Wednesday 26 September 2018

An Ocean of Minutes


Polly finds herself pinching the pads of her fingers, one by one. This Saturdays-in-September idea is suddenly sickening. It is like a plan a mother would make to keep from losing her children on a subway. It's a plan able to withstand early-closing doors and a snarl of stairways, not the ocean of minutes that twelve years holds. But uselessly, her mind has gone blank. Strange, random thoughts wander into the empty space. Is it dinner time? She is entering a world where the notion of something as normal as dinner time does not exist.

When I was just a chapter into An Ocean of Minutes, my daughter asked me what the book was about and I was able to answer: It's 1981 and there's a devastating flu pandemic wiping out the population. Polly's partner, Frank, is sure to die, but since time travel has been invented in the future (there's a weak explanation for why people can be sent back to September of 1981 but not to six months earlier so the flu can be prevented), Polly has been able to sign on as an indentured servant – about to be sent to 1993 – in exchange for Frank's life-saving treatment in the present. With a time and place arranged where they will eventually meet, what could go wrong? As soon as I finished explaining this, I asked my daughter, “With just this information, what do you think would be a satisfying ending? That Polly overcomes a bunch of obstacles in the future but eventually finds Frank? Or that she overcomes obstacles but has lost him forever?” We agreed that the book must eventually be about more than just that, and then my daughter pretty much guessed how it turns out, but what I'm still unconvinced of is if this book really is about more than this basic plot. In the end, the writing was fine and some big ideas were gestured at, but I still wanted the more.
Just as the invention of air travel had made it easy to go, but no easier to leave, the invention of time travel made time easy to pass, but no easier to endure.
Polly and Frank are from Buffalo, but since they happened to have found themselves quarantined while vacationing in Texas, it's to a future Galveston that Polly is sent. It turns out that she was only given this opportunity because Polly has rare skills that are desperately required in the future: those of a furniture restorer. Apparently, after the flu (which killed off 90% of the population), the USA split into two countries – the United States in the north (which has all the military and industry) and America in the south (which has oil reserves and rundown resorts) – and because the rich northerners need places to vacation, Polly's skills are employed to clean pillows and recane chairs in a bizarro, moldering south; a place where Hispanic women are warehoused in shipping containers and shuttled to exercise bike farms in order to spend their days generating “clean energy” for those liberal northerners who love green living. Right away, Polly realises that she had been sent to the wrong year (1998), and as an indentured servant in a low-tech dystopia, she doesn't have a lot of rights or freedoms or access to information: she sold her time in order to save Frank's life, but at every turn, she's prevented from finding him again. As I said, there's some gestures about big ideas – about nationalism, class and belonging – but they didn't really go anywhere; this is more love story than social study; and it's a strangely uncompelling love story.
But what could she do? She looked up. She kept laughing in the evening light, which is what people do when monstrous epiphanies surface in their minds. You cannot put life on hold to have a moment of grief, so every second, half the people in the world are split in two. This is what they mean by life goes on, and the worst is that you go along with it too.
I don't think that author Thea Lim got much out of the sci-fi potential of her concept, and with her MFA from the University of Houston, her writing style is much the same as every other MFA I tend to complain about; all sizzle no steak. I was simply left wanting more from this.


I read An Ocean of Minutes because it was nominated for the Giller Prize (Canada's richest literary award, meant to promote Canadian authors), so right from the start, I was miffed that Thea Lim (born in the US, raised in Singapore, now living in Toronto) even qualified for the prize. (The lack of anything even vaguely related to Canada didn't help.)
The 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Longlist: 

Paige Cooper: Zolitude
Patrick DeWitt: French Exit
Esi Edugyan: Washington Black
Sheila Heti: Motherhood
Emma Hooper: Our Homesick Songs
Tanya Tagaq: Split Tooth
Kim Thúy: Vi
Joshua Whitehead: Jonny Appleseed


*Won by Washington Black (but I would have given it to Songs for the Cold of Heart)
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