that is at once incredibly enjoyable—both for the thrill of recognition, and for the audacity of mixing together such disparate works—and which threatens to overwhelm the novel itself. 

The True Grit aspect is quickly established when our narrator, fourteen-year-old Annabelle Crisp, witnesses a robbery in her father's restaurant and is outraged by both his and the authorities' mealy-mouthed response. The robbers are known to live in the nearby mining colony, but the local sheriff makes only a half-hearted, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to arrest them, while Annabelle's father merely reopens the restaurant as if nothing happened. Despite this quintessentially Western premise, the novel's setting is quickly revealed to be otherworldly. Annabelle lives in New Galveston, the first and largest city on Mars, in an alternate 1931 in which the red planet has been colonized since the 19th century (in keeping with both the Burroughs-ian nature of the novel's version of Mars, and the novel's tendency to poke holes in the myths of American expansion, the first Martian explorer was an ex-Confederate). A year ago, all communication with Earth was lost, an event referred to as The Silence, which has effectively orphaned Annabelle—her mother was on a visit to Earth when the Silence descended, and her father has subsequently sunk into a depression, spending most of his time talking to a recording of his wife's voice. When Annabelle realizes that the robbers have inadvertently stolen this recording, she blackmails two of the town's more marginalized figures into accompanying her on a journey to retrieve it through the Martian desert.

The thing that first captures you about The Strange is how, despite a rather convoluted setting and a mishmash of influences, it so effectively places you in its world. Annabelle's voice is pitch-perfect in both its self-importance and tunnel vision. The town, as seen through her eyes, is a fascinating combination of old-timeyness and retro-futuristic sensawunda—the spaceship that carries colonists and tourists back and forth from Earth is a saucer; the family restaurant is maintained by a Forbidden Planet-style robot called Watson. It's easy to understand how Annabelle—bright, bold, and curious—would feel stifled by a life that places her at the very edge of a frontier that seems to promise infinite possibility, but expects her to conform to rigidly-defined norms, mostly related to her age and gender. In the face of the listlessness and despair that have infected most of the adults in New Galveston, her willingness to take action can't help but seem heroic.

The more time one spends in Annabelle's head, however, the clearer it becomes that she is not merely hard-done-by, and that there is a lot that she doesn't—or refuses to—see. Choosing not to pursue justice for the robbery, for example, is not merely, as Annabelle insists, a cowardly act, but a recognition that the situation on Mars has irrevocably changed. More people in town are wondering whether it really makes sense to buy and sell food when there's no longer any guarantee of resupply from Earth, and the residents of the mining colony appear to have a legitimate complaint when it comes to resource allocation. Uncompromising and self-righteous, Annabelle dismisses these arguments as irrelevancies, demanding "justice" with no thought to the damage caused in her pursuit of it.

If The Strange were merely this, it would be an impressive gimmick. A fun exercise in working out the  references. Where Annabelle's model, Mattie Ross, had a dissipated marshal and a self-important Texas ranger to accompany her on her journey of revenge, Annabelle's companions are Sally Milkwood, a carter and smuggler who is initially frustrated by Annabelle's dogmatism, but eventually realizes that she and the younger woman are more alike than they suspect, and Joe Reilly, spaceship pilot and "the most hated man in New Galveston" for refusing to fly the spaceship back to Earth, terrified by what might be a one way trip. It's interesting to note both the similarities and differences between the two sets of characters—perhaps especially, that Sally has a sort of fond but pitying love for Joe. But just as you begin to wonder whether there's anything more to this novel than a demonstration of stylistic and genre mashup, Ballingrud ups the strangeness by introducing, well, The Strange, the substance that justifies the existence of a human colony on Mars, but which may also lead to its undoing.

The Strange is what the miners on Mars mine and send back to Earth, where it's used to power and give personhood to Engines, the robots and automata that enable every human endeavor, from war (the deserts of Mars are littered with abandoned war engines left over from the US's fight with Germany over control of the planet) to kitchen helpers like Watson. But the Strange has an effect on the people who come in contact with it, giving them green eyes and changing their behavior. When Annabelle visits the mining colony before setting off on her journey, she discovers that most of the miners have descended underground to be closer to the Strange. Some, like Silas Mundt, the man who robbed Annabelle's father, have retreated into the desert to hold communion with what they believe is the voice of the planet. As Annabelle journeys into the desert, she notices the effect that the Strange has on Watson, who begins to wonder about his purpose and identity.

This is all an obvious reference to the Bradbury story "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed". But one interesting choice that Ballingrud makes is to remove humans from their central place in that narrative. For all the horror of that story, there is at least a sense in it that Mars wants humans, if only as fodder for an unwilling transformation. In The Strange, we are repeatedly told that humans don't belong on Mars, that their presence there has twisted its consciousness in ways that might end up destroying both species. It's the Engines, like Watson and the abandoned war machines, who seem to find the truest symbiosis with the Strange, while humans end up playing a more utilitarian function—fused to machines to act as mouthpieces for them, or consumed by the fungal infestation that has grown in the mines. Characters like Silas and Annabelle find themselves relegated to, at best, enablers of the relationship between Mars and the Engines, providing raw materials—Silas stealing recording cylinders turns out to be at the behest of the Martian consciousness—but irrelevant to its ultimate goals.

It's here, too, that Annabelle's orneriness and refusal to be swayed from her path start paying unexpected dividends. They make her more resistant to the allure of what's transforming all the humans around her. They also make her capable of seeing through the pretenses that power a place like New Galveston—whose authorities persist in a delusion of law and order, for example threatening to hang Annabelle's father after he attacks and kills a miner, even as the foundations of their project of "civilization" crumble beneath their feet. Unlike Mattie Ross, Annabelle is capable of change and growth, even if she remains fundamentally herself. Her experiences with Sally and Joe as they cross the desert, and meeting with Silas, shake her conviction that she understands ideas like justice and rightness. But they don't change her belief that the things that matter to her are what truly matters—she remains fixed on regaining her mother's lost recording until the end of the novel, a determination that ultimately becomes as sympathetic as it is monomaniacal, in the face of an entire community struggling to find meaning in an increasingly insane situation.

The Strange struggles a little in its final act, teetering somewhat unconvincingly between Bradbury-ian body horror and Portis-esque frontier action. It's never entirely clear which mode, and which emotional register, the novel wants to land on in these chapters. Perhaps for that reason, the resolution of the conflict between the various factions' aims—New Galveston's increasingly desperate pretense of normality, Silas's need to believe that he matters in the Strange's plans, Annabelle's desire to save something of her family—takes too long to arrive. But the conclusion to Annabelle's story is winning, as she finds what is probably the only place for her in a world where she is both too stubborn, and too clear-eyed, to fit in among most people. Somewhat surprisingly given all the antecedents it recalls (and given that it ultimately falls more on the horror side of the horror/SF divide), The Strange comes to something that strongly resembles a happy ending. One that arrives not through surrender to an alien consciousness, but through an acceptance of the self, with all its flaws.