The Shadow Cabinet
A good example of Chapman’s stylistic genius can be found in his account of Naomi joining the army. On Chapman’s Earth, the nations with the strongest military might don’t hoard nuclear weapons—they hoard frozen soldiers. The description of Naomi’s initial emersion in a suspended animation tank is worth quoting at length:
Cheated of shivering and cramps. Cheated of pleas and tears. Nothing outside of me, just my brain winding up my spinal cord like a rubber band in a toy airplane. Struggling to squirm out of the rotten, frozen core of that dark, that dark, that dark so cold, you could cut it with knife, a knife, a knife so sharp, it could cut off your thumb, and your thumb so numb, it wouldn’t cut butter, butter, butter so small that it sings in the eye of an icicle, slips through the needle so thin, it would slide off a spoon, and the spoon so hot, it burns a hole in your tongue, and your tongue so wet that it sticks to a frosty parking meter, and there you are, there you are, there you are, stuck. On a city street, in the dirty sleet, stuck by your tongue. And it’s no consolation that you’re one of a series, just one little girl in a row of foolish little girls in blue jackets, all standing on the sidewalk, all spit-glued to parking meters. Because they were all so foolish and also because someone, someone they never see, keeps coming around and putting cold silver quarters in the meters, to avoid little red violation flags and to keep the current running through the meters, so the tongues stay stuck, all those raw, purple tongues of all those little girls, for twenty years. Oh children misled! Said the voice in my head. Beware! Beware! For thou art dead. Beware entrapment by refrigerator. Beware the lid that slams on suffocation. Beware the stinging freezer mites that swarm in the ice cubes that float in the desolate gutters of freezer burn, where no hipboots can call you an ambulance. This is the place of itching, buzzing battery acid, where balloons break like eggshells, and eggshells bend like balloons.
The ability displayed above to simulate a mind shutting down, to mix almost-stream-of-consciousness with dead-on metaphors to describe the process of encroaching deep freeze—this ability is what separates a major writer from a lesser writer, a stylist from a technician. This ability, contrary to what they tell you in writing workshops, cannot be taught. It’s a gift to be treasured by readers fortunate enough to stumble upon it. (It’s also, unfortunately, not a quality much prized by commercial publishers.)
Following several break-neck narratives that provide textbook examples of how to create suspense and tension, the denouement of The Troika has a tremendous cathartic effect on the reader, who has shared a harrowing journey with fascinating characters. Portions of the novel remind me of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, early Harlan Ellison, and Philip K. Dick, but, in truth, these are nearly silent echoes, for Chapman possesses the type of originality that places him more exactly among the ranks of those writers not connected to any school or movement—namely, writers like Mervyn Peake, Angela Carter, and Alasdair Gray.
In 1997, I managed to find the financial backing to publish the novel through my own Ministry of Whimsy Press. When the dust settled, the book had won the Philip K. Dick Award and received rave reviews in over 100 publications worldwide. However, as of this month, the book resides in the purgatory between out-of-print and in print. (A few copies are still available through Amazon. A warehouse somewhere in the western United States has some copies as well.) Thus, it is perhaps appropriate to remind readers of its existence as it once again recedes into a kind of limbo. It is certainly possible that it may return to a shadowy half-life through print-on-demand in the next year. But for now, it has become the newest member of the Shadow Cabinet, a junior officer in a world of miracles and marvels beyond the ken of anyone who did not luck out and buy a copy while it was widely available.
—Jeff VanderMeer
Note: Thanks to Mike Simanoff for his invaluable research and assistance.
