Ethanthi100
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The Girl in the Road – Review
Monica Byrnes, 2014
Crown Publishing
323 Pages
The Girl in the Road, Monica Byrne's vivid, incredibly self-assured debut novel, isn't a work of grand apocalyptic survival, mega-corporations, or space stations; it's of hallucinations and granular details – it's details are zoomed-in. Like most science-fiction works, from its first moments it throws names and places at the reader that are unfamiliar and “exotic”, but they are not fictional, they are not arbitrary, and you might want to get a map.
The novel is built of two stories, one of a young woman prone to manic episodes named Meena, and a young girl named Mariama; the former's story begins in Keralam and quickly flees to Mumbai, then begins a journey across the Arabian Sea on The Trail, a new energy source made of wave-energy-capturing pontoons; the latter's story begins in Nouakchott and begins a journey across the great expanse of Saharan Africa. The Wall Street Journal review of the novel, quoted in the advance praise before the story proper, notes: "Sci-fi has long claimed to be the multicultural literature of the future. This is the real thing." You definitely can't disagree as you constantly open Google Maps to try to chart the journeys of our characters; it's exhilarating, and calls to mind a Patrick O'Brian Master and Commander novel, but with the stuffy British imperialism replaced by beautiful colors and terse, brilliant descriptions of these locales rarely examined or inhabited in Western fiction.
Ultimately the novel is entirely about journeys: the tolls they take, the circumstances under which they conspire, and the relentless rhythms that drive them. Meena believes she is being hunted by an Ethiopian terrorist group, even as she journey's to Ethiopia to find truths about her family's past. Mariama is a runaway, an orphaned nomad, also on her way to Ethiopia to start a new life.
If there's any downside to the extensive globe-trotting and wonderful cultures, it's that Byrnes has to spend enough energy describing them and getting the reader descriptively acclimated (if not academically – a lot of terms regarding Hindu practices and Indian food will probably have to be looked up, great fun but time consuming) that she runs out of energy to write more about the characters – ironic, seeing as they are the only static element. A short tangent of Meena talking to, learning from, and sleeping with a young woman who explains to her The Trail is one of the greatest short stories I have ever read, but sadly doesn't stick around; Mariama is… a little girl, that's her main attribute. We get hallucinatory insights into Meena's psychology, and Mariama gets to learn how to read, but perhaps because of the geographic chess-piece-moving there isn't enough meat on their characters for the reader to get as personally invested as the prose would want you to.
Because the prose is gorgeous; Meena's aforementioned manic states allow Byrnes to go outside her otherwise grounded textures and indulge: “Each wound is a blazing star, and I’m a moving constellation.” Meanwhile when the story focuses on the young Mariama, Byrnes works with naive literalism: “And then the trees started to crowd up right along the road, leaning in to get a look at us”.
To tell the plot would be to ruin the journey, as we already know the destination. The Girl in the Road glitters rather ominously, for underneath the taut prose of far-away places there is a pessimism and a sense of resign to the affair; our characters are followed, and defined, by tragedy in a way that takes away from the beautiful view without truly earning it. Nonetheless I can't help but recommend the book – it showed me so many beautiful places I hadn't known before.
Monica Byrnes, 2014
Crown Publishing
323 Pages
Oh the Places You'll Go
The Girl in the Road, Monica Byrne's vivid, incredibly self-assured debut novel, isn't a work of grand apocalyptic survival, mega-corporations, or space stations; it's of hallucinations and granular details – it's details are zoomed-in. Like most science-fiction works, from its first moments it throws names and places at the reader that are unfamiliar and “exotic”, but they are not fictional, they are not arbitrary, and you might want to get a map.
The novel is built of two stories, one of a young woman prone to manic episodes named Meena, and a young girl named Mariama; the former's story begins in Keralam and quickly flees to Mumbai, then begins a journey across the Arabian Sea on The Trail, a new energy source made of wave-energy-capturing pontoons; the latter's story begins in Nouakchott and begins a journey across the great expanse of Saharan Africa. The Wall Street Journal review of the novel, quoted in the advance praise before the story proper, notes: "Sci-fi has long claimed to be the multicultural literature of the future. This is the real thing." You definitely can't disagree as you constantly open Google Maps to try to chart the journeys of our characters; it's exhilarating, and calls to mind a Patrick O'Brian Master and Commander novel, but with the stuffy British imperialism replaced by beautiful colors and terse, brilliant descriptions of these locales rarely examined or inhabited in Western fiction.
Ultimately the novel is entirely about journeys: the tolls they take, the circumstances under which they conspire, and the relentless rhythms that drive them. Meena believes she is being hunted by an Ethiopian terrorist group, even as she journey's to Ethiopia to find truths about her family's past. Mariama is a runaway, an orphaned nomad, also on her way to Ethiopia to start a new life.
If there's any downside to the extensive globe-trotting and wonderful cultures, it's that Byrnes has to spend enough energy describing them and getting the reader descriptively acclimated (if not academically – a lot of terms regarding Hindu practices and Indian food will probably have to be looked up, great fun but time consuming) that she runs out of energy to write more about the characters – ironic, seeing as they are the only static element. A short tangent of Meena talking to, learning from, and sleeping with a young woman who explains to her The Trail is one of the greatest short stories I have ever read, but sadly doesn't stick around; Mariama is… a little girl, that's her main attribute. We get hallucinatory insights into Meena's psychology, and Mariama gets to learn how to read, but perhaps because of the geographic chess-piece-moving there isn't enough meat on their characters for the reader to get as personally invested as the prose would want you to.
Because the prose is gorgeous; Meena's aforementioned manic states allow Byrnes to go outside her otherwise grounded textures and indulge: “Each wound is a blazing star, and I’m a moving constellation.” Meanwhile when the story focuses on the young Mariama, Byrnes works with naive literalism: “And then the trees started to crowd up right along the road, leaning in to get a look at us”.
To tell the plot would be to ruin the journey, as we already know the destination. The Girl in the Road glitters rather ominously, for underneath the taut prose of far-away places there is a pessimism and a sense of resign to the affair; our characters are followed, and defined, by tragedy in a way that takes away from the beautiful view without truly earning it. Nonetheless I can't help but recommend the book – it showed me so many beautiful places I hadn't known before.
