Mindscape

Aqueduct Press, 2006
Intended Audience: Adult
Sexual content: Explicit
Ace/Genderqueer characters: Yes
Rating: R for language, violence, and sex
Writing style: 1/5
Likable characters: 3/5
Plot/Concepts: 2/5

When the Barrier came—a cosmic and organic life-form, restricting travel between arbitrary zones on Earth—the world changed forever. A hundred years later, Celestina dies to bring an end to the wars between the zones, and five years after that, the treaty is still not being lived as it should be. Instead, many of the zones reject the treaty, already too set in their individual agendas and cultures. Soldiers, actors, directors, ambassadors and Vermittler (humans who can commune with the Barrier) are thrown into a conflict with and against one another that will decide the future of Earth.

At 445 pages, Mindscape is a fairly hefty read. I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked it up, as the synopsis I'd read was fairly vague. I soon learned that this was for good reason. I'm not sure if Hairston was trying to pull the reader into a particular "mindscape" via her writing style, or if the muddled feel of it was accidental, but I was nearly a hundred pages in before I had any sort of clue what was going on. In the first scene, the reader is dumped right into the thick of an important political event, with foreign names and words being thrown around helter-skelter with very little indication of which ones are important or what they really mean. Then comes the realization that there is no single main character; the reader is bounced back and forth between first and third-person perspectives and multiple points of view. The only explanation of anything comes in dialogue or flashbacks, which could be real, or could be visions or legends—it's impossible to tell for sure. I can appreciate the effort taken to teach by immersion, but in this case I would have preferred an info-dump over feeling so lost for the entirety of the book.

Post-barrier Earth is in many ways a very different place from our present-day Earth. It seems to be divided into three main areas, although where these areas are, and how the seasonal corridors between each of them work, was barely described. We never find out exactly why they were warring in the first place. And although many words were used to describe these places and the characters in them, I never actually got a clear picture. All that came through were vague emotional impressions. Los Santos is dirty and dangerous and full of gangsters, while New Ougadougou is like some romanticized hodge-podge "ethnic" village, has nice small-scale architecture and probably looks like how an idealized cluster of adobe and brick houses would in an animated Disney movie. Paradigma has a lot of scientists. That's almost everything I know about these places despite 445 pages of action taking place in them.

The timeline of the story was very difficult to follow as well. The characters are one place, then another. They're shooting a movie, and suddenly one of them is injured, and then he's splashing water on his face, but where did the water come from? Is he in the bathroom now? Did someone bring a bucket? Why is it that nobody cares when bombs are going off outside the theater? The sense of movement, space, presence, and time, are all mixed up and insubstantial. I couldn't get my bearings at all. It was like trying to remember a dream that was already a bit fuzzy to begin with, littered with proverbs in other languages and lots of references to technological and movie-making jargon. This kind of narrative style could work in poetry, but for a novel it was needlessly metaphorical, trying too hard to be meaningful or artistic without actually letting the readers experience the story themselves. Sometimes this also makes any in-narrative discussion of real-life problems come off as preachy.

So my biggest problem with this book was how unreadable and incomprehensible it was. I imagine that I could have really gotten into the setting if I were allowed more concrete glimpses of it, and more actual explanation of what was going on. The cast of characters was definitely diverse, and once I could keep them all straight (at about page 300), I found that I liked most of them more than I expected. Elleni, Celestina's spirit-daughter, is the closest thing to a central main character we get. As a Vermittler she can commune with the Barrier, and is tasked by Celestina's ghost (or is it her voice transmitting from an alien spaceship?) with healing the Barrier and thus the many rifts between the warring zones. Then there is Ray Valero, star actor, and his Director and Assistant Director, Aaron and Achbar, respectively. They are all working on making a movie out of Celestina's life throughout the entire story... a plot element I barely cared about, although I did find Aaron's character to be one of the most interesting by the end.

Aaron was an Extra before becoming a famous director. Extras, as far as I can tell, are people who are too poor, unhealthy, or otherwise deemed unimportant by their community, often killed by being thrown into the Barrier, or harvested for organs. It seems that when the world was cut up into zones by the Barrier, the difficulty in transporting resources caused shortages which in turn made people begin to evaluate who was most important to keep alive. The twist with Aaron is that he was not only an Extra but a black female Extra named Stella, gang-raped and traumatized by the experience. In order to become Aaron, he had to essentially kill off a part of himself. However, Stella remains buried deep in Aaron's psyche, and he has mixed emotions about having to give her up to be who he is today. He is not asexual but I do consider him to be genderqueer. Beyond that, his identity is a metaphor for how some members of oppressed minorities feel they must become like the enemy in order to survive, and Mindscape explores some of the consequences of such a choice.

Lawanda is woman of color and an ethnic throwback, who replicates a speaking style which I can only describe as gangster-like. She is stationed in Los Santos, trying to shut down the treaty-resistance there, guarded by a woman called Captain, and in love with a stoic, mysterious and cold man who just goes by Major. I didn't like Lawanda much at first. Most of her first transmissions to the Major are full of complaining about the Major not calling her back and how she's in way over her head. But she is stronger than she at first appears, and I came to respect her for her strong sense of self. Eventually I even grew to like the Major, because out of all the characters he seems to change the most throughout the course of the story, going from unquestioning loyalty to fearful open-mindedness and then even further to brave defiance of what he'd previously believed. This is all the more impressive because he, like Captain, has bombs wired up in his brain, in danger of going off if he strays from his mission. Captain isn't much of a character for most of the book, more of just a background bodyguard for Lawanda, but she suddenly shines in a few chapters, and I wish there had been more of her. She was also a woman of color, of Hawaiian origin, and a much better person than she at first appeared.

This book has no qualms about sexuality, and a sense of the mystically erotic permeates nearly every scene. Subtly in most scenes, but it's there. Same-sex relationships are actually an integral part of the story, in fact being the cause of Celestina's dual-consciousness—she holds two female lovers inside her, one who murdered the other. Elleni and Ray are lovers, both bisexual and attracted to many other people. The author spares no expense in describing Elleni's body in great detail, particularly because, as a Vermittler, she has even more unusual features than the genetically-modified rainbow-haired humans around her. Her electrically charged dreads seem like a character all by themselves, hissing and spitting and wrapping around things without her consent.

As a woman of color, Andrea Hairston probably has much more of a right than I to depict other people of color in whatever way she sees fit. Certainly she is entitled to depicting characters of African descent however she chooses. But the Ghost Dancer characters seemed oddly stereotypical and theatrical to me, mostly there to add a touch of mysticism, putting Native Americans in a mythological light. I'm not sure if she was trying for parody or if there was something else going on that I was missing. Admittedly, the Wovoka (head of the Ghost Dancers), was a decent character in the end, but so much of the ethnic throwback thing in this book seemed oddly distorted. Maybe this was related somehow to the development of the three separate zones post-Barrier, and I missed the connection—entirely possible, considering how disorienting the writing style was.

Overall, I just found Mindscape baffling in terms of plot. If someone were to ask me to describe how the characters got from point A to point B to point C and so on to Z, I wouldn't be able to summarize with more than a "well, stuff happened... I'm not really sure how they accomplished task X, but they did... probably some combination of the Barrier's will and ancient magic." It seemed like throughout the story, the humans were all running around blindly bumping into each other, trying but failing to do anything really important, and sometimes getting killed... and finally in the end a path magically appears toward the future, and so they start to walk on it. The End.

I wish I could have read the story of what happens once things started making sense. I can only suppose that the confusion may be part of the story's meaning—after all, Vermittler are charged with making meaning out of the Barrier's cosmic chaos. But for me, there was altogether too much chaos and not enough translation of that chaos into meaning. It's a shame that the story was told and not shown—I felt like I was looking at this world of Hairston's through warped glass, and I really wanted to open the window.