Annotation #7

Tevis, Walter. Mockingbird. New York: Doubleday, 1980.

My introduction to Tevis was with The Man Who Fell to Earth, and though Mockingbird came later and isn't quite as compact or lyrical, it serves as a kind of life-affirming answer to the tragic earlier novel. It is set in a future Earth where the population has dwindled to several million apathetic, drug-addicted humans, along with what is left of the robots that were made by previous generations to take care of their every need. Robert Spofforth is the last remaining Make Nine robot. He has lived for hundreds of years and is currently Dean at New York University, and spends much of his time trying to keep the city's robots in working order. No one--not even Spofforth--can read, and there are gadgets of all kinds to prevent anyone from needing to. Until Paul Bentley shows up at Spofforth's "University," claiming to be able to read. Spofforth sets Bentley up with old recovered silent films and assigns him to read them and keep a journal with a voice recorder. Thus begins Bentley's journey into understanding what the importance of reading is, and why his society seems headed for extinction. The subject matter immediately brings to mind Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, though in this case the story is told primarily through the characters' own journals and focuses much more on not only the need to read, but to live and to love.

Bentley's journal winds up telling the majority of the story, and though his voice improves during the course of the novel--after all, it is the spoken and written record he has kept through his journey of learning to read and write, over a year's time--Tevis doesn't seem to have pulled off the technique as effectively as he could have. Something similar was done to much better effect in Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon, for example. The problem is that while Tevis has fully and vividly imagined Bentley's journey, in terms of what happens to him and how he lives through it all, he hasn't translated that into a convincing style. Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on him. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and didn't find anything to pull me from its dream, but reading it closely and looking for style, I found much of it was lacking. Part of the problem is that Bentley is meant to be a serious, matter-of-fact character, and it is reflected throughout much of his journal. For example, on day five:

Now that I have begun keeping this journal I find myself paying more attention to oddities during the day than I used to--so that I may record them here at night in the archives, I suppose. Noticing and thinking are sometimes a strain and a bafflement and I wonder if the Designers were aware of that when they made it almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to make use of a recorder. Or when they had us all taught that earliest learned wisdom: "When in doubt, forget it" (22).

Much of his writing, perhaps understandably, looks almost like academic writing, with little sentence variety, long paragraphs, and few extraodinary stylistic choices. It's not as boring to read as Leonid Brezhnev's diary (Today, borscht for dinner. Tonight, vodka before bed), but it doesn't jump off the page as well as some of the writing in other portions of the book. Contrast it with an early journal entry by Mary Lou, the woman he falls in love with and teaches to write:

    I am certainly wandering in this account, in this continuation of my plan to memorize my life. Maybe I'm getting senile--like Bob.
     No, I'm not senile. I'm just excited to be memorizing my life again. Before I started this I was merely bored--as bored as I had been after Simon died in New Mexico, as bored and freaky as I was getting at the Bronx Zoo before Paul first showed up, looking so childlike and simple, and appealing...
     I'd better quit thinking about Paul (106).

Consequently Bentley winds up telling us how he feels at length, when it simply could have been expressed with a gesture if the book had been written in third-person, or if Bentley had simply related things more simply. It was a hell of a time trying to pick quotes for this annotation, since anything significant in the novel is seldom said with brevity. In any case, towards the end of the book his journal entries become less of a chore to read.

The only portions of the book in third-person narrative are Spofforth's sections, where he is not keeping a journal but nevertheless the events need to be told. When he speaks, he reveals a complex character, not a robot and not a human, but something more. He is practically ancient and was built to serve humanity, but his brain was based off the patterns of an unkown melancholy human's, and he is probably more of an individual than any of the humans he watches over. Unlike them, he cannot hide in drug-induced stupor, or even commit suicide. To try and explain how things came to be, he describes on old car commercial he witnessed:

"...And down the empty road he went, at seventy miles an hour, insulated from the outside air, insulated as far as possible even from the sounds of his own vehicle's moving down that empty road. The American Individualist, the Free Spirit. The Frontiersman. With a human face indistinguishable from that of a moron robot. And at his home or his motel he had television to keep the world away. And pills in his pocket. And the stereo. And the pictures in the magazines he looked at, with food and sex better and brighter than in life" (174).

For much of the novel Spofforth is an inscrutable authority figure. Only as the story goes on do the other characters learn enough about him to understand what a kind of poignant horror he represents.

This novel is much more than a churlish complaint of television and whatnot taking the place of a good book. Bentley and Mary Lou both grow beyond the prevailing ignorance of their society and Tevis has thoroughly thought it out and documented it with a developmental psychologist's eye for detail. The couple, through exposure to prison, pregnancy, religion, and libraries, gradually lose their need for tranquilizers of all kinds and instead learn the value of continually questioning themselves and their world. This is in stark contrast to their early conditioning, and the influence of their robotic authority figures, as Bentley explains:

"Reading is too intimate," Spofforth said. "It will put you too close to the feelings and the ideas of others. It will disturb and confuse you."
I was beginning to feel a bit frightened. It was not easy to be in Spofforth's presence, and to listen to his deep, authoritative voice and not want to be obedient, and unquestioning. But I remembered something I had read in a book: "Others can be wrong too, you know," and I held on to that. "Why should it be a crime to be disturbed and confused? And to know what others have thought and felt?" (78).

Mary Lou, apparently more rebellious than Bentley from the start, likewise learns to question the status quo:

Why don't we talk to one another? Why don't we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then--perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics; but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said: I am human. I talk and I listen and I read (114).

The novel then shows its colors not just as some fanciful idea or speculative fiction, or even a collection of lonely characters and imagery, but an entreaty for less escapism in modern life.

It's hard not to read this book and not immediately draw parallels with my own life and learning, and I'm sure the same can be said for many readers. In this age of information, it is far too easy to stick our heads in the sand and sit slack-jawed in front of the TV when that cute girl is waiting for our call, or our children need attention, or our novel needs to be written. Bentley, after being rebuffed by Annabel, flirts with the idea of giving up altogether:

I never tried to make love to her again. I have thought since that I should have tried; but once she had told me how she felt about lovemaking I was too confused and uncertain. I would think about Annabel and Mary Lou, loving them both and knowing both were unattainable. And somehow it was almost good that way. There were no risks (221).

The society of the novel has become one of avoidance of risk, of attachments, of responsibilities, of feelings. It is a society with a terrible kind of inferiority complex, so afraid of failure that virtually everything is stymied and left in the hands of the automatons that previous generations had succeeded in making. There is no community, and that is what Bentley and Mary Lou must realize for themselves, then venture to change. In essence, the novel is everyone's story, set in an extreme situation to magnify the daily challenges we too often overlook, or are afraid to confront. And, though I won't give it away here, there is a very moving and poetic ending, painful but not tragic, optimistic but tempered. In short, an attainable ending.

All contents, except where otherwise noted, are copyright Andrew Lee Hunn.

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