race/gender/science fiction - Slow River

nicola griffith website

blacklace — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 05:55:49 +0000

Looking for resources for the bibliography, I tripped across a variety of interesting essays on Nicola Griffith's website in which she discusses science fiction as a genre, her books, her life, and gender in writing.

slow river and corporations

surrealistic — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 03:10:48 +0000

Of all the "subplots" that make up this novel, I found the Lore/Sal Bird -- Magyar one the most intriguing. In the beginning it definitely inspires a disgust for the corporate machine and how little it seems to care about the consumers of its "product", which is essential to life: water. All of this seems to suggest that in a technological age, one of humanity's few remaining weaknesses is its dependence on greedy profit-driven corporations for survival, which is certainly true of our real world.

At first I was stunned that Magyar ends up falling in love with Lore/Sal Bird; I thought that Magyar would just be the thorn in Lore's side, the annoying boss who is intimidated by her intelligence and pretends that Lore's work isn't good enough to save some face. However, in this section of menial worker ants, Lore is probably the only one who has ever given Magyar a good challenge. But this ending kind of bothered me because of how "Hollywood" it was...walking away hand in hand 'into the sunset' per se.

Also, Magyar in some ways is made to seem more traditionally "feminine" than Spanner (mainly implied by numerous references to her glorious hair swishing behind her), thus suggesting that the best kind of lesbian relationship can only happen between two "feminine" women. I was glad that someone brought this up in class because although it's clear that Griffith sets out to break a lot of boundaries and go against readers' expectations, she also goes along with some other stereotypes (the porno lesbian being the main one)

Anyway, that's my rant on this novel; not my favorite, but certainly innovative when it comes to sexuality and gender issues.

Living in a fish-eye lens, caught in the camera eye

blacklace — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:53:27 +0000

One of the most striking elements in Nicola Griffith's Slow River is the use of cameras. Throughout the text, the picture seen by the camera somehow shows a raw truth, and is able to catch characters at their most vulnerable moments, and with Lore, somehow seems to draw out her vulnerability.

The use of the camera is first introduced when Lore is taped begging for ransom. Her vulnerability at this moment and the total stripping of her defenses by her captors shows an underlying truth of a scared child. What is more interesting, though, is how knowing others have seen this video creates a level of paranoia in Lore once she escapes. She has a constant fear (though the intensity of it caries as time passes) that she will be recognized from the video. She both does not want to go back to her family, and, more importantly, does not want people to associate her with the person who was trapped in the camera's eye.

When Lore uses the camera against others, specifically Ruth and Ellen, she feels guilt, but she also feels justified in her actions. Though she cries as she films her friends, she responds to Ruth's subsequent confrontation by thinking "You've seen pictures of me in far more humiliating circumstances; and my abductors did not even have the courtesy to swap my head for another's" (197). This point is interesting in several ways. When Lore is in control, there is a sense that she has earned it, and that being the one wielding the camera is some sort of ultimate control. There is also the issue of body over face. Yes, the face is far more recognizable than the body to people. Yet Ruth implies that, in the situation of sex, especially in porn, it is not the faces that matter, but the body that is being traded and it is the body that becomes identity.

When Lore was younger, she made porn films of her parents using stock bodies and grafting her parents' heads on the bodies. When there s film, it is what is filmed that is directly important--any edits become the work of fantasy. Lore's manipulation of her parents' heads and environment on film does not violate them, because she did not actually capture them in a moment of weakness. It is this capture, this trap that film creates, that is so important n the text, and which justifies Ruth's anger and sense of betrayal.

When Lore manipulates the consensual footage she takes of Tom, he says he does not want to see the final result because he doesn't want to see himself looking confused and old and pathetic. There is again the sense that what the camera sees becomes truth.

The final, and perhaps most important use of the camera, comes when Lore tells the story of her life to the camera to be used as a starting point for evidence for the police. When she sets up the camera, she observes "The camera lens was like a cold fish eye, unblinking. I stared at it, forgetting what I was supposed to say" (326). The overwhelmingness of being exposed, laid bare to the camera is shown here.

There is also the interesting concept of the fisheye lens. There is the sense that the camera sees more than a normal eye would see, that there is no escape and there is no ability to hide any part of oneself, really, when presented with the camera. It speaks to Tom's fear, that there is a part of himself that really is that confused old man, and Ruth's anger at her violation by the camera, the capturing of her body against her will, and Lore's kidnapping being all the more humiliating because her degraded self was shown to the world.

Camera and utilisation in Slow River

amphiskios — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:28:06 +0000

In any world where identity is important, the camera is going to be a focal point of observation. In Slow River, in response to Tok's "Find something," an admonishment to keep Lore sane with the parents she has, Lore acquires a camera and edit board. Lore's filmography becomes a very important part of the book. It shows not only the fluidity of identity, but shows first how perception of identity can change things. "Lore's first projects are wish fulfillment," and are of her parents happy together. This scene is the first that really spells out how poor her parent's relationship is. Then she moves on to porn with her parents faces on the bodies. From a very early age, she has sexualized the camera and the things she looks through it to see. The identity through the camera becomes desensitized, and not as real. This is one of the reasons that lead to the creation of porn with Lore's movie making skill. Because her parents never touch, even the touch of porn seems better than no touch at all.
Shifting forward chronologically, Lore's camera becomes a defense mechanism. She carries it around with her all the time, and avoids both her mother and father's presences. Her father stops taking her fishing, and her mother stops trying to talk business with her. This is when a mutable object defines her identity. Lore's identity is defined through her camera, which allows anything seen through its lens to be changed. This doesn't allow for a strong sense of identity by lore. This is also the period of her life where Lore starts dying her hair, another change to her identity that the camera led to. The identity and defense mechanism comes to a head at Spanner's home. During the sex orgy brought about by the drug, Lore is shielded from the action only by her camera. That is when she realizes that the camera is not truly a shield. She is still affected by her actions, even years later. While Ruth nominally gave her permission, Ruth was still hurt by her act, which led to a break down in their relationship anyway. Even with the identities changed on the other side of the camera, people can still be hurt in their true selves.
The last and most important camera scene is the creation of the charity ad. It creates a huge problem first off, because the equipment is so expensive. It seems to say that it is extremely difficult to try to perceive things differently than they are. Spanner gets all of her limbs forcibly dislocated and relocated to try to get the money for the equipment. That just says another thing about the false identity that the camera can create. It shows how much Spanner is reaching and trying for that false identity. As this stage of the novel however, Lore is not making nearly the effort to try to get the equipment for the falsehood. She has matured in enough ways that she no longer feels the need to hunt out the material to achieve falsehoods. The charity ad itself is a large falsehood. Starting with a false charity, where all the money goes to Spanner and Lore, and then being a false advertisement, in place of the show because the rest of the commercial space was filled, to being about a problem which, while real, was not personified by the person used to portray it. Lore was trying to show the plight of the person born before 1960. Her subject however, Tom, was fully integrated into his world and had no trouble at all living in it. In fact, he quite enjoyed it. The camera had to create a complete falsehood to be successful. Then, when the ad was given to Tom along with his share of the cut, he did not watch it. Instead he started on at the news with his impossibly clear eyes, full of truth, and did not watch the falsehood. That was the last straw, and helped Lore to finally start to realize her true identity, and not an identity created through any kind of construction or lens.

The timeline of Slow River....isn't really a line...

Trix2000 — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:30:27 +0000

As was already shown in class by the presentation, the events of the book Slow River, while mixed up and shown out of order, can be lined up to form the majority of Lore's life. Beginning in Chapter 2 when Lore is at the age of 5, and ending with her rejoining her Father again at the end of the novel.

However, on first glance it seemed like these events were just thrown together in random order....in a sort of flashback-y way. A little rough, but not terribly unusual.

As it turns out though, a closer inspection reveals what I would call a pattern in the chronology. Or rather, several patterns that relate to one another.

For starters, it seems that there are two to three separate time-"lines" going, as the story rotates between Lore's early life (age 5 to her kidnapping and escape) her time with Spanner (beginning with being taken in from the street and ending with Lore leaving the flat) and her life as Sal Bird. Although I haven't taken the time to check in detail, these seem to rotate in a sort of order (usually early, mid, then late) with each section bringing another portion of the particular time period.

An interesting setup to watch in action, and I found it even more so with the fact that the "sections" started getting relatively shorter and closer to the other time periods. In my mind, I pictured the three timelines as "strands" of time weaving through space, though they weaved together closer and closer until they finally met in the end.

A little bit of an odd way to put it I suppose, but that really is what went through my mind. That and the fact that I could finally put together the entirety of Lore's life and thus understand the story a lot better.

A very good read....though I wish a little that we could find out more of what happened in the end, even if it was only a sort of epilogue....

power, knowledge, and self/identity

ahnadibrawr — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:26:42 +0000

In many of the novels we've read for this class, information and knowledge have been closely tied to technology and/or power. The collection and accumulation of information and its practical applications demonstrate and enforce control. With all of this focus on bettering one's social and financial status through useful knowledge, what happens to the individual? In Slow River, as we discussed in class on Monday, Lore has identity issues (illustrated through parallel narratives, different point of views, etc.).

Early on in childhood, Lore learned something important: "...at seven Lore is suddenly realizing she can make of herself what she wills. When she is old enough she can have red hair or golden eyebrows...And no one will tell her she is wrong, because no one will know. She could become anyone she wishes. But how will she know she is still herself?" (52). Even at such a young age, Lore recognizes the implications of knowledge as power over others. If no one knows what she is supposed to be, then they cannot question what identity she portrays. At the beginning of the novel, for example, Lore is uncomfortable when she realizes Spanner knows "all about her" (18). No PIDA can change that.

Progenies of the social elite are expected to maintain certain standards, whether those standards are on the physical or intellectual scale. Roles and identities are laid out for them. Lore, then, is the product of this environment (and a dysfunctional family, but that's a different matter). Not only does she have "all the visible trappings of the rich and powerful" (52), but she also has the knowledge that comes with managing her family's corporation. In trying to meet all these social and familial expectations, Lore ultimately jeopardizes herself. Even under the guise of Sal Bird, Lore must also meet a different set of expectations (though it is because her knowledge exceeds these expectations that she is able to help the water plant).

The time Lore spends away from her family ultimately enables her take control of her own life. "Self-actualization," according to Thoreau, requires a rejection of material goods, which Lore definitely accomplishes when she expresses her desire to stay with Spanner instead of going home.

In the article we read, the author questions Lore's supposed progression throughout the novel. Is her development truly progressive? Even though it may seem regressive because she returns to her family, I don't think that everything she went through should be discredited. While I agree that her character seems to fall flat at the end, I think that, in the beginning of the novel at least, there seems to be hope for her internal development.

Sex in Slow River.

CountZero — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:17:00 +0000

I feel that the entire novel works to reconcile Lore with the incredibly intimate and damaging rape that occurred in her past. All her experiences outside of the protecting curtain of the Van de Oests functions to give her the perspective and independence from which she can understand and come to accept what happened to her. She must reconcile her own sexual attraction for women with the horrible emotional injury that was inflicted upon her by a woman.

Sex, throughout the novel, works against this reconciliation. First, obviously, is the event (or series of events) that so damages Lore: Her rape by her mother, Katerine. "She doesn't know how to describe it. Heavy like the end of everything" (68). This is the fundamental event that makes all the future healing work necessary, and it is entirely sexual.

Even Lore's early attempts at reconciliation are damaged, and probably do more harm than good. At the age of 13, "her films fill with porn actors wearing her parents' faces...As her parents become more distant to one another, Lore brings them flesh to flesh" (135). Sexual desire has come early for her, and she needs to find a way to express it, to rationalize it in terms of the damage that has been done to her. And so she fixates on her parents. Though it is the natural choice, because of what has happened to her, it can only have made her psychological damage worse.

There are several other examples of how sex works against Lore's independence and rational thought. Among them: The scene in which Lore films her friends having sex while drugged, for monetary gain (196-7) and the continuous sex work that Lore and Spanner pursue to pay for the aphrodisiac (220, 262, etc). These events, always involving sex, always work against Lore. She cannot reconcile herself with the past when her perspective of sex continues to be corrupted by mixing it with money.

An important note: Sex between women in this novel always involves penetration, though that is not strictly necessary (235, 220, etc.). It is not the equal sharing of pleasure that it could be. Sex is inherently a violation in Slow River, I think with the purpose of emphasizing the damage that it has done to Lore. It seems that the only solution is abstinence. Lore's relationship with Magyar is very chaste and intellectual. It is based on their mutual respect, which is followed, instead of led, by physical attraction. Lore can only overcome the damage that has been done to her when she is able to feel this physical attraction in combination with a more abstract mental attraction.

Rich people suck.

dreamfall17 — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 08:55:57 +0000

I enjoyed Slow River. However, I also enjoy The Hills and America's Next Top Model, so this means very little. I enjoyed it, but I didn't think it was particularly good. The major issue I had with it was the apparent lack of a character arc for Lore. As she is the protagonist, I assume we are supposed to identify and sympathize with her; at least, I found no indication to the contrary. I did not particularly like her, however, and there were some major flaws in her character that I thought needed more of a treatment than the book gave.

In the beginning of the story (chronologically), Lore is:
a) mind-blowingly rich, and has all the easy naÃ¯ve carelessness of the aristocracy
b) mildly obsessed with sex
c) prideful and striving to prove herself to those around her (her family, the company)
d) unthinkingly supportive of the unfair and dangerous monopoly her family hold on the water purification system.
At the end of the novel, she is still all of these things. She has apparently made the most progress in the "mildly obsessed with sex" category â€“ she has at least discovered love, to augment lust. She has plenty of positive characteristics as well, obviously, but the above four were issues I expected to be addressed in her development that were not.

Slow River was unexpectedly pro-corporation. The ethical dilemmas posed by the van de Oest monopoly on the genetically engineered water-purification system are obvious â€“ it allows blatantly artificial price inflation and the eradication of all competition. None of the characters, besides the huddled masses in Venezuela, ever question the rightness of this. We already went over this in class, so I will say no more; more interesting to me is the sense of entitlement and subtle arrogance that Lore displays throughout the book. At her job on Hedon Road, she listens to her superiors speak with a condescending, critical air. After nearly everything Hepple says as he gives her a tour the first day, she mentally disparages him with thoughts like, "I had learned at age 12, from my uncle Willem, that in a properly run plant the average BOD should never be higher than two ppm, but I didn't say anything" (30) and "[Hepple was] a little tin god, lording it over his tiny domain. He wouldn't have lasted more than a day on one of my projects" (32). In just these two statements, Lore reminds herself, and the reader, that as an adolescent she already knew better than Hepple, she is connected to the van de Oests, and if she was not in hiding, she would be in control of all her bosses' fates. With unthinking ease that comes with being of the super-elite, she places herself as superior to everyone else in the plant. Even Magyar has to prove to Lore that she is not a complete idiot.

When Lore tells Magyar her true name, it is with a certain self-satisfied pride. When Magyar reacts with anger, and not awe, Lore thinks, "But I'm Frances Lorien van de Oest! Didn't she know what that meant? She couldn't just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else...But she had. Which is what I wanted, wasn't it - to be treated as a real person?
It is the closest Lore comes to self-reflection.

When I finished reading, I found myself wondering if Lore's flat character was faulty writing or some kind of extraordinarily subtle criticism of the sheltered elite on Griffith's part. I think that this is swerving dangerously close to trying to identify author's intent, so I will not attempt to answer that question; rather, I will only comment that Lore is quite an unusual character in a genre that is so often anti-establishment and subversive.

Ain't no Cyberpunk

drawercat — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:51:54 +0000

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 â€“ 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.

So much identity!

amandejoie — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:17:27 +0000

Though I would agree with Moller when she says that to label this novel solely as a humanist work about the nature of human identity completely misses the novel's social and political ramifications, the exploration of identity is an interesting facet of the novel to explore. It's also such an obvious part of the novel, that to ignore it is impossible. Lore has three "identities," as represented by the different tenses and perspectives, as we talked about in class. Not only does each Lore's storyline end with a convenient climax, they also begin with a birth. First, her original birth. Then she arrives naked "curled in a fetal position" in a new city (5). Then, she implants herself with a new identity. But the overarching question remains, are these rebirths really new starts, or are they just the same Lore, but in a new environment? I see the novel as presenting two pretty conflicting ideas of identity. The first is that there is some sort of intrinsic identity, that who you are is static, even in the face of a changing environment. At other times, the novel seems to suggest that your identity is based more on other people's perceptions of you than anything inherent within yourself.

Nature is a strong theme in the novel, more so than in a lot of the other novels we're read this semester. It is set soon enough in the future that wild things still exists, but far enough away that they are more precious, so when they do show up, they are significant. Lore describes the trees dying in Spanner's apartment as strong, you can "drench it in acid rain and infest it with parasites, carve initials in its bark and split branch from trunk, and it will survive" (56). External conditions don't wear down the tree, even under outside pressures, it keeps going. Similarly, Lore continues to be Lore even with the outside pressure to be Sal Bird. She wants to adopt Sal Bird's identity, say only the types of things Sal Bird would say, but because she "couldn't bear to see a system fail due to simple ignorance" she knowingly risks being found out (75). There are certain aspects of herself that Lore simply cannot suppress.

At the same time, Lore is strongly affected by her interpersonal relationships. With Spanner, she does some terrible things that she would not have done otherwise. After a particularly bad night, she vomits in disgust at her actions and repeats "It wasn't me, it wasn't meâ€¦" (262). She knows that her old self would be disgusted with what she does now somewhat willingly, as she admits to Spanner. Also, Lore thoroughly discards her identity as a van de Oest after the kidnapping. She dyes her hair, adopts an accent and discards her family as always having been different from her. However, the moment someone besides Spanner learns that she is in fact a van de Oest, she falls back into old patterns. She is a van de Oest. Magyar she said "couldn't just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else" (282). So here, it seems Lore seems to be who other people think Lore is, rather than having an identity based on anything she creates herself.

I'm not sure whether Griffith was trying to push one perspective or the other, though I'm inclined to think that we are more outwardly determined than we would like to think.

Tank Girl was a trip, but this is my response to Slow River

Captain.ver.Kerk — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:45:59 +0000

In Slow River, we are presented with a protagonist who is rarely who she says she is, yet always remains herself. Frances Lorien van de Oest is the kidnapped heir to a multi-billion dollar company working as a grunt in a sanitation plant for little pay. Nicola Griffith uses Slow River to present Identity as a two-fold concept, where one is defined by a legal classification, yet also by the set of morals and experiences they carry with them.

The most pressing and recognized identity is of course the legal identity. Present in the form of PIDAs, they are microcapsules implanted into the crook of the thumb and forefinger that are scanned for economic transactions, and detail the owner much in the same way as a license. When Lore gains her new identity, she is given all the details with the PIDA: "Bird, Sal. Female. Caucasian. Blood type A positive. DOBâ€¦ Twenty-fiveâ€¦The tiny black PIDA was in a sealed bag withâ€¦ a plaskin pouch the size of a pink cockroach. Frozen blood for DNA tests," (21). When Lore was still part of the van de Oest family, she had her own PIDA rather than that of a dead woman, and when kidnapped, the first thing to go was this legal identity. By removing her PIDA, her kidnappers create a legal nobody, making it impossible for her to prove her identity on her own or access her family's resources. Lore becomes a nobody, but at the same time can now be anybody simply by obtaining false temporary PIDAS, giving her a new sense for the world and for what an identity is.

Through her reactions to experiences with Spanner of switching identities through various PIDAs, Lore shows her true inner identity, and comes to realize it is an inescapable, defining part of her. While working as Sal Bird at the Hedon Road Plant, Lore is supposed to know little more than the most basic of procedures and functionings of the facility. Yet when she recognizes issues with the operation, she can't help but remember things from her van de Oest past. Magyar, her supervisor, tells her that the bacteria in the plant need to always be at 27.3oC, never anywhere else, yet Lore recognizes and almost speaks out to tell her, "For a denitrification-nitrification process, heterotrophic facultative bacteria were usually comfortable anywhere between twenty-five and thirty degrees," but realizes in time that this is something Sal Bird would have no conception of (47). In addition to the knowledge, though, Lore also retains some of her superiority complexes, as shown when she discovers that her family's nutrient products have been substituted with generics. While the bacteria are most likely completely capable of surviving and functioning with the nutrients provided by the generic brand, Lore feels that the lives of millions of people are being put at grievous, unnecessary risk. Yet the plant functions fine until an occurrence of deliberate sabotage.

Lore's experiences through the novel help her to realize that there are two levels to identity. The surface level that most people see is the legal and falsifiable persona, but the deeper, moral identity is something that cannot be recreated and invented so easily, as it is an accumulation of knowledge and experiences. The two together serve to act as the real, present self, and at the end of the novel, Lore recognizes that finally she "would be nobody but the Lore [she] had made," (343).

Slow River and the long-range privatization of biotechnology

Paracelsus — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:15:02 +0000

I was very impressed by Slow River's depiction of the near-future applications, and consequences, of developing biotechnology and nanotechnology. The novel uses accurate, technical terminology to create a sense of reality; even for those readers who are not familiar with the technology Griffith is discussing, her faculty with it is obvious and lends authenticity to the novel. Furthermore, it is this background of science and its economics which makes the novel more than a simple, plot-driven work of fiction.
The novel brings up the fundamental issue of corporate involvement in the development and application of new technology. Up until very recently, most biotechnological and nanotechnological research has been conducted in academic settings; however, these settings have rarely proven broadly effective in developing useful, large-scale applications of these technologies. However, the recent involvement of large amounts of private funding has spurred rapid advances in certain areas of bio- and nanoengineering.
Slow River takes this trend to the extreme: catastrophic environmental failure on a world-wide scale has spurred the growth of powerful, private biotechnology firms, such as that of the van de Ouests.
Here is where one of the basic conflicts of the novel's setting becomes clear; it is implicit that without the privatization of bioremediation technology, and subsequent dominance of the relevant social services by these private firms, the technologies would never have been developed in the first place--or at least, not to its (in the novel) incredibly sophisticated level. Without these private firms, the necessary improvements in water quality, air quality, waste reclamation and so forth would not have occurred in the first place. However, this privatization has also created its own problem; the profit motive, while extremely effective at encouraging innovation, also creates ethical conflict. Those in charge of or dependent on the corporations which provide these social services are on some level obligated to serve the corporation, to maximize its profitability and influence; however, this is often directly at odds with worker safety, social safety and, at its largest scale, civic integrity.

Social Justice

greenhedge — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:28:20 +0000

I noticed today in class that the issue of excessive wealth hit some nerves on both the social justice and economist side of the thought spectrum. Some people were offended by the notion that someone who works just as hard as an executive (or some other high earner) could be living in squalor while that single executive could have so much money that he doesn't know what to do with it. Others seemed offended by the thought that people could hold that executive in contempt for earning so much money. I just want to add my two cents. I've always wondered what compels someone who already has enough money to make it so that he'll never be want for anything ever again, to make more money. For example, David Beckham went to L.A. for more money, but how is that going to improve his life? Isn't the camaraderie of his own nation worth more to him personally than some article about the 12 wealthiest athletes or something? Yet, I meet so many people who see it as completely natural for someone to make a decision like that. All I can say is that there is something fundamentally flawed with the decisions people with lots of money make. I don't know why it is. I could guess that since they've been successfully making decisions to increase their wealth all their life, that's the only kind of decision they know how to make, but that would be a gross generalization, and is rather simplistic.

Slow River - First Reactions.

CountZero — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:21:35 +0000

So my first reaction on finishing Slow River: "What? That's it?!?"

There were a few things that prompted that reaction. First, I didn't feel like Griffith really pulled off the conspiracy with Greta very well. There was only the mention that she "had to have secret power" there at the end, and that she had been perverted by Katerine to explain any of her conniving and plotting. The secret conspirator at the plant was not very interesting, basically since we never really met him or knew anything about him.
Second, I felt like Lore returned to the arms of her father far too readily, with nothing but a few scolding "Oh Papa"'s to let us know she's angry. There should be a lot more that she has to deal with before she can resolve such deep issues.
Finally, I thought the union between Lore and Magyar, while kind of inevitable, didn't have any real charm.

All that being said, I did enjoy the book quite a bit. The world that Griffith creates, in which companies compete for huge governmental contracts to clean up our mess, seems to be plausible to me. At least, I can't imagine a more likely scenario in which the human race will clean up the earth. There will be corruption and greed in any such large undertaking, no matter how noble the overall motives.
Also, I liked the intricacy of the three plots that Griffith wove around each other, and the depth with which she constructed Lore and Spanner, especially.

It was interesting to note that the only heterosexual couple mentioned in the novel (as far as I could tell) were Oster and Katerine, who were pretty much as screwed-up as they could be. That's not to say that Spanner and Lore's relationship was any good, but I thought it was interesting that heterosexual relationships made such a small appearance.

-CZ

Narrative Structure/POV/tense of Slow River

katashitakashi — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 21:56:30 +0000

The most obvious thing that I noticed about Nicola Griffith's Slow River was the variance in storytelling styles. Not only are there three different storylines ( Lore's life with Spanner, her work at the purification plant, her childhood flashbacks ), but they are told in three different ways ( third person past-tense, first person past-tense, third-person present-tense ). It was incredibly jarring for me at first, as it went against everything grammar school had taught me about sticking to one style of narration and one time frame. It's still a bit odd, but I've been able to work through what Griffith was trying to do.

The third-person past-tense from Lore's personal life is narration designed to make Lore seem alienated and out-of-place, even from herself; we do not get her POV directly, because she is not the center of this universe. She comes in destitute, is taken in by Spanner, and put into a life far different than the privilege she is used to. Her relationship with the cynical, morally ambiguous Spanner is of a very tenuous nature, and she is very ambivalent to the illicit activities she gets involved in. Even though Lore and Spanner are very intimate physically, the narration style seems to indicate an obvious disconnect between action and feeling.

The third-person present-tense from the flashbacks seems to indicate the same sort of alienation, but the shift in tense indicates the importance of her memory; for Lore, her formative years and trauma are not just recordings from the past, but something so important and visceral that it permeates the rest of her life. Like they say, some memories are so vivid that they seem like they just happened yesterday; with Lore's tragic backstory, this would be very appropriate. The third-person POV continues to keep it alienated from her, though also from us; I can see how getting a blow-by-blow recount from Lore as things like the kidnapping are happening to her would be too painful to read, and for that matter, even harder for Griffith to write without slipping into melodrama.

The first-person accounts from Lore's job as Sal Bird are a bit harder for me to get my head around. I can see how the fact that Lore develops her own agency in the field of biological science helps put the spotlight back on her, as she goes from being a spectator to an active player. However, it still seems like Lore has to accept that there is only so little that she can do in her position; she's still the same person as she is at home with Spanner, even if she is more in her element. It almost seems unnecessary, because while we hear about Lore's feelings in both of the present-continuity storylines, only the POV makes a difference. And there, it's just the semantics of wordplay.