smile or two may well up, through the pages of this book, here and there, like a bubble reluctant to leave the dark waters of the deep pool of mourning; it cannot be denied. But this will not be a smile at wit, or visible humor, or at moments of champagne joie de vivre, for there are none. It will be a smile—one might call it rueful, or reminiscential—of recognition.
Here and there—in the title story "Breathmoss" (2002) in particular—Ian R. MacLeod manages to capture the smell and turn and sting of an entire landscape or world, a sense of wonder in a totally imagined given, and here and there—perhaps most vividly in two deeply similar hymns to belatedness, "New Light on the Drake Equation" (2001) and "The Summer Isles" (1998)—there are moments in Breathmoss and Other Exhalations when you seem to see a life entire in a moment. And you smile, because you recognize that smell of the world, that capsule of living. But for the most part, Breathmoss, which is a collection of stories of profound resignation, does not give release.
It is almost all of it SF, which leads to a conclusion (see below). There are only two real exceptions. "The Chop Girl" (1999), a sad little tale set in World War II in England that tells, through the viewpoint of a young girl who drives aviators to death by kissing them, the de rigueur WWII story of the seemingly unkillable pilot who is in truth a ghost, or the victim of a Faustian pact with the devil, or not there at all, like Kilroy. But even this fantasy rests within the iron claws of belatedness and nescience: Because it is told by the young woman grown old but still uncomprehending, and the doomed/ghost/devilish pilot falls offstage into the unanealing (as far as we can make out) sea.
And "The Noonday Pool" (1995) describes, in language not entirely free of sentimentality, the last day or so in the life of Sir Edward Elgar, a composer historically belated by the failure of his genius after World War I gutted him; he is guided toward an epiphany of sorts by a spirit of the English wood, who is also a fox. This is an early story, and a bit raw-boned in its unpacking of the emotion that lies at its heart (all MacLeod stories seem to move toward the expression of, and end in, a state of mind), but for this reason, it is easy to detect a more naked sense of the world here. Peg (it is a name Thomas Burnett Swann would not have eschewed) is musing on the oddness of her human charge, and muses briefly on her role as genius loci or Spirit of Place, a concept dear to English (but not American) writers of fantasy:
This was the thing about humans that puzzled her more than anything, their constant desire to be somewhere other than where they were. And, even for her, even when she'd flown on the gossamer wings the fireside tales of this old man's forefathers had once allowed her, such a thing was quite impossible. Your body was changeable, disposable, but your spirit, ah!—that could only ever be in one place.
Now, the greenwood was shrinking—dying—and Peg knew that soon it would all be fields, and then, not long after, a green expanse in which humans with sticks would chase a small, white ball. And after that, the green would turn to brown, and things would happen that even her own prescience forbade her to witness.
It is a crude quote, but it contains everything the later, more sonorous MacLeod says in tales far more supple: Wherever you go, you can never really leave, and that which you can never really leave is dying.
(There is one very irritating sentence in "The Noonday Pool," and I'd like to make one more try at cauterizing the obsessive recurrence of its burden. Elgar is remembering his past. He remembers "shaking hands with his one-time friend and admirer Richard Strauss (who was now squandering his gifts on pompous, grubby music for that pompose and grubby new German Chancellor)." MacLeod may intend this canard simply to represent the maunderings of an old English mind at the end of its tether, but the accusation against Strauss has been repeated too often, and usually by English writers, to slide through unchallenged. Strauss wrote, on occasion, pompous music, from the beginning of his career, we all know that. But he did not write Nazi music, as did his weird coeval Hans Pfitzner, and indeed, in 1934, he was preparing to compose a pacifist opera—Friedenstag—to a libretto by Stefan Zweig, who was a Jew in Germany. Between Strauss and Elgar in 1934, the vacancy was in Elgar.)
The rest of Breathmoss is all SF.
Saying one thing well
The title story is superb. It is set on the planet Habara, which enjoys a shortish Great Year seasonal cycle. The heroine and her mothers (family patterns, which are complex, reflect the almost total absence of male humans on the planet) descend to a small town on the coast, where she passes through menarche, falls in love with the wrong person (a young woman) while the rare young man who might have been the right person commits (out of inchoate frustration) a deeply emblematical, and ultimately emotionally shattering act of violence. But the novella itself is a paean to the world, to menarche, to the sea and the seasons and (calmly and clearly, without any of the self-pitying rhetoric of "The Noonday Pool") to the implacable locatedness of the self.
This last is not a message 20th century SF often expounded—that the journey outward is an illusion, that the monomyth of the Hero of the Thousand Faces makes sense only if the hero discovers, at the end, that he has never really left—but it has always been a message, a burden, a litany, a tocsin dear to the English (we may now say British, as we're not talking simply about the extremely English MacLeod) imagination. It is a message that, in 2004, can also be understood to say something about the enterprise of SF itself: that the long dream of outreach has ended here, right here, here and now, on this Steel Beach. When, in "Breathmoss," we fully understand the true identity of the ancient star pilotess who guides the heroine into her life journey, we more fully understand, as well, the nature of SF in this year. It is a story which rests in the mind like a bomb.
"New Light on the Drake Equation" may be slightly too long—most of MacLeod's stories should have been hung out to dry before they reached print—but tells a story very similar in its message to that of "Breathmoss." It is about 2060. The protagonist, a moderatelly successful scientist, has been obsessed from early youth with SETI. In later years, he has built a refusenik life out of this unending campaign to discover signs of other life in the universe. (It is significant that, even as a young man in the early 21st century, the only SF he read was already half a century old.) The world of 2060, whose inhabitants have themselves become virtual aliens through transformative advances in nanotechnology, lies about him, rich and strange and multifarious, but the SF story his life tells and manifests is too strict and simple and archaic and outreach-obsessed to allow him access to the SF world that story cannot comprehend. MacLeod clearly loves his protagonist, and we do as well, but "New Light" is a long farewell to everything that protagonist stands for.
"Verglas" (2002), also set on a meticulously realized alien planet, also depicts a character who does not get it, whose failure to get the world reads as a body English of belatedness. "The Summer Isles" (1996) is set in an alternate 20th century where the Great War has been won by Germany, and Britain, out of postwar humiliations, has fallen to a dictator who replicates, in this world, the Nazi transformation of Germany in our world. This tale, too, is an utterance of belatedness, for the protagonist, a burnt-out case homosexual who has known the dictator in his youth, approaches death with a dry heart that can only moisten through embrocations of memory, rather like the protagonist of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1953). There is, in other words, something quite astonishingly unified about Breathmoss. It says one thing.
Purity of heart (it says) is to say farewell.
