(Normal, by Warren Ellis. Farrar, Straus and Giraux, 2016, 148 pp., $13.00)
reviewed by Zeke Teflon
Whether Normal is science fiction is questionable. It is however, very much concerned with the future and those who predict it, futurists. In this case, futurists who have been driven mad by contemplating the future or by allowing themselves to be used by governments and corporations racing to put new technologies to the worst possible uses.
The novella begins with its protagonist, Adam Dearden, a foresight strategist, heavily sedated, en route to Normal, the rehab facility that treats those who for too long have “gazed into the abyss.”
(See Nietzsche’s aphorism 146 from Beyond Good and Evil:
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
References to, and paraphrases of, this aphorism appear repeatedly in Normal, but neither the full aphorism nor its attribution appear anywhere in the book; Ellis apparently figured that this is such a famous quotation that readers will be familiar with it.)
Once at Normal, Adam falls into the place’s decidedly oddball routine and quickly gets to know its even more oddball inhabitants, including Clough, “a man from the north of England, by his accent, with a face like a mallet and skin like a map of Yorkshire scratched out in gin-broken veins.”
Very shortly, one of the other patients, Mansfield, goes missing from his locked room. When the door is forced, the orderlies find only a huge pile of insects on Mansfield’s bed.
The investigation of Mansfield’s disappearance is undertaken by, first, the facility’s staff, and then by the patients with Adam in the lead. During that investigation, we gradually learn what drove him crazy, more about the technological horrors dreamed up by some of the futurists, and how both these things relate to Mansfield’s disappearance.
Along the way, there’s frequent dark, often grotesque humor, vivid descriptions of humans crazed from “gazing into the abyss,” and occasional trenchant political and social comments, such as that of Adam to his psychiatrist, Dr. Murgu:
Americans are all about ‘supporting our troops,’ until those troops come home, and the best those troops can expect is some idiot mouthing ‘Thank you for your service.’ Because the moment they come home, they’re abandoned and forgotten by the system. Unless there’s a VA hospital available to kill them in.
Although only 30,000 words long, Normal is replete with fine descriptive passages, well drawn characters, dark humor, and glimpses of the horrifying future being prepared for us by the state and the corporations that control it.
Highly recommended.
* * *
(Note: Given the normal lag time between a writer’s finishing a book and its being published, Ellis likely wrote Normal in 2014 or early 2015. Three days ago I read a report on the recipient of a DARPA grant creating what is nearly identical technology to the frightening technology central to Normal.)
* * *
Reviewer Zeke Teflon is the author of Free Radicals: A Novel of Utopia and Dystopia. He’s currently working on its sequel. A large sample from Free Radicals, in pdf form, is available here.
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