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Posted by Paul Kincaid

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What is in the air? Not so long ago, Harry Josephine Giles won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Deep Wheel Orcadia (2021), a novel in verse that also made use of Orcadian dialect. Now we have another science fiction novel in verse. This one uses jazzy rhythms and the language frequently slips into a creole. Does the verse facilitate the language? Or is it the other way round?

Prose and verse do distinctly different things. In prose, the focus is upon the sentence or more often the paragraph, which tie each moment to the next, stretching time until they form a sequence, a narrative. In verse, the focus is upon the line or more often just the word, which isolates the moment to emphasise its emotional heft. We are used to telling stories in prose because the structure of the language, indeed the familiarity of the language, pushes the reader on, allowing us easily to pursue one idea to the next, one incident to the next, until plot and character and pace allow us to form in our minds a coherent whole. Verse does not work like that. It isolates moment and thought and feeling. It estranges.

“Estrangement,” a word all too often employed in academic SF criticism, was in fact first used in relation to poetry. It is used to indicate that trigger in a poem—a word choice, a line break—that makes you stop in your tracks to work out what is being said, how it makes you feel. That necessary facility in poetry to shock us out of the text, and into our response to the text, is why dialect or creole or patois can work so effectively in verse. We do not skip across the line, as we can so often do with prose. Instead, we work our way through it.

If we look to story for an immersive sense of being swept away, then, we will not find it in verse. This does not mean that you cannot tell a story in verse; history is too full of vital and unforgettable counter-examples to claim that. But the way you read the story, the way you respond to it, will inevitably be different: Rather than a smooth narrative progression, you get a staccato sequence of moments and images that requires more work from the reader to unify it into the sort of narrative we might more readily recognise. Indeed, it is not always easy to precis what is going on when the focus is so relentlessly on the foreground, and the background is implied more by an occasional oblique reaction by one of the central figures than by any clear statement on the part of the author.

Nevertheless, let me suggest a reading of the situation here in Syncopation, with the proviso that other readers might pick up on different clues or choose a different emphasis.

There has been a war, sometimes referred to as the Memory War. It is not clear who the combatants were, or who won, or even if there was a victor at all. Rather, it seems that the war fizzled out when the Earth itself rose up in protest, and now, in the late twenty-first century of the novel, there are acid rains that really do burn the flesh and Earth tremors in places once thought safe from quakes. Those who survive have formed themselves into new tribes, primarily based on how they retain their memories. The New Griots, for instance preserve their memories in songs. As one character puts it: “how they / manipulated sounds he said, elongated speech, cadenced the air / then severed it” (p. 36). On the other hand, the Adorners weave their memories into the clothes they wear, and the Earth Tech tribe are descendants of today’s environmentalists, who see everything in terms of the land and its creatures; the Chip Users upload their memories onto the expired tech they integrate into their bodies. But there is conflict still between these different groupings, who look with distrust upon everyone who is not of their tribe.

That, of course, is all in the background. We are told about it largely in passages labelled “déjà vu suite” which present as prose but the cadences and rhythms of which are elliptical and elusive: “we were born into a world that demanded we have a name. & when we refused, we grew into the shape of burden” (p. 5). These are the very first words of the novel, eschewing capitals and approaching things not as prose might explain the world but as verse might inflect the moment before we fully comprehend, the moment of instinct not of understanding.

Who is this “we” of which the déjà vu suite speaks? Perhaps it is two young Black women known only as O and as Z, who come together, then part, then come together again as they journey across a landscape that is still recognisably Canada. They don’t just refuse a personal name; they also refuse to be named as part of a group. One is a New Griot, one is a Chip User, but they stand at an angle to their respective tribes, not entirely separate from them but not fully a part of them either. This is how they can explore each other’s beliefs and attitudes, without antagonism but without full acceptance either.

Syncopation is a system of music that catches the ear by putting the stress on the off beat rather than the expected down beat. It is irregular, unexpected, interesting. It is the broken rhythm that attracts us and makes us want to dance. And, as French’s title tells us, it is the defining characteristic of this novel, in more ways than one. Syncopation, we learn belatedly, is part of a plan that just might offer a future for the world, and in which O and Z might play a part. But that, in truth, is perhaps the least interesting syncopation in the novel. For syncopation also defines the relationship between O and Z: It stops and starts unexpectedly, is broken yet somehow whole. And syncopation also represents the way this novel is written: broken lines, irregular verses, unexpected repetitions; odd word choices that abruptly shift the ground under your feet and make you reassess exactly what is being said at this point.

This is not an easy book to read. There is plot here—the aftermath of war, the travels of O and Z, the plan code-named “syncopation”—but this is not where the stress of the novel lies. Rather, our interest is in the polyrhythms that envelop the plot, the off-beat of being these people in this world. You need to get yourself in tune with the language. Even then, there will be words and phrasings that consistently catch you off guard. It is like a jazz opera: jagged, sometimes discordant, telling its story as much in the musical pattern as in the words. Yet it is vigorous, insistent, and stimulating, the sort of book that sets you off in an unexpected new direction—the sort of book that you will find yourself endlessly puzzling over without ever being able to quite get it out of your head.

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