a gallimaufry

Hexwood, by Diana Wynne Jones

Some thousand years ago in February I wrote about The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern and postulated that it might have been influenced by video games. (This was, I admit, quite a reach since I don’t play video games, but knowing very little about something has rarely prevented me from pontificating.) Anyway, in the comments we wondered about a subgenre of fiction influenced by video games. Chris mentioned Codex by Lev Grossman but I don’t think we came up with any others.

Now, perhaps here is a third novel to add to that subgenre: Diana Wynne Jones’s Hexwood, from 1993, which uses elements of gaming as its plot in a far more fundamental way than I think Morgenstern did.

First of all, what is Hexwood? To teenaged Ann, lying in bed with a virus, it is the housing estate on which she lives – with Hexwood Farm, a derelict old place behind crumbling walls. People enter it but never seem to leave. To Hume, it is a woodland filled with strange creatures, a castle, a white van. To the Reigners, it is an old library and archive on Earth, a remote and backward outpost in their intergalactic empire.

But in all these guises Hexwood houses the Bannus, an ancient computer whose function is to make decisions by creating an ever-expanding theta-field and:

live action scenarios of any set of facts and people you care to feed into it. [It] acts little plays for you, until you find the right one and tell it to stop.

What does that mean? It means that it generates an alternative reality into which it pulls people and circumstances. In this alternative reality the people play out different scenarios, on and on, until an outcome is reached and someone stops the machine. And each of these scenarios is itself a sort of alternate reality, since the people playing them have no memory of the previous versions.

At the beginning of the book, a young man called Harrison Scudamore has succeeded in getting himself employed by Rayner Hexwood, the manifestation of the Reigner Corporation on Earth, and has switched on the Bannus. More and more people are being sucked into it to play out its scenarios. Can anyone stop it – and how? 

This device of the playing out of versions of a similar story is very like that of many video games, in which you have a character and a set of circumstances and at each stage a variety of possible decisions which shape the way that the game moves. And one (or possibly more!) set of decisions will lead you to a successful outcome and the winning of the game.

In many of her novels, Diana Wynne Jones uses alternate worlds and realities (The Homeward Bounders, Fire and Hemlock, the Chrestomanci series, to name but a few), so the conceit of the computer game is obviously attractive to her. The Bannus layers different realities over each other, but what is ‘real’ and what is ‘game’ is further complicated by the lies and misdirections of some characters and the confusion of others over who they ‘really’ are – since they inhabit more than one identity. Furthermore, time is not linear but skips back and forth. The Fisher King has apparently been in his castle for years at the beginning of the novel, but in fact only arrives there halfway through. (This makes much more sense in the book.)

Hexwood I think goes further, in asking questions about free will and control, which again come from the device of the video game. When someone plays a video game, they know they are playing and they know what their goal is, even if they only have control over their own character. In Hexwood you are in the game, but you don’t know it, you think you are in the ‘real’ world and acting from your own free will. The Bannus is the one who is playing, and without your consent or even knowledge, since your memory is wiped each time.

Wynne Jones make the parallel with political systems clear. If the Bannus, compelling people to play a game they do not understand and removing parts of their memories to do so, has a sinister aspect, how much more does the Reigner Corporation, which seeks to control and (mis)shape people to suit their own ends, treating them as having no more value than some pixels on a screen? The training of children to become Servants – official assassins to the Reigners – is truly chilling. Yet the power of the Corporation, like that of the Bannus, seems so great as to be unstoppable.

Of course, there is a lot of fun too. Wynne Jones also throws in dragons, a robot, Arthurian legend, a magician and problematic middle managers, all handled with her customary verve and humour. It is complex and even the outline I have given is not accurate because what happens right up until the end of the novel is that your perception of what is happening – and even what the Bannus is – is constantly shifting (due to the lies and misdirections I mentioned before). It’s also a timely reminder that the checks and balances built in to any system of government are both deeply important and deeply vulnerable so we should fight for them while we still have them, ahem British government (yes I know it is a cheap political point sorry).

What do you think? Have you read Hexwood? Can you think of any other novels which use video games in some way?

The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern

Sometimes I reach the end of a book and really don’t know what to make of it. The Starless Sea has been one of those books.

(Study of an owl, pen and ink, French school, late seventeenth century; found here)

Never having read Morgenstern’s bestselling first novel, The Night Circus, I had no particular expectations of The Starless Sea other than stronger wrists as it is a 500-page tome. However, the promise of a quest inspired by a strange book, a dangerous secret club and a ‘subterranean labyrinth filled with stories’ tempted me to borrow it from the English-language section of my local library. Wouldn’t you?

The principal narrative in the novel follows Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a graduate student writing a thesis on video games who is also a devoted reader, and his discovery of a mis-shelved old book with no publication information. When he starts reading it, he discovers an incident from his own childhood has been printed in it. How could that be possible? The book is decorated with symbols of a sword, a key and a bee, and soon he has left the university campus for New York and a masked ball and adventures. His story is interspersed with stories from the book itself, from other books, from a diary; despite this increasingly complex layered structure it is not difficult to follow what is going on.

For what is remarkable about this novel is its lack of tension and its promotion of symbolism. I know – how can a book including a dangerous secret club lack tension? It does. The club swiftly becomes irrelevant, its leader powerless. The quest plot mainly involves Zachary wondering what the quest is. I too wondered what was going on a lot of the time. The key to the book lies in the juxtaposition of the stories and the repeated use of the symbols, and to be quite honest by the end I was mentally exhausted from the sheer size of the narrative and wanted more help from the author in deciding what was going on. Lazy reader.

There’s a scene early in the book in which a class discusses gaming as part of an Innovations in Storytelling course. They talk about how video games balance the framework of their programmed story (pre-destination, if you will) with giving the gamer the freedom to make their own choices (or exercise some free will. There are options and different possible endings, but all have been foreseen. Now, if only I had ever played a video game I think I would understand this novel a great deal better, because I think that Morgenstern is using video-game conventions to structure her novel, and Zachary – a character who exhibits very little personality and could easily stand as an archetypal reader – is our – the reader-gamer’s – avatar in the story. Morgenstern’s refusal to offer easy explanations of her book’s meaning is part of the idea that we, the reader-gamers, must decide for ourselves. This is made more explicit in the recurring stories about Time and Fate, as well as the ending, which I shall nobly resist giving away.

Another element Morgenstern takes from gaming, though it is common to a lot of fiction too, is immersiveness. I didn’t read The Starless Sea exactly to find out what would happen next, I read it for the pure pleasure of being in the worlds that Morgenstern created. Painted doors which open, precocious cats, strange visitors at a wayside inn, jealous stars. Imagine a library filled with all the books ever and never published, a sea of honey deep in the earth which is actually a sea of stories, a forest of cherry trees blossoming at night, an Owl King. Some of Morgenstern’s ideas have literary antecedents, some seem purely her own invention, all are woven together to form a book-lover’s paradise. Every time I opened The Starless Sea, I wondered what marvel I would read next.

(Still Life with a Snake, Elias Van den Broeck; Belgium, seventeenth century; from here)

For some readers, the lack of tension or character development or explication may be off-putting; for me, some of the gnomic utterances grated, and Morgenstern did not always successfully navigate the line when it came to tweeness. (And the UK cover is hideous!) However, despite all this, how could I not enjoy this beautiful expression of love for stories? I shall definitely be re-reading it as there is a great deal that I missed. (Alas for now I must return it to the library.)

(Images of blocked book covers from here.)

Meanwhile, in ‘not-buying-any-new-books-resolution’ news, I have bought:

• Of Cats and Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner (well, I do have to read it for STW reading week, so that doesn’t really count)
• Glass Town, by Isabel Greenberg (really I bought it for my daughter) (when she’s older) (but I’ll read it in the mean time, silly not to)

and I have pre-ordered:

• Medusa’s Daughters, edited by Theodora Goss (which has led me to covet Handheld Press’s Women’s Weird)
  The Tower of Babel, by Christelle Dabois (it’s the third in the series and I wouldn’t want to forget to read it the very moment it’s available)
• The Pure Heart, by Trudi Tweedie.

So that resolution has proved strong.

But in other news, while excavating a corner of the study I found my copy of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, which I thought I had rashly given, unread, to a charity shop. It turns out that tidying up occasionally has its uses.