(1984) The Ark Sakura
1984-01-01
This book has interesting ideas and characters, but fails to cohere them together, with the plot ultimately crumbling apart in the final sections.
Our unnamed protagonist, who goes by the monikers "mole" or "pig"---which, on account of his weight, is the least preferred option---has been living underground, preparing for a feared apocalypse. He does not intend to go the distance alone, instead seeing his habitat as a ship which could sustain hundreds of people. Naturally, he would be the captain of the ship, the Noah to this ark.
While shopping for supplies, he buys a curious insect from a dealer: the eupcaccia, which lives going around in circles, eating its own dung. Because of its steady rhythms, the bug is said to be used as a kind of clock in different cultures. Mole takes a fascination to the bug and its style of life, almost envying it.
Befriending the insect dealer, he offers him a ticket and key to board the ship. While mole has prepared many such bundles, along with pretty leather cases, the insect dealer is the first person to receive one, despite not being an ideal candidate.
Unfortunately, a couple of shills---promoters paid to boost sales by pretending to purchase goods---steal one of the bundles, running off with a key to the hideout. Mole manages to recruit the insect dealer in pursuit of the man and woman, but they aren't able to catch up to them before they reach the hideout.
From there, events unfold as mole deals with these three visitors, and the signs that other intruders might be present.
The personality of the main character is the most well-executed part of the novel. His weirdness is captured through his thoughts, actions, and the habitat he has crated. The first-person narrative brings us into his perspective, and the mood of the novel is imbued with his character.
The use of action and scenery to describe him to us is quite clever. We learn about him through the kinds of preparations he's done, the sparse furnishing he's chosen, the meticulous traps set around the ship, his odd habits---including consuming chocolate and beer to thwart insomnia, and immersing himself in the stereoscopic imagery of photographic land surveys. These details give us a richer view into his character than his background or his thoughts.
The management of exposition is also well done. We continue to learn more surprising details throughout most of the novel, rather than them all appearing up front. Cleverly, we manage to have to background information about the main character in waves. There are several points where we learn about his past, each time seeming like a full picture, but containing pieces with shift our perspective substantially. This gives a mystery to the main character which makes us curious to learn more.
The other characters are less well fleshed out. We learn less about them. They're hard to read, especially because their behavior is intended to subterfuge. They lie and manipulate the main character, whose perspective makes us tied up in this confusion as well. While this could be an interesting use of the first person, there aren't any satisfying payoffs to the befuddling behavior. We get the impression that the characters' motivations are inconsistent, that they don't make sense. Abe succumbs to a great flaw of fiction: characters that fail to seem real.
The personality of the insect dealer shifts completely from the start to the end: he goes from timid to a ruthless commander and social mastermind. This shift is not a result of character development, and is not explained in any way, nor presented as some kind of revelation of his true nature. The male shill makes incomprehensible decisions towards the end, and the female shill serves more as a carrier for sexual themes than a character at all.
These difficulties in depicting characters outside the main one also undermine the plot, which starts to wobble midway through, before disintegrating completely by the end. A great premise is followed by several natural and well-posed beats: mole meets other characters, he and the insect dealer have to chase the shills, they drive to the ship, mole has to deal with his guests, we learn more about the ship as they explore, they discover hints of another intruder...but then these setups are not completed, leaving us hanging.
The biggest flaw in the resolution is that the plot happens in the background: the shill encounters the intruder "off-screen", a confrontation with a rival group seeking to use the ship concludes "off-screen", the protagonist, and thus our point-of-view, are literally stuck in a toilet while this group takes over the ship. It's frustrating in that so many elements are happening out of our sight, while, at the same time, so little of what we do see is resolved.
This issue extends to the themes of the novel. Those linked to the psychology of the main character are well developed, but outside of those, everything is merely hinted at, without a satisfying exploration.
The main character is a vehicle to explore feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and perversion. A poignant critique of the nerdy preppy archetype is well-developed: despite his knowledge and preparation, his is unable to seize power under a real crisis, and his fear lets him be easily manipulated.
The first-person perspective feels limiting. Ideas associated with other characters are only hinted at, teasing us. For example: how society treats "rejects", discarding people deemed "useless", such as the elderly; satire of community organizations, through a group of volunteer cleaners engaged in illegal dumping and criminal dealings; the sexual violence of the mole's father; etc. So many ideas are not developed, in favor of moving events forward. Frustratingly, these events are trying to advance a plot which falls apart to the point of making all of this seem like a pointless sequence of happenings.