Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s set in 1962, in a parallel reality in which Roosevelt was assassinated in 1933, so the whole of the Second World War was completely different and lasted until 1948 with the US forced to surrender. America is ruled by the Germans and Japanese, and it’s all about what people end up doing in this reality. You think you’ve acquired one truth: but that truth is really that there are infinite truths and infinite worlds, and nobody knows what the hell is going on.
And the Dick?
It’s set in 1962, in a parallel reality in which Roosevelt was assassinated in 1933, so the whole of the Second World War was completely different and lasted until 1948 with the US forced to surrender. America is ruled by the Germans and Japanese, and it’s all about what people end up doing in this reality. There’s all these different people masquerading, and specialising in the trade of fakes; the whole of reality has collapsed, and nothing can be trusted as real. There’s a novel within the novel, called “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy”, by a character called Abendsen who lives alone in a castle, which is set in another reality again – not ours – in which the Axis lost the Second World War, but the war lasted 1939-1948. The climax of this novel, which is brilliant, is that a woman finds Abendsen and says what does your novel mean? She also asks the I Ching, and the I Ching symbol is “inner truth”: so it’s a suggestion that they’re living in yet another reality while a whole load of others are going on – that of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is happening in another place, and there’s probably another reality that we’re in. You think you’ve acquired one truth: but that truth is really that there are infinite truths and infinite worlds, and nobody knows what the hell is going on, basically.
So reality is an inchoate force that everyone makes his or her own shape out of?
Exactly, and attempts to order it are always a bit suspicious.
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Joanna Kavenna is a novelist, travel writer, and reviewer. She has held writing fellowships at St Antony’s College, Oxford and St John’s College, Cambridge. Her first book, The Ice Museum, was about travelling in the North in search of the mythical land of Ultima Thule. Her first novel, Inglorious, won the Orange Broadband New Writers Award. Here she tells The Browser that the concept of parallel worlds is no more dubious than that of a single reality, and that this is something that writers have known for centuries.
