Kairos by Gwyneth Jones
(Gollancz SF Masterworks, 2021)
Reviewed by Nick Hubble
It’s fantastic to see Gollancz reissuing so many of Gwyneth Jones’s novels in the, ahem, ‘Masterworks’ series. Whether one should wish classic status on any author is a moot point, but I can’t think of many writers in the SF field whose work over the last four decades is as distinctively personal and yet as universal in its significance. While the Clarke-Award-winning Bold as Love (2001) and Life (2004), previously unpublished in the UK, are perhaps the most obvious selections for this series, the inclusion of Kairos is the one that gives me the greatest joy. This is in part because some of it is set in Brighton, where Jones lives, in areas well known to me such as the wasteland near the racecourse and the Whitehawk neolithic camp. Generally, the ambience is evocative of the rundown alternative Brighton, rather than the developers’ nightmare which has emerged in recent years. However, more importantly, Kairos is the novel which best captures the magnitude of the change during that strange period in the 1980s when British history was to jump track so catastrophically.
Following an opening line—‘It was as cold as an August day can well be’—which in the best British SF traditions of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Day of the Triffids alerts us to the fact that time is out of joint, we meet one of the main protagonists, Sandy Brize in St Paul’s Cathedral. As Jones helpfully glosses in a new introduction to this edition, Sandy is the ‘underclass girlfriend’ of left-wing politician’s daughter and lesbian activist, Otto (originally Jane) Murray. Sandy and Otto are drifting apart not least because the revolution which they had been struggling for when they were young had ‘faded ignominiously away’. As Sandy reflects in St Paul’s, now they are in an ‘age of sanitised newscasts; of a tough-minded acceptance of poverty and squalor as part of life’s rich tapestry; of pragmatic revival of the gender roles.’ Although the novel is set in an early twenty-first-century future, the comparison being made here is between the still-heady days of the mid-1970s and the cold new Thatcherite era which had become established by a decade later.
Interestingly, this new edition seems, as far as I can tell, to have reverted to the text of the original 1988 hardback publication rather than that of the revised 1995 paperback version. Therefore, the utopia that Sandy and Otto are fighting for is restored to its original uncompromising formulation of ‘Lesbian-Bisexual-Utopia’. Indeed, the rough, sharper-edged antagonism of the original text seems uncannily to predict the divisive class and gender politics of 2021. Even amidst Jones’s brilliant representation of the uncertain realities of a disintegrating landscape (fully equal in achievement to Philip K. Dick’s Ubik or Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven), Sandy’s clear-sighted rejection of all binaries speaks directly across the years to a contemporary readership: ‘I’ve always hated being a woman… But I wouldn’t be a man either’. While the novel is resolutely anti-patriarchal, Sandy has no time for the idea of establishing a matriarchy, suggesting that they are two sides of the same coin: ‘It’s just like the old class war. Being shat upon doesn’t mean you’re a nicer person. Well, I’m done with them both, I mean all.’
This continued relevance is hardly surprising given that one meaning of the word ‘kairos’ is an imperative immediate sense of now! In some ways, as Jones implies in her introduction, we are always simultaneously living through our own time and the end times. Only by holding these two realities in superposition, through acts of the imagination, as Sandy and Otto are able to do by the end of the novel, do we gain any perspective from which to act. The ‘now’ of Kairos and Jones’s other work is still the now of today. I hope these new editions bring her to a younger generation of readers.
Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.