These reviews are from our Original PCU Archives. We hope you enjoy them.

Slow River
Nicola Griffith,
New York: Balantine, 1995

Slow River is another bleak and gloomy near future novel. It uses the familiar plot of a 'poor little rich girl' lost in the cruel hard world. When she wakes up naked in body and stripped of her identity chip she is 'helped' to survive by a friend who then uses her for crime and her own personal pleasure. Strip away the modern preoccupation with sex and the plot is as old as the hills, and then some.

It was old when Dickens used it in Oliver Twist. While the author adds some feminist and lesbian “sensitivity” the reader is left thinking that 'I think I read this one last year, and a few years ago too'.

The writing is clear, at times even evocative and vivid, and not overly crude by modern standards. But the book fails because of the artistic pretensions and lack of any positive, or even sympathetic, point of contact with the heart of the reader. The plot shifts in time and place and at times the situations are almost incoherent. In short, reading this one is something of a chore.

The use of symbolism is simplistic and heavy handed, with no sense of vision. The main character, Lore, likes to wander by the slow river flowing through the heart of town. She works in a waste treatment plant, knows more about it than anyone there due to her past life, but can't clean up the waste of her own life.

Because she is without an ‘identity chip’ she must use false ones, or masks, to hide in the regimented and impersonal world.

The perspective of the book sees life as joyless and flat, with no real hope or meaning to it all. In spite of her skill with words the author has painted a three dimensional picture of a one-dimensional life.

If this is the lesbian feminist view of life then I am glad I don't have a part in it. There is no joy, and no real lasting pleasure in the so-called pleasures of the moment. Everyone uses everyone, and there is no real human contact, in spite of the sometimes frantic sexual contacts, and no real relationships are formed that are not either exploitive or enslavement.

It is possible to write a novel about an unrelenting bleak future that still calls us beyond ourselves. That is what makes Brave New World or 1984 classics.

Here there is no vision of what ought to be better, and all that is left is the empty shell of life.

With this 'artistic' point of view it comes as no surprise that the writing was partly funded by government grants, in this case from the Georgia council for the Arts and the Atlanta Bureau of Cultural affairs.

This raises two questions. First, would this book make it in the free market place of ideas? Second, why would an author who is so down on

American society take government money, with all the strings attached?

Are not such government controls and their constant interference the very things that cause the world to be impersonal and bureaucratic in the first place? The secret of writing about a broken life or world is to point the reader to another, a better, and a more human one. From this book you get the impression the author does not believe any such world or life exists, or can exist.

While well written in places this book will appeal only to those who have lost touch with the aspirations and hope that define humanity. In other words it will be a critical success with the media elite and the self-proclaimed enlightened ones. It will be praised as “High and Nobel ART” by those who mock the idea of human nobility and higher ethics or moral passion.

They will say it is great and Nobel because it denies the ideas of greatness and nobility of character. For me it would be better to write a book people can enjoy reading and which lifts the spirit, rather than to get the so called rewards of highbrow critical praise and a government handout.