Monday, January 25, 2021

Book Review: Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

 


Mockingbird by Walter Tevis
Hardcover, 247 pages
Published January 1980 by Doubleday Books

 

I’ll admit it I got sucked in by Queen’s Gambit like everyone else. When we watched the first episode I was surprised to see that it was based on a novel by Walter Tevis. This is an author I knew and had read before. It had been decades since I read The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hustler and in the last decade I had read his last Sci-fi Novel Steps of the Sun but I had not heard of Queen’s Gambit. I decided I wanted to look and see what other Tevis gems I had missed. When I went to Good Reads I saw that I had already marked this book as want to read. With further online encouragement from Professor D.Harlan Wilson, I bumped this novel up in my TBR.

Mockingbird is an interesting work of Science Fiction for an author primarily known for his mainstream work. It would be reductive to make simple comparisons but the most obvious is Brave New World but that is unavoidable as this dystopia has similar elements like the lack of monogamy and the plethora of drugs. That is really yet, very surface level. Brave New World is a dystopia wearing a Utopia Halloween costume. Mockingbird is a pure Dystopia that explores Humanity’s downfall via the mind of Walter Tevis.

By modern standards, this is a short novel, but Mockingbird is jam packed with ideas, questions, and an intense dialogue with history and culture that is only possible when a story reaches beyond history and character into speculation. This is what Science Fiction at its best can do that mainstream novel can’t. Surrealism, fantasy, and magic realism can do many of the same tricks but Tevis a master of mainstream novels like The Hustler doesn’t take the genre lightly.

Like a battering ram tearing through the castle gates, major themes and important ideas are dead on this battlefield. Mockingbird is one you enjoy as your reading, but long after you close the book you will be considering its ideas.

When the book starts it would be easy for a modern reader to dismiss this rather pulpy and simplistic look at a robot – a member of the 9th class of robots designed to serve the human race. The sad robot trope is most famous in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that book did exist. Our sad robot here is Bob, he is wary of running human affairs we don’t know why but when he climbs to the top of the Empire state building which he says is the tallest building left in this future. He wants to die but can’t.

He is one of our three POV characters the other two Paul and Mary Lou are humans who challenge societal standards by learning to read. There are laws against reading, it is just the way things are. Reading is for robots, who run the show.

“Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of the ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Age. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.”

Of course, with reading comes questions and answers and threatens the control the robots have slowly been handed. Keep in mind it is clear that in this story we handed the control to the robots. Just as we basically log into big brother in the form of social meeting in a way that would probably stunned mister Orwell. Tevis on the other hand imagined it pretty clearly.

  Reading is more than an information transfer for Paul and Mary Lou. The freedom leads the two characters to fall in love. Paul is punished with Prison as monogamy and his desire to learn will upset the balance they have developed in society. Paul and Mary Lou’s love affair is one thing and in a sense the more important rebellion in the eyes of this society. Bob the Robot is more concerned about humans coupling again than it is that they are learning. That is ultimately a mistake by the robot and in the final pages, we understand why.

A science fiction novel that reverses the dystopic destruction of books like Fahrenheit 451 with a story about the power of reading in action is refreshing.  The San Francisco Chronicle went as far as calling it a sequel to Bradbury but I think response is a better description. It is a response in the same war Haldeman’s Forever War is responding to Starship Troopers. Tevis pointed out more than once that he was inspired by the fall of literacy he was watching teaching high school English for more decades.

“I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.”


So if we ignore the sexism at the end there, the message is important. Touching another person’s mind in the way an author and reader mind meld is something this future world doesn’t know. Once Paul and Mary Lou learn, it changes them forever.

They learn valuable things like history and also unimportant things. Tevis doesn’t ignore the pluses and minus of the canon of human writing. Even in Sci-fi for every Mockingbird, there is Dean Koontz's 40th generation copy of Frankenstein with a dog hero novels.   

One of the most important and powerful books that Paul reads as he learns the power of reading is titled The Causes of Population Decline. This happened in the world of Mockingbird in the twenty-first century but it is unclear what year exactly. We know humans were still reading and writing in the last date on any of his books is 2135. This is an excellent world-building detail.

The Causes of Overpopulation are boiled down to six reasons.

1. Fears of overpopulation
2. The perfection of sterilization techniques
3. The disappearance of the family.
4. The widespread concern with “inner” experiences
5. A loss of interest in children
6. A widespread desire to avoid responsibilities


The mission statement of the novel really comes on pages 158 and 59 of the first edition hardcover I read. This happens when Bob Android-splains the decline of the human race and blames cars.

“It changed the life of mankind more radically than the printing press. It created suburbs and a hundred other dependencies—sexual and economic and narcotic—upon the automobile. And the automobile paved the way for more profound – more inward- inner dependencies upon Television and then robots, and finally the ultimate and predictable conclusion of it all: the perfection of the chemistry of the mind…It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fires—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium.”

Mockingbird is a deeply misanthropic novel, and you should know that coming from me that is not a knock against it. In fact, you can feel the frustrated intellectual living in small-town Midwest for decades dripping off every page of this novel. I loved that and related to it pretty hardcore.

But the fact is Tevis did tell us in a Radio interview in 1981 his intentions. “…what I am convinced of is that it is very bad for people to find substitutes for living their lives, and that’s what I hope I do say, and say well, from time to time in the book.”

Well Mister Tevis I would say you pulled that off. This novel is super close to being a masterpiece if he didn’t blink at the end miss the chance to end this book with the strength of the earlier pages. I have to spoil that to explain my feelings on that.

Overall Mockingbird is a must-read for fans of highly literate Sci-fi. I think of the three genre novels Tevis wrote this one was my favorite. At times this book is profound and at other times it is funny in a sly way. Tevis is such a talented storyteller and I love that he is coming to the book with a point of view.

I have just one problem…

Major spoilers ahead…

The Final Twist of the knife comes on page 210. Mary Lou is about ready to give birth and Bob the robot is not happy. He is helping her because he is programmed to. The thing is he will live on the serve humanity as long as it exists. So you see the big reveal is that Bob sabotaged and sterilized the human race just so he could die. Mary Lou actually calls him out “You fed the world birth control because YOU felt suicidal. You’re erasing mankind…”

The debate is an interesting one. Bob reminds her that mankind was plenty suicidal on its own and she blames Bob for drugging the entire species through social control.

This ending was a cool reveal and story-wise I loved it. As far as what it is saying about the theme that is totally different. I don’t like how this information ethically dodges some of humanity’s responsibility. To me it is similar to the ending of Spielberg’s War of the Worlds a movie I liked for its unrelenting brutality, the problem was The Berg blinked and undid all the amazing build-up by having Tom Cruise’s son alive against all story logic.

Here I think Tevis had a neat story twist that subverts the overall message of the book. That’s fine because at least there was a message.  

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