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Till We Have Faces

Review: Genevieve Valentine’s ‘Persona’

Genevieve Valentine (Ellen Wright)
August 1, 2015

At the core of every science fiction novel is a coherent theory, an implied, but boldfaced assertion of The Way We Will Live Someday. These dynamics make writing books set in the near future particularly difficult, even for the best authors. Predictions being what they are, which is to say nearly always wrong, near-future science fiction must navigate a narrow passage between two fatal hazards. Get too specific, and in a few years your book will take on the characteristic irrelevancy of an old newspaper article. Too broad, and things start to feel generic. Persona, Genevieve Valentine’s third novel, smashes squarely into the latter extreme, and fails as a result.

The main character is a woman called Suyana Sapaki, a "face" (diplomat) in the International Assembly, a U.N.-like body. For unexplained reasons, international diplomacy has become a tabloid obsession, and each face is a minor celebrity, though all decision-making authority rests in the hands of behind-the-scenes staffers called "handlers." Readers for whom opacity and corruption are novel attributes of international politics will find this interesting.

Sapaki, representing the relatively poor and weak United Amazon Rainforest Confederation, is decidedly a C-lister until, on her way to sign a relationship contract (exactly what it sounds like) with the American face, someone attempts to assassinate her. Enter Daniel Park, a Korean illegal alien reporter, who has made the correct supposition that Sapaki is not all that she seems. Waiting with his camera in an alley next to the site of the date/contract-negotiation /crime scene, he shows up just in time to help a wounded Sapaki escape.

It turns out that Sapaki, in an attempt to save her native rainforest from the depredations of American multinationals, has been passing information to an eco-terrorist group called Chordata. Chordata has all the trappings of a fearsome extremist organization, but their operations mostly consist of blowing up mining and agricultural facilities while they are empty. Then again, civilian casualties in the service of radical environmentalism might add a disturbing element of moral complexity to a narrative where the villains are uniformly white denizens of the northern hemisphere.

Politics aside, there’s a grain of a good story here. It’s a passably interesting concept, and corporations make for easy villains. However, nothing is ever fleshed out enough to make it interesting. You can tell what Valentine is going for: a subtly brutal, propulsive minimalism. That’s not what she achieves. The setting is anodyne, the period is unknown, and the institutions at work, ally and foe, act randomly outside a coherent framework. The novel is set in Paris, but there’s nothing, no details, that distinguish the City of Lights from other metropolises. Why is this nobody a target for a murder that will surely make her a martyr? No one really knows, including the reader.

The author also makes some unusual literary decisions. They’re daring, but ineffective. Every so often, she’ll throw in a photo caption. A representative example: [ID 29963, Frame 7: Daniel Park in black coat, walking though security doors of Hôpital François du Lac, looking over shoulder at broadcast of Magnus Samuelsson giving press conference regarding the shooting of Suyana Sapaki.] The captions are the equivalent of a telegraphic all-caps FULL STOP, blasting Valentine’s fine prose style out of rhythm.

Then there are the minute descriptions of facial expressions, gestures, and mannerisms as stand-ins for emotional description. A skeptical character’s "smile is full of little tests." Sapaki, unnerved, "closes her eyes a beat too long." David, distraught, has his "chest clench like his ribs were caving in." And so on. This is supposed to be a window into the thrust-and-parry of diplomatic conversation. Instead it reads like the efforts of a creative writing student who has taken the dictum "show, don’t tell" a little too much to heart.

Although Persona is not quite a success, the author’s creative courage bodes well for her future efforts.

Published under: Book reviews