The Shadow Cabinet
One aspect of fantastical literature that concerns me deeply and which has universal implications is the relative paucity of unique, interesting imaginations within fiction today. Too many writers and readers prefer their literature spoon-fed to them, in portions similar to the last, with the same smells and colors, served to them on the same worn dishes, and accompanied by the same polite conversation. It seems to me that reading—reading well, with an appreciation for more than just the basics of narrative, plot, or story—is a heroic act these days, especially considering the distractions of other media. Comic books, movies, and television shows can all be quite profound, but even the best examples provide us with ready-made immutable images. Reading a book that not only entertains but is also deeply felt—deeply realized, created from a highly personal vision, strikes me as a kind of rebellion.
Reading fully engages and strengthens that long dormant muscle called the imagination, which is the most visible manifestation of the soul. Books define who we are but, more importantly, they allow us to dream well. History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.
The ultimate effect of the inability to reach beyond a certain set of constraints is to create a Shadow Cabinet—an anti-canon that exists in the minds of those readers who have not been colonized by the all-too-familiar. Some of these books remain in print and although not widely known still find an audience. However, certain members of the Shadow Cabinet cannot be easily found outside of used bookstores or dusty warehouses, where they wait to be discovered sometime in the future. These are the books that good readers hoard in order to send copies out to new converts. Such books, which have so enhanced our own imaginations, can only be rescued by holding them in our memories and by spreading the word.
One book that recently joined the ranks of the Shadow Cabinet, The Troika (excerpt), by Stepan Chapman, began its “public life” as even less than a published novel. For 10 years, it existed only as excerpts in various literary journals, no publisher willing to bring it out into the light. The reader could intuit the existence of a larger vision through the jagged fragments in those journals, but nothing more. That it has once again receded into the world of shadow is perhaps no surprise.
The Troika is that rarest of birds, a truly visionary novel of the surreal that never loses sight of its main characters’ lives. In this case, those characters happen to be a robotic jeep (Alex), a brontosaurus (Naomi), and an old Mexican woman (Eva). If that sounds strange, consider this: the troika is trudging across an endless desert lit by three purple suns. Not only has their journey lasted hundreds of years, but they have no memory of their past lives, and therefore no clue as to how they came to walk the desert. Only at night, in dreams, do they recall fragments of their past identities. To further complicate matters, sandstorms jolt them out of one body and into another (a game of metaphysical musical chairs): Eva falls asleep a Mexican woman only to wake up a jeep.
The novel alternates between dream-tales about the troika’s former lives and their present-day attempts to discover where they are and how they can get out. From this quest form, Chapman has fashioned a poignant and powerful story of redemption in which pathos is leavened by humor and pain is softened by comfort. It is the story of Alex who wanted to be a machine. It is also the story of deranged angels, deadly music boxes, and of the love and desperation that can bind people together.
As importantly, The Troika is a stylistic tour-de-force—it abounds with magnificent prose passages, some of which delight and some of which horrify. One of the cleverest passages describes an alternate theory for why the dinosaurs died out:
The dinosaurs called them The Spoilers. They evolved from the man-of-war and grew huge on the surface of the oceans. They killed by stinging. They were hollow animals, beasts of living origami, with radial skeletons of cuttlebone and opalescent white skins. They rolled up onto the beaches like moving cities, folding into and over themselves. Lifting their minarets against the purple skies, they scoured the continents, consumed the fern forests, slow and hideous and inevitable as doom… In a matter of decades, the Spoilers chewed the Earth down to its rind. They all starved, leaving behind not a single fossil to mark their passing.
This little story is irrelevant to the plot and yet indicative of the novel’s many tangential pleasures, none of which harm the main thrust of the narrative. Chapman is a master of creating backdrops that have real depth and life—the images and ideas he tosses out would be the foreground material in a novel by a less inspired writer.
