The Hope
James Lovegrove
Victor Gollancz, 229 pages
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Just
by chance, while preparing to write this review, I tuned in to a TV show
that included a feature on something called the Freedom Ship: a gigantic
ocean liner a mile long and three city blocks wide, on which nearly 50,000 people
would live and work, cruising endlessly around the world and never touching
shore.
The Freedom Ship hasn’t been built yet, but its inventor is raising funds,
and it seems quite possible it will be. Proof, I suppose, that real
life is just as strange as fiction: for this, more or less, is the
premise of James Lovegrove’s The Hope--though Lovegrove’s
ship is much bigger, much more crowded, and much less benign, a metaphor
not for the vast sweep of human imagination (however pointless its products
may be), but for the worst excesses of human nature.
Built by a philanthropist whose mad dream it was, the Hope
journeys across an apparently endless sea, carrying more than a million people
in its gargantuan belly. Once, the passengers believed they sailed
toward a better life on a distant shore, but so many years have passed without
a landfall that this dream has been mostly forgotten, and many of the Hope’s
denizens no longer remember why they came aboard. Some, born on the
ship, have never known another existence. Over time the Hope
has corroded, eaten up by rust and salt, and so have the lives of the people
on board. Violence and privation are everywhere; safety and compassion
are in short supply. Danger lurks even in the sunlit expanses of the
upper decks, while down in the perpetually shadowbound recesses of the lower
decks, horrors crowd as thick as oil. All of this has changed the Hope
in a way that’s more than physical. The Hope, in
fact, may be the greatest horror of all--though the humans that infest the
great body of the ship don’t yet know it.
Lovegrove embodies this striking premise in a series of linked stories (the
book is described by both publisher and author as a novel, but in my opinion
this is a stretch; the tales form a larger story arc and feature recurring
characters, but taken as a whole they give an impression of scattered
episodes rather than a unified narrative) that guide the reader from the ship’s
exalted top to its degraded bottom, with stops at various points in between.
The Hope is a multiple metaphor, the upward progression
of its decks mirroring the hierarchies of human society, the vast endeavor
of its making and the pointlessness of its voyage echoing the destructive
excesses of the industrial age. Lovegrove uses this symbolic structure
to explore the deepest darknesses of the mind and heart, guided by what seems
to be a truly savage conviction of the inevitable devolution of human nature
under stress.
It's powerful writing. All the episodes exhibit a deft command
of pace and detail, and evoke an aura of degradation and decay so dense you
can almost feel it on your skin. In concept and conception, though,
they’re not all so successful. A few have visceral impact--"A
Bath of Blood", which chronicles a mother’s desperate battle to
save her children (and on the Hope, “save” doesn’t necessarily
mean “preserve”); "No Man’s Land", which explores
bizarre and terrifying developments in the bowels of the ship; "Perfect
Cadence", in which a desperate drug addict flees to the haven of
the upper decks and finds unexpected acceptance. But others are overly predictable
("Reading Habits", in which a book-hating librarian gets
a comeuppance as unsurprising as it is nasty, and "Faith, Hope, Charity",
in which a charismatic minister “with auburn hair growing back from his head
dramatically, like flames” turns out to be exactly the sort of holy man you’d
expect from that description), or don’t seem to have much purpose beyond
their gruesome treatment of sensational subject matter (was it really necessary
to have two tales about troubled but apparently sane people who turn into
homicidal maniacs?).
In the end, the relentlessness of the horror starts to seem monotonous--perhaps
because, while the episodes faithfully reiterate Lovegrove’s ship-as-class metaphor, they
never really amplify it. Basically, it’s a one-note theme: the
underclasses on the lower decks constantly starving and preying on each other,
the privileged classes on the upper decks drifting in an eternal zombie stupor
of self-involvement. In the entire book, only one character looks outward
to ask “how” and “why”, and eventually he too surrenders to the forces of
entropy.
The Hope was first published in 1990 to a good deal of
critical acclaim. Against the background of cyberpunk and Thatcherism
it must have seemed both startlingly original (there’s no high-tech anything
on the Hope, which might as easily be of the past as of
the future) and extremely topical. But in 2002, the socio/eco-symbolism
has a tired feel; and there’s a whole subgenre now of writers who
transport readers to symbolic, surrealistic fantasy worlds awash in blood
and other body fluids. In that context, The Hope
must stand on its own merits, and it doesn’t, quite. One is left with
a sense of a powerful idea incompletely realized--of decks, and depths, still
unexplored.
Copyright © 2002 Victoria Strauss
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