dystopia

Another Present Era, by Elaine Perry (1990)

Another Present Era by Elaine Perry

Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales has been on the trail of neglected Black writers for a number of years, first with his feature The Blacklist for Catapault and now with CrimeReads. More recently, he was instrumental in getting the short stories of Diane Oliver, whose life was cut short at the age of 22 in a motorcycle accident, published for the first time in Neighbors and Other Stories, just published in February 2024 by Grove Press. He wrote about his latest discovery, Elaine Perry’s 1990 dystopian novel Another Present Era, in CrimeReads just last month.

I was fascinated by Michael’s article. “Another Present Era,” he wrote, “touches on many of the same subjects (global warming, corporate greed, racism and disease) as [Octavia] Butler’s more well-known Parable of Sower, but that book wasn’t published until three years later.” It was Perry’s only published novel, though an article in Perry’s hometown Lima, Ohio News from 1990 quotes her as working on a second novel, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven But Nobody Wants to Die, which she said was “about the civil rights marches in the South during racial strife in the 1960s.” Whether it was the few and cursory reviews that Another Present Era received, frustrations with her work in progress, or just, well, life, Elaine Perry chose soon after to put her brief career as a writer behind her. Just the initial hardcover edition of Another Present Era was published and used copies are few but not (yet) unreasonably priced. It’s also available on the Internet Archive (link), which is how I read it.

The book opens with Wanda Higgins Du Bois looking out from the 58th floor of the Savings of America building lower Manhattan at a New York City beginning to show signs of the impact of climate change:

No one is out on the streets. Searchlights sweep across the sky and the fog above the neighboring blocks of four- and five-story buildings and the hypnotic stream of headlights and taillights on multilane West Street. Civil Defense klaxons wail, indicating the severity of the flood warning. Four long blasts followed by a brief silence, repeated endlessly. On her nightstand is the booklet every New Yorker has, explaining why and when the klaxons sound and what to do.

Wanda is an architect working on an ambitious proposal for the Toronto waterfront. She is alone, or so she finds her colleague and boyfriend, Bradley, is there as well. Though he greets her warmly, he soon produces a gun, spins its cylinder, and points it at his mouth. Wanda stops him, but Bradley’s distress becomes just one of the streams of psychological conflict running through her life. Bradley is distraught over the fact that he, like Wanda, looks to be a textbook Nordic Aryan when they are both African-Americans. Wanda’s mother is Black; her father the son of one of Hitler’s rocket scientists, an Air Force colonel working on the space program who used to beat Wanda with a steel ruler when she let slip that her mother was neither white nor dead.

The ambiguity of identity is a major theme in Another Present Era. Wanda looks white and identifies as Black. She soon meets an elderly German man who introduces himself as Werner Schmidt, though she recognizes him as Sterling Cronheim, a Wisconsin-born artist who became a member of the Bauhaus school in Germany and who disappeared sometime after the fall of France in 1940. Sterling pretends to be straight and pursued a brilliant physicist named Lenore Hayden throughout his time in Germany in France, despite the fact that she knew he spent many nights crusing the streets of Berlin and Paris for rent boys.

Elaine Perry, photo by Steve Bryant, from the dust jacket of Another Present Era.

If Another Present Era shows signs of first novel weaknesses, it’s primarily in how Perry deals with a complex and intricate narrative in which few steps are straightforward and sequential. This is far more a work of atmospheres and undercurrents, and Perry does not shy away from weaving her way through decades of history, scattering enigmatic and passing references as she goes. I can imagine obsessives constructing a long and elaborate concordance of all the characters, places, and cultural references in the book, much like those that have been creating for Lord of the Rings or Gravity’s Rainbow.

With its mentions of the Nazi rocket programs and the Weimar Republic, it’s easy to sense the influence of Gravity’s Rainbow in Another Present Era. Like Pynchon, Perry works on a maximalist scale when it comes to history. And she takes advantage of her futuristic setting to play with the relativity of history. People talk to each other over video phones and watch streaming television services (the German silent movie channel) while they also listen to big bands (Eddie Heywood and his Orchestra) playing on the radio live from the rooftops of New York hotels as if it were 1939. And Wanda still clings to idealistic visions of the future that certainly wouldn’t have survived the troubles of 1968:

Wanda believed in the future, not a future of space exploration, but one of the harmonious and cooperative society human-rights leaders always talked about.She really thought everyone would be like her some day, neither black nor white, but something in between. It might take decades or even centuries, but it would happen. And sooner than that, racism and the concept of race itself would become completely obsolete.

There is much about Another Present Era to applaud. Time and again, Perry tosses off remarks that shows a deeper recognition of the impact of global warmingthan most of her contemporary writers. As Wanda works on her design, she muses, “So much fanfare and civic pride pouring into the Toronto Harbourfront, but the ocean will swallow all the buildings in a matter of decades or even years.” A new generation of Hoovervilles are popping up on the landfills constructed to keep the Atlantic from swamping the streets of Manhattan, populated by climate and economic refugees, while the rich find ever more expensive ways to distract themselves. Perry’s treatment of race and identity and their complexities, innovative in 1990, seems familiar today. There is more than enough material to populate a few PhD dissertations here.

I must admit that I had a selfish motive in rushing to read Another Present Era. It’s exactly the sort of unique, utterly forgotten, and deeply intriguing book we’re publishing in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, and Michael Gonzales was kind enough to communicate my interest to Elaine Perry. Although she chose not to entertain a reissue at this time, I hope we will see Another Present Era return to print sometime in future. For the moment, I strongly encourage anyone looking for a strikingly original novel to track down a used copy before they become the stuff of antiquarian and rare book dealers.

Another Present Era, by Elaine Perry
New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990

One by One, by Penelope Gilliatt (1965)

Cover of Pnather paperback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt

When I picked up an old Panther paperback copy of Penelope Gilliatt’s novel One by One at Bookcase, a veritable treasure trove of old books near the cathedral in Carlisle just a few weeks ago, its cover blurb was already a bit too real: “London is once again an isolated, panic-stricken city … in the grip of a fearsome plague that has killed 10,000 by the third week of August.” Now, like Polly Talbot, Gilliatt’s protagonist, I am holed up in my home, advised to avoid venturing out in the interest of containing a new and dangerous virus — which made reading this book a particularly unsettling experience.

It’s impossible not to look for parallels between Gilliatt’s fictional epidemic and today’s COVID-19 pandemic. Polly’s husband Joe is a veterinarian, but he becomes involved early in the response to the mysterious illness that begins taking lives as Europe swelters in a July heatwave — first helping out in a laboratory, then as a lowly orderly in a make-shift morgue and finally seconded as a doctor in a London hospital as the numbers rise. Aware of its contagion potential, he insists that Polly — seven months pregnant — remain at home weeks before the government responds and takes steps to quarantine London from the rest of the UK.

Cover of Atheneum US hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt
Cover of Atheneum US hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt

As in today’s crisis, the government is slow to act: “People were asked, but not ordered, to avoid travelling in and out of London.” Swimming pools are shut; the infected are isolated in their homes, food and supplies being brought to them by civil defense workers in protective gear. “For many days, far too many, no one in power grasped the danger because everyone was busy trying to find a scapegoat.” Before long, however, most of the city is shut down. Racketeers posing as undertakers take away corpses and set them alight with petrol in empty lots. As in time of the Black Death, survivors find themselves confronted by the overwhelming presence of death, but few are equipped with a faith to cope with it: “The difficulty of living without any system for thinking about dying was unacknowledged, and for that reason very acute.”

And as we are seeing now, some respond by grasping at war as an analogy. “In the emergency the right thing to do was to stir other people to a sense of outrage, to make a stink about it and hope it could be turned into the Armada or Dunkirk or anything but a biological affliction.” At the same time, those at a distance from the worst affected find it hard to break out of their everyday concerns. Over a few days before London is fully quarantined, Polly is able to visit her mother and her friends in the countryside. There, the discussion is not about the virus but about the scandalous public school careers of various MPs: “Our friend was always a great beater…. I should say he has beaten at least half the Cabinet.” The topic shifts then to speculation about closeted gays and unfaithful wives. The old boys express some sympathy for the PM’s wife and her series of ever-richer and fatter lovers: “I always think of Daphne like that, pressed out like a wafer by the great weight of men traveling over her, bumpetty bum, bumpetty bum.” When one finally turns to acknowledge Polly, he asks about the parties she must be missing.

“‘I shouldn’t think there are many,’ she said. ‘Too many of the guests are dead.'”

“It’s not on to mope,” the peer cautions her. As she approaches London on her return, she sees an orange glow in the distance. Burning corpses.

Cover of Secker and Warburg UK hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt
Cover of Secker & Warburg UK hardback edition of One by One by Penelope Gilliatt

In the novel’s final chapters, the focus shifts from the epidemic writ large to the individual stories of Polly and Joe and situations having little to do with the illness. Polly manages to get out of London to the safety of her mother-in-law’s house by the sea, but finds the potential for harm there — emotional from Joe’s mother and medical from her degenerative GP — far worse than anything in London. Meanwhile, the Press (Gilliatt uses the capital P to hammer home her point), having first made Joe into hero for his selfless hospital work, turn him into a pariah by digging up evidence of a teenage experiment with homosexuality.

It is in these pages that Gilliatt’s aim becomes clear: to skewer the Establishment (using the capital E with which it was hammered in the 1960s) for its complacency. She sees in how upper- and upper-middle class parents cared for their children — including their gay children — indicators of how these children (now the adults in charge) deal with the epidemic:

You never gave him a chance to get near you. You shoved him into a grey flannel suit and sent him to some prissy dame’s-school when he was six, you gave him a meringue or something when he had a good report and you saw that he had his castor oil and you took him to those god-awful mournful churches without even believing a word of it yourself; and that was it. Then you packed him off to boarding school for more of the same when he was eight. Eight. And it went on for ten more years.

In other words: pack them up and get them out of sight. Unfortunately, as is often the case with fiction, messages can get in the way of stories, and One by One ends with what The New York Times’ reviewer, Martin Levin, called a “climactic non sequitur.”

One can identify, in hindsight, which reviewers considered themselves part of the Establishment by their verdicts of the book. Writing for The Listener, Hilary Corke regretted that Gilliatt had chosen to mix good old fashioned science fiction with “social satire and commentary.” Marigold Johnson, the TLS reviewer and never one to blunt her arrows, found the book “Too much of a rag-bag of protest, comic observation, emotional analysis, fantasy and cleverness.” Anthony Burgess, whose own novels were often similar rag-bags, loved it: “If it had a fault, it was the best fault imaginable: more action and characters and ideas than the small space could carry.” Johnson did, however, credit Gilliatt for displaying a “passion and intelligence … far too rare and ambitious for one to wish that it had been written in any other way or to forget the impression it leaves.”

Penelope Gilliatt obituary
One of Penelope Gilliatt’s obituaries

One by One was Penelope Gilliatt’s first novel and though it’s also her shortest, its mix of sharp and strong set pieces of description and dialogue and hazy passages of internal monologues suggest that her fictional talents were better suited for the short story form. Although Gilliatt is primarily remembered now as a film critic, she left behind a considerable body of fiction, most of which can be found online at the Open Library (Link), including One by One. When Gilliatt died of alcoholism in 1993 at the age of 61, her friend lyricist and playwright Betty Comden, wrote, “What a glowing further career she might have had, and what beautiful, inventive, never-to-be-written pages this cleverest of all sausages [a bit of British slang Gilliatt often used] might have produced we will never know.” Were she alive today, however, she would also be among those at most risk in the face of our real-world epidemic.

One by One, by Penelope Gilliatt
London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1965
New York: Atheneum, 1965

Skrine, by Kathleen Sully (1960)

Cover of Skrine by Kathleen Sully

None of the four novels by Kathleen Sully I’ve read so far is anything quite like the others, but I feel safe in saying that Skrine is the most unlike the rest. In fact, in his TLS review, Arthur-Calder Marshall observed that Sully’s critical reputation (back when she had one) would have been higher if she’d had the stamina to rewrite the same novel over and over, like Ivy Compton-Burnett. Instead, he wrote,

Each of her novels, like those of Miss Muriel Spark, is original in the sense of being not merely unlike those of other authors but also unlike her other novels. Each demands from the reader an approach without preconceptions; each erects the standards by which the author wishes this particular book to be judged. There is no Sullyland, but there is a Sully world, as yet as ill-defined in her eight novels as the maps of the early cosmographers. It is being filled in piece by non-continguous piece.

From what I have been able to learn, Sully’s novels were set in southern England in a time somewhere between the early 1950s and the late 1960s. Skrine, however, while set in the same area, takes place in a time after most of the population and signs of civilization in England — and the rest of the world, we must assume — has been wiped out by some worldwide holocaust. Nuclear war? Plague? One cannot tell. “Surface earthquakes” is the most we are told. Survivors band together in scattered farms or the startings of small walled towns. Others roam the landscape, living by their wits and ability to overpower those like them.

As Skrine opens, the title character, has just killed a woman for a pack of cigarettes. He finds just one cigarette — desiccated or ersatz — left in the pack. No matches on her. And his lighter long out of fluid. He moves on.

A lone wanderer, Skrine is a stranger, looked at with suspicion and fear by anyone he encounters. And his memory is haunted by people — an old woman, a man, a child. Are they people he killed? “These people don’t exist — except in my brain. I must rid myself of them.” “I’ll be the boss,” he tells himself. “I’ll banish these apparitions for once and all time.”

But after he swims across a wide river — the Thames? — and collapses on the far shore, his imagination kicks in again. He sees a boy watching him. He cannot recall killing a child. Had he stolen food from him? “Children had been abandoned or deliberately lost and there had been rumours of cannabalism and the rumour hadn’t surprised Skrine or troubled him in those days — at least, not much.”

After stumbling on in a delirium of hunger, he comes across a group outside a walled town burying four bodies — three adults and a child. He edges up, watches, then cries out, “This child is alive.” Taken into the town, he is hailed as a healer. Some sort of illness is taking its toll, and the inhabitants flock to him to be cured. The mayor holds a council and it is decided to let Skrine stay.

At this point, the narrative shifts. Within a few days, Skrine discerns that the arrangements of power are more complex than he first thought. The real power is held by Jervis, a short, nasty, and brutish man who took over the town with the help of a small band of men armed with guns. Do the guns really work? No one has the appetite to find out. A few of the original inhabitants murmur about taking control back. Jervis recognizes the value of an ambiguous opposition and gives them just enough rope to keep muttering behind his back. He cultivates Skrine as an ally — also recognizing that Skrine sees himself as a loner and idealist, and hence probably not capable of organizing any viable resistance.

Skrinecould be read as a parable for the use of power in the age of Twitter. Jervis warns the people of the threat of attacks from other towns to the south. In reality, he wants to take their remnants of running machinery and supplies. In response to his threats, Skrine and others mutter their objections — but no one makes any over gesture of opposition. And Jervis has his trolls among the small population, raising charges against Skrine: Theft! Rape! Murder!

If a parable, then Skrine offers little hope for us today. Fear may be a negative force, but in the right hands it can be extremely effective, especially when it gathers an influential minority to its cause. A reviewer in the Catholic Herald called Skrine “an absolutely remorseless, post-Apocalypse novel, uncompromisingly bleak.” It is all those things — and also impossible to put down. One wonders how Kathleen Sully — then a mother of three teenagers — found a way to such dark emotions and then translated them so powerfully to the page. And one also has to wonder: how is it that Lord of the Flies has sold in the millions and is taught in classrooms around the world, while Skrine has vanished so successfully that not even a single copy appears to be available for sale?

Skrine, by Kathleen Sully
London: Peter Davies, 1960