It was pretty easy to expect, when I was first handed Lore as a trembling victim and Spanner as her fast-talking underworld coach, that the world of Slow River is a cyberpunk world in which one's identity implant is their life and loss of it turns one into a non-person. This isn't what Slow River is about at all. It's not cyberpunk at all, though aside from Neuromancer it's one of the few novels we've run into that is set in a world not that much after our own, where space travel isn't an issue and earth and recognizable human technologies define the plane, scale and challenges of the novel. Lore has never lost some widget of technology she couldn't regain. She doesn't glory in her life on the edge, and neither does the novel. In fact, instead of being faced with the unknowability of the life and threat of the elite, we find her first with intimate knowledge of the world, rather than fighting desperately against it. She chooses to hide from her former identity and her incredibly powerful family for other, far more tangled reasons, reasons that the story slowly peels back in layers. The psychological thickets underlying Lore's denial of her identity are the heart of a fascinating study of economic class, family secrets, friendship and loyalty, self-esteem, and self-created identity. This is not a cyberpunk identity thriller. Lore observes that she is a creature who has fallen from the tops of the jungle trees down into the lower layers of growth. What follows is simple, but an elegant metaphor in the body of the novel. Each layer of the jungle is a different ecosystem; each has its own rules, its own predators, its own logic. Jungle creatures who fall out of their natural layer are completely unequipped for the world in which they find themselves, and often die miserable deaths. But the river that cuts through the center of the jungle also cuts through all of the layers, leaving open space where one can, if one chooses, see them all at once for what they are. It's a compelling metaphor for class and an interesting guide to Lore's emotional journey, and when Lore finds her emotional riverbank, the resonances echo back through the story and transform and improve the entire novel.
Interestingly, the science in is water reclamation, and surprisingly, I find it riveting as presented by Griffith. To be honest there is some passing reference to identity hacking, ransoming, and con games, but those bits of technology are indistinct supports for character and plot. Environmental engineering is the foregrounded science, and Lore's competence, dedication, and understanding makes it far from either boring or typically political. Not that it's NOT political. The politics here are about class, rather than purely about environmentalism, and even here the multinational corporation is more ambiguous than evil. Seen through Lore's eyes, the biological process of cleaning and recycling water takes on a complex, difficult beauty that had me looking forward to scenes of tromping about sewage treatment plants. Go sewage rakes! Yeah!
One thing I just have to mention about this book is how elegant the use of more-and-less subtle difference in P.O.V. is in this book. Though confused along with the rest of you at being introduced to the same character at several different stages in her life, it allows you to move in and around the complex identity timeline of one person in a way that make me much more comfortable than any of the other books we've read so far – take, for example, Stars in my Pockets as an example of the opposite effect. As far as I have picked it apart, Slow River is told in three narrative strands with the same protagonist but separated in her life by time. The current story is told in the first person, the immediate background in tight third-person past tense, and Lore's childhood in a "looser" third-person present. Lore's childhood was a story told to her, her life with Spanner was a story pushed at her, and her life afterwards is the story she takes control of. It's that sort of book, full of parallels, symbolism, sideways approaches to questions of identity, and use of literary devices as cues.