Blackfish City

Blackfish City is a science fiction novel that wants to talk about the problems of an ultraliberal society at the same time that wants to focus on a family finally reuniting after many years kept apart. However, it fails in merging these two themes into a cohesive narrative.

The setting is the floating city of Qaanaaq, built north of Iceland in the shape of an asterisk. Early on, the city is painted with oppressive colors: one character refers to it as a “tangled labyrinth,” and it is said to have “camps, factions, and subcults.” It’s a city haunted by the past:  “Qaanaaq was not a blank slate. People brought their ghosts with them. Soil and stories and stones from homelands swallowed up by the sea.”  Immigration is a big issue in Qaanaaq, which receives people fleeing from The United States and other countries in the American continents destroyed by climate change and war.

The city is ruled by invisible shareholders and it’s a place where landlords, merchants, and corporations have free reign. When the story starts, Qaanaaq is already at a tipping point, and things only get worse when a bizarre rumor starts to spread: a woman who travels with a polar bear and a killer whale has just arrived in Qaanaaq, and what she intends to do is anyone’s guess. She appears to be rage incarnate: when journalists try to talk to her she answers with a “single inarticulate roar.” And why wouldn’t she be angry? Just because she’s an outsider, people think that she must be “demonic, Antichrist-derived, the work of evil foreigners bent on undermining Caucasian hegemony.”

The narrative is structured around chapters that follow a single point of view. The first character to be presented is Fill, a young man on the brink of despair. When we first meet him, he has just given up on committing suicide. Fill has discovered that he has contracted an STD called “the Breaks” from his ex-boyfriend: a disease that makes the person start being haunted by the memories of the one that passed it to them, and the person that passed it to that one, and so forth until their mind can’t take it anymore and break. He’s dying, but the city’s “relentless, dependable cold” makes him a bit calmer: pain soothes him. Although rich, Fill feels lost: he has to hide his sexual habits from his own family, having to carry the burden of his newfound disease alone.

We then move to a woman named Ankit, who goes to pay a visit to an immigrant family that filed a complaint against their landlord. Ankit is not there to help; she’s there to be seen as a representative of her boss because it’s election year. And she couldn’t help anyway: they live in a society with no regulation, where landlords can do whatever they please. The social clash bothers her: she’s angry about the wealthy people that come to these parts of town to take pictures of the poor so they can feel good about themselves – poverty tourism in all its glory. Her inaction and her powerlessness frustrate her. She doesn’t know what to do when she discovers that a child managed to get the breaks without any sex involved: “Less than a foot between the beds. One night the woman besides my daughter started vomiting, spraying it everywhere, and…” Ankit is happy when the father drops the subject and then proceeds to take pictures of them. In other words, deep down Ankit cares, but she’s part of the problem nonetheless: “Still afraid. Still obeying the rules.”

The third point of view is of a man named Kaev. He’s a fighter who earns money by losing fights in rigged games. He’s fierce and, like Fill, welcomes pain, but in a more intense way: “He loved the fights, loved the way his opponents helped him step outside himself, and something about the fall into freezing water provided an almost orgasmic release.” Kaev is a bitter man, who sees no pride in what he does, but sees no alternative if he wants to keep putting food on the table. What links all these points of view is the element of despair: they are all characters lost in life, being crushed by how their society operates. Kaev loses fights to make a living but even that has a prescription date. Now, he’s told, he has to become a street thug if he wants to keep on living. It’s not enough for Qaanaaq to remove Kaev’ dignity during the fights, it has to keep pushing him further down the drain.

Therefore, it’s no surprise when we arrive at the final main point of view and discover a character consumed by rage. Soq is a young messenger who likes to be called by the right pronouns – and is tired to request that – and who dreams of revolution – and a bloody one at that: “Soq fell asleep like that, in the fetal position, knowing their knees would ache in the morning, smiling to the imaginary sound of a million people screaming for help as they drowned.” As Kaev, they’re pushed to a life of crime by their own city, which couldn’t care less. While Qaanaaq makes them feel insignificant, crime gives them purpose. Meanwhile, shareholders and landlords rule unopposed, living ostentatious lives.

Blackfish City is not a subtle book. During one scene, for example, one shareholder confesses, “we set this city up. Everything’s stacked in our favor,” and it wouldn’t be out of character if he had followed this comment with an evil laugh. He’s a one-dimensional character that serves only to give a human face to the novel’s real villain: the city’s ultraliberal mentality.

However, if Blackfish City starts out strong, it doesn’t take long to lose its momentum. By the middle of the book, the characters are basically at the same place they started. Fill feels lost, Ankit and Kaev are frustrated, and Soq is angry. Little has happened and we don’t know the characters much better, since the book’s small chapters – which are usually just six pages long – don’t leave them too much room to breathe.

To make matters worse, the third act of the book is more about family bonds than about civil unrest, with a lot of plot twists revealing the same thing about the identity of the characters. The twists quickly become repetitive, but the main problem is that they don’t fit well with everything that came before: the whole story was building up to a revolution in Qaanaaq, but then it suddenly becomes about discovering who your relatives are. If the center of the narrative was the city, now it’s is just one family.

The fact that characters start to bond with animals also helps to make the narrative feel disjointed: for a long time, the story focuses on social problems and injustices committed against immigrants and the poor, but then it suddenly has the characters bonding with animals as if they have just come from the world of His Dark Materials. One could argue that it enriches the book’s discussion on family bonds – and there are parallels in the climax between the actions of an orca and Soq’s, for example – but that is a discussion that was already born out of place in a novel that was so keen in painting a troubled city ready for civil unrest.

It’s not that family and revolution can never form a cohesive narrative together, but that Blackfish City is not a successful example of that. The city of Qaaanaq makes the characters’ feel like they don’t belong and don’t matter. The answer that the novel offers to this problem is not to change how society operates, but to find solace in one’s own family, where they can finally belong and matter. And what about everyone else that doesn’t have a family to rely on? Someone like Fill? Well, the city remains their tomb.

Blackfish City excels when it’s dealing with how its characters’ society alienates them, but utterly fails when it tries to find a solution to the problem. It’s a book of two halves that simply don’t fit well together.

December 02, 2012.