The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Playing mind games with a Tamagotchi
A nerve-jangling thriller about robotic household pets controlled by strangers impresses Lucy Scholes
TLITTLE EYES by Samanta Schweblin, tr Megan McDowell 256pp, Oneworld, £14.99 ebook £6.99
echnology’s ability to keep us all connected has never been more important than it is right now. While social distancing measures are in effect, virtual meet-ups and video conferencing have swiftly become the new normal. These forms of communication can’t help but be an acute reminder of the physical space between us, but at the same time they’re collapsing the boundaries between private and public, home and office. “Saw inside some Chelsea ladies’ very fancy sitting rooms,” someone wrote on Twitter only this morning, describing the nowaffordable online Barre class from an expensive gym that she’d taken via Zoom.
It’s not just our colleagues who are peeking inside our homes for the first time; turns out, we’re many of us inadvertently inviting strangers inside them, too. With eerie prescience, this is also what’s happening – albeit under less apocalyptic circumstances – in Samanta Schweblin’s nervejangling new novel, Little Eyes.
Remember Tamagotchis, the virtual pets that were all the rage in the late 1990s? Well, in her “kentukis” Schweblin has invented the 21st-century upgrade. At $279 (£223) a pop, they’re pushing the price of an iPhone, which makes sense since they’re “a cross between a mobile stuffed animal and a cell phone”. Kentukis come in the shape of a variety of different animals – moles, rabbits, crows, pandas, owls and dragons – and all have wheels, so they can move around.
You’re either a “keeper” or a “dweller”. The former buys the physical, robotic animal, while the latter owns and operates the kentuki’s consciousness. From their screen, the dweller sees the world through their kentuki’s eyes, and is responsible for moving the animatronic pet around its keeper’s home; the dweller can hear the keeper talking, but just as with a real pet, they can’t talk back. The process of matching a “keeper” and a “dweller” is an entirely random one; neither party has any choice in the matter. And once made, each connection is a one-time only event. If the kentuki is destroyed, or runs out of charge, or if the dweller decides to sever the connection, that’s it, game over.
The catch, though, is that there’s nothing particularly playful about the power games that develop between keepers and dwellers. As many of the former learn, often too late, there’s a very “real danger” in “opening the doors of your house to a complete stranger”.
That Schweblin excels at mining this darker, more unsavoury side of kentuki life is unsurprising. Anyone who’s read either her Man Booker International-shortlisted Fever Dream, a nightmarish eco-thriller set in rural Argentina, or her savagely macabre stories in Mouthful of Birds couldn’t be expecting anything else. Little
Eyes lacks the more traditional gothic horror elements of either of her previously translated works – always deftly undertaken by Megan McDowell – but this new bogeyman, the unknown figure lurking at the other end of a kentuki connection, is just as scary as any of the weird creations in Mouthful of Birds, perhaps because the fundamentals here are so firmly grounded in reality.
In one of the creepiest chapters in the novel, for example, a mother in Vancouver buys a crow kentuki for her two little girls. They take it home from the shop and set it up to charge. The minute the connection is established, the bird behaves like it’s possessed. It begins to shriek, ramming itself into the youngest child again and again. The mother’s protective instinct kicks in and she beats the toy into submission with the heavy marble base of a lamp: “Its total connection time had been only one minute and 17 seconds.”
That Schweblin introduces us to more keepers than dwellers only adds to the growing sense of unease. We, like them, don’t know who’s looking out from behind these various electronic eyes. Some keepers, like the Canadian family, we meet only once, while others – lonely old ladies, and impressionable youngsters amongst them – we return to on multiple occasions.
These aren’t all tales of terror, but at best there’s still something off about them. A schoolboy in Antigua struggles to draw the line between his body and that of the kentuki in which he dwells: he “was no longer a boy with a dragon, he was a dragon with a boy inside him”. In Zagreb, an enterprising young man sets up a business selling “pre-established kentuki connections”. An Australian father requests a “well-behaved keeper” who is into “extreme sports” in “paradisiacal places” so his disabled son can live vicariously, but others exploit the opportunity for a new kind of poverty tourism.
Schweblin’s portrait of humanity here isn’t a pretty one, though many, no doubt, would call her a realist. Little Eyes makes for masterfully uneasy reading; it’s a book that burrows under your skin. It’s also made me want to stay away from Zoom for as long as possible.
‘Keepers’ of the pets are matched randomly with ‘dwellers’, who inhabit them remotely
Lurid, florid and overheated, the imaginary worlds the Brontë siblings created, first by improvising, then by moving their toy soldiers around maps they made themselves, then in the “little books” written in tiny print, have been called their secret science fiction. Their juvenilia were finally deciphered and transcribed for a critical edition in 2010. But they’ve never quite found a readership. They’re incoherent – the Brontës rewrote each others’ stories, killed each other’s characters off and brought them back to life – and full of gaps because so much of the writing is lost or was destroyed.
So Isabel Greenberg has done something extraordinary. She has somehow made sense of the juvenilia without tidying it up. In this graphic novel she has met the Brontës on their own terms, and the result is – and I mean this as a compliment – utterly loopy.
Greenberg begins with a boot splashing into a muddy puddle, a
woman all in blue, shivering on a rug on the damp moors, a shawl pulled close against the wuthering wind. This is Charlotte Brontë and it is 1849. She has just lost her three remaining siblings. She is lonely.
And then a dashing, louche young man appears, in a claret cravat, a top hat and dark glasses. This is Charles Wellesley, Charlotte’s fictional avatar from childhood, when she and her brother and sisters invented Glass Town, a whole world full of adventure, romance and derring-do. (And yes, her avatar was a man – just one of the ways the Brontës’ fantasies were transgressive.)
Charles invites Charlotte to go back to Glass Town, and she can’t refuse. “Spin me a yarn, Miss Brontë,” he says, “Weave me a web.” And she’s off. She starts in Haworth, with her brother and sisters dreaming up characters. Emily wants to create a heroine, but Charlotte is scornful: “A queen? What about a great commander? A King!” Greenberg
is slyly funny on Charlotte’s feminist failings. “No, I prefer a queen, thanks,” says Emily, who will later go off with Anne to create her own world, Gondal. The break between the siblings is depicted in one of the most startling double pages in this gorgeous book; on one page, Charlotte and Branwell stand on the shore watching a ship sail far out to sea. “They’ve really gone,” says Charlotte. On the facing page, Emily and Anne have
landed and, still in their nightdresses, are gleefully beginning their own story.
One reason for the break is that, as Anne says, “We don’t want tropical climates and far-flung colonies. We don’t want a world where people can die… and then be ‘made alive!’” Charlotte, though, understandably longs for a world where the sun always shines and no one really dies, and one question Glass Town asks is: can imagination be a necessary escape, or is too much imagination dangerous? Greenberg brilliantly depicts Charlotte’s breakdown while teaching at Roe Head School where she became addicted to escaping into her imagination. In Glass Town, Charlotte’s hero Zamorna leaps out of a chest in her bedroom and pulls her (through the chest!) into his anarchic, exotic, thrilling world. Blind to real life, she blames herself horribly when Anne gets ill.
Glass Town works so well because while the Brontës’ own story is absolutely devastating, the
Charlotte’s fictional avatar was a man – Charles Wellesley, in dashing claret cravat
Yet it in a roundabout way, the devil is in that detail. Were it not for the author’s forensic fastidiousness, his marshalling of piles of correspondence and arid minutiae, the most disquieting elements of his family saga might have remained dormant.
What do those interests in Jamaica – and what flowed from them – entail? Something sobering, and unpalatable: deep-seated complicity in the slave-trade. What makes this much-documented viciousness hit home in Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract is – well, the way it’s so close to home for Atkinson. The more he probes his roots, the bloodier the business.
He lays hands on a document, dated 1801, listing, by name, age, employment and value, 196 enslaved workers. In Jamaica, Richard Atkinson’s nephew Matt was a serial rapist of slave women, begetting several children – conduct “quite ordinary on an island where white men viewed enslaved women as sexual prey”. And what of the Rum Mr A himself?
“The greatest mystery” lies in a document dated 1785 that transferred to his ownership a slave called Betty and her three children – the price £120. Was Betty his mistress, those children his children? In the midst of a typically flowery and ardent letter to the unrequited love of his life (Anne Lindsay) sent a few years earlier, there’s a reference to “the black Family”. Atkinson captures his own confusion at his forebear’s contradictions: the near heroic go-getting, and evident tenderness, coupled with his age’s ruthless mercantilism.
If Atkinson lacks a novelist’s capacity to bring his populous array of characters fully to life, his evidence-sifting tenacity is impressive and the way he combines thumbnail nuggets with grand narratives shows how history benefits from being written from the ground up. Are we so very far removed from those long-done deeds? The fragility of 18thcentury banking systems and the sudden blighting onset of malady feel very familiar. More broadly, the question of what is known and not known, what can be omitted and what gets ignored, goes to the heart of our vexed relation with our imperial past.
Visiting Jamaica and its colonial ruins, Atkinson finally reveals that a DNA test connects him to distant cousins of West African ancestry. Isn’t his many-stranded family tale part and parcel of Britain’s story, in all its buccaneering vitality and gruesome death-dealing? There are no easy answers as to how to process this, and this isn’t an easy read, a penance as much as a pleasure. Maybe that’s apt.