Russell Hoban

FREMDER

Fremder is, not surprisingly, a man who has never fully come to terms with who he is, and the book tells the story of his self-discovery. The early chapters contain a good deal of flashback reminiscence, which slows things down somewhat. But gradually we find that Fremder is being investigated because of a strange incident that occurred when the spaceship he was travelling in, the Clever Daughter, vanished. All its crew disappeared as well, apart from Fremder himself, who was found in drifting in space, without a spacesuit or oxygen, but still alive. He has no conscious recollection of what happened, so the authorities invoke the help of a supercomputer called Pythia to try to find out. This being a Hoban novel, however, nothing is quite as it seems in the beginning, and Pythia herself (or itself) turns out to be different from what we and Fremder initially supposed.

This is a bare summary of a complex book—too complex perhaps; I found it harder to read than most of Hoban's other novels. It is also darker in tone than most, with fewer flashes of humour. And there is a good deal of violence; the streets are populated by gangs of renegades called Shorties and Clowns, bands of whom jointly gang-raped Fremder's mother. The Earth has been mostly destroyed by pollution and people have to wear ultraviolet protection and use air purifying apparatus to go outside. This makes it difficult to understand how wildlife still exists, though it apparently does, because Fremder has seen ravens feasting on the bodies of people who died accidentally.

Aficionados of Hoban's writing, of whom I am one, will certainly want to read this book, but I don't think it is an unqualified success. It is not always easy to follow the story, the writing is sometimes uncharacteristically diffuse, and there are far too many quotations (needing one and a half pages of small-print acknowledgements at the beginning).

5 June 2012