The Chimes

In the quiet days of power,
seven ravens in the tower.
When you clip the raven's wing,
then the bird begins to sing.
When you break the raven's beak,
then the bird begins to speak.
When the Chimes fill up the sky,
then the ravens start to fly.
Gwillum, Huginn, Cedric, Thor,
Odin, Hardy, nevermore.
Never ravens in the tree,
till Munnin can fly home to me.

The Chimes represents the final book from 2015's Man Booker longlist for me to have read – after waiting over a year for it to become available locally, I finally broke down and ordered a second-hand copy direct from Britain – and as a result, I may have overinflated its importance in my mind. As it begins, I found the dystopic England to be strange and fascinating, but as it went along, I became less enchanted; I couldn't help but feel a strong YA vibe. When I later learned that author Anna Smaill had proposed it as a YA novel herself, that made total sense to me: it's not that being YA makes it a lesser novel, but it's still curious to me that both Smaill's publishers and then the Man Booker judges decided to put this title up against adult fare, where it doesn't quite stack up as original or deep. If The Chimes was listed as YA, I'd give it four stars all day long; three stars is where it more properly ranks against adult novels in general and the rest of the Booker longlist in particular (in the latter case, three might even be considered generous). 

The arrival in London, what was it like?

As The Chimes opens, we discover an unsettling, post-apocalyptic England: After a destructive civil war known as the Allbreaking (in which familiar landmarks were reduced to rubble), a presumably benevolent ruling class known as the Order “arose from the dischord”, and through the complex musical compositions they play on the Carillon twice a day (which are apparently heard throughout the entire country?), they are able to wipe the memories of the populace and keep them in control. Every morning at matins, the Chimes tell the Onestory – the accepted history of the civil war and the rise of the Order – and every evening at vespers, the Chimes play a melody so complex that everyone goes into an ecstatic state, their hands signing along in the do-re-mi language of solfrege, and collapsing to the ground afterwards. This populace has reverted to a medieval farmer/hunter/tradesman society, and when people awake in the morning, they can only remember the very basics (their name, maybe some family members), relying on bodymemory to get them out of bed and started on their daily routines. Most people also have a roughcloth bag of objectmemories: trinkets that they have willed themselves to associate with something from their past, but for the most part, no one can hold a memory for more than a few days. Too, all the books were destroyed in the Allbreaking, and no one knows how to read anyway.

Music is so important to this society that the latinate of music scores is part of the vernacular (people move presto or lento), every young child is taught to play an instrument as a sort of common language, and without maps or other recording devices, people whistle out directions and instructions to one another. I found all of this world-building to be very interesting, and as it took a hundred pages or so for me to learn this much, this began as a tantalising read: just what is going on here? The book begins with Simon, a farmer boy from Essex, who is travelling to London because of his mother's deathbed instructions. With nothing more than a phrase of music to guide him, Simon is expected to find a woman named Netty; but with a weak memory like everyone else, when he initially fails at this quest he is lucky to be taken in by a group of scavenging ragamuffins; the Five Rover Pact. Led by a blind and beautiful boy named Lucien, these kids search the sewers for palladium (known as The Lady and required by the Order for their arcane needs), and Simon soon forgets any other life. But: There is more to Lucien than it seems, and in Simon, he recognises a boy who is more than he seems. It was at this point that the book started to feel YA; it became very Hunger Games, with the kids who would dare to resist the faraway government (in this case, the Citadel, where the privileged citizens have no idea how brutal life is for those outside their walled city), their quest fulfills a rumoured prophecy, and when the inevitable love story develops, it's a story of first love. All of this and the fairly predictable conclusion were less interesting to me.

Sentence-by-sentence, the writing in The Chimes is lovely and lyrical and Smaill did a really good job of teasing out information to keep up the tension and mystery. As I played an instrument growing up, I wasn't confused by the musical references, and as a method of control, I found the Chimes themselves to be intriguing: I liked when Simon remembers his mother showing him a hidden scrapbook with old articles in it – with titles like Whole-body Vibration and the Human Nervous System and The Potential Effects of Anthropogenic Noise on Birdlife – that go some way to explaining the how of what's going on to the reader, while we understand that these characters have no idea what they're looking at since they can't read. With the Chimes having driven the birds out of England, I liked the way that Smaill implied that avian nursery rhymes were an effort at passing down information to future generations. On the other hand, there were some writing quirks that annoyed me: like, what's the point of playing around with the spelling of “mettle” for “metal” or “orkestra” for “orchestra” when the characters in the book can't write? Where would these alt-spellings have come from if not from them? And as I said earlier, once the book veers from interesting world-building to a familiar-sounding YA quest to take down the evil-central-government-posing-as-benevolent-provider, it pretty much lost my interest.

I don't regret reading The Chimes but it wasn't what I expected; and I have no idea what the Man Booker jury was thinking last year. I do think it would make an interesting movie.

Man Booker Longlist 2015:

Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have a Family

Anne Enright  - The Green Road 

Marlon James  - A Brief History of Seven Killings

Laila Lalami  - The Moor's Account 

Tom McCarthy  - Satin Island 

Chigozie Obioma  - The Fishermen 

Andrew O’Hagan - The Illuminations 

Marilynne Robinso - Lila 

Anuradha Roy - Sleeping on Jupiter

Sunjeev Sahota  - The Year of the Runaways 

Anna Smaill - The Chimes 

Anne Tyler  - A Spool of Blue Thread 

Hanya Yanagihara  - A Little Life 

I was really pleased that A Brief History of Seven Killings took the prize; even more pleased that it didn't go to A Little Life as seemed inevitable.