Black Gate

Triptych
J.M. Frey
Dragon Moon Press (286 pp, $19.95, March 2011)

Science fiction typically makes certain assumptions about alien races. For example, that they use language in ways we understand. Or, that they imagine gender and sex in ways familiar to us. The second is a far more unlikely assumption; language, or communication more broadly, is something one would expect to develop in intelligent species, and in a way defines for humans what intelligence is. But sex necessarily is a thing of the body, and so will vary with the composition of the body. An alien body won’t have human sexual responses.

J.M. Frey’s novel Triptych tries to tell a story with that awareness in mind. I’m not entirely convinced by the book, but I think it’s effective overall. Both its flaws and virtues seem to me to follow from specific genre traditions, with the result that it feels oddly like an old-fashioned science fiction novel that happens to have some twenty-first-century attitudes about sexuality.

A triptych is a work of art, typically a painting, in three parts. Usually the central part is the most prominent. That’s essentially the structure of the novel: three parts, plus a prologue and epilogue. The prologue sets up a near-future world in which alien refugees have come to earth. Their integration into human society comes through working with a multinational organization called the Institute, physicists and linguists and other specialists, all given military training. The first part of the story proper then skips back to 1983, setting up a time travel plot. The second part gives us the tale of one of the alien refugees, up to the point where the prologue begins. The third part, and the epilogue, wrap up the plot and solve the remaining mysteries. And through all these sections, the book is actually telling a love story, or at least the story of an unconventional relationship: another triptych, a polyamorous love between an alien and two humans.

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Westlake Soul is twenty-three, a good-natured surfing champion with a loving family, loving girlfriend, and loving dog. Then a terrible fall leaves him in a vegetative state, unresponsive to the outside world — but, locked in his own mind, he’s a superintelligent superhero, astrally projecting to the moon and battling the mysterious villain named Doctor Quietus. Westlake can’t affect the outside world; can’t even twitch a finger, can only sit and be cared for by his mother and father and little sister, and the nurses they hire. But he can see what goes on around him, and react, if only internally.

Rio Youers’ novel Westlake Soul is Westlake’s account of his life and opinions, and of his fights against Doctor Quietus. Youers pulls off a tricky proposition; Westlake’s completely incapable of actually doing anything, of changing anything in his physical environment. He can only view the world, describing what he sees and how he feels. That ought to make him too passive to work as the centre of a story — and make no mistake, more than simply a narrator, Westlake is the heart of his own story, speaking as he does with the unselfconscious egocentrism of youth — but it is precisely his struggle to make a change, to accomplish even the smallest of actions, that becomes involving.

In fact, the book succeeds due to its directness of affect. Westlake Soul’s had no choice but to become thoughtul and empathic, and those qualities, along with a certain precision of diction, make his voice endearing and highly readable. The book doesn’t hesitate to tug at the heartstrings, but the writing’s effective: it feels like a kind young man’s voice. And Youers deploys that voice nicely, giving us Westlake’s observations of both his exterior and interior worlds, keeping things moving briskly.

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