Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

China Mieville's collection Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories is punctuated by three sketches for film trailers of variously horrifying sorts--a zombie film ("The Crawl"), a quasi-Matrix thriller ("The Escapee"), a weird relative of Hitchcock and du Maurier ("Listen the Birds").  The trailers are deliberately fragmentary, the time signatures indicating that each shot lasts no more than three, four, perhaps six seconds.  They are also deliberately paradoxical, as advertisements for non-existent films that will never arrive to complete, explain, and perhaps rearrange the not-quite-intelligible shots described here.  (And, of course, the reader might well worry, given the rest of the collection, that the imaginary films are documentaries...)  But these fractured trailers, left forever awaiting a cinematic closure that fails to arrive, also embody the form of most of the stories on offer here.  Many of the stories drop us in medias res into inexplicable situations that have no known beginning and no comforting explanation at the end.  Corpses mysteriously reorient themselves; icebergs float over London; people start generating mysterious trenches around their bodies; skeletons bear mysterious scrimshaw work.    Indeed, "Four Final Orpheuses" keeps accumulating different explanations for the Orpheus legend, none of them precisely final.  Some stories are less narratives than they are found textual objects, like "Syllabus" and the "Second Slice Manifesto," which ask the reader to imagine the conditions under which they might be produced and received, but provide few real clues.  

Even the two most "straightforward" stories, "Sacken" and "The Junket," deliberately reject genre fiction's supposed tendency to explain, or over-explain, itself.  "Sacken" deconstructs the classic ghost story: its protagonists, a female couple named Jo and Mel, do all the stereotypical things that characters in ghost stories have a bad habit of doing.  They go on vacation (a major no-no) and rent a somewhat run-down property (also a bad plan), where the moderately less-intellectual Mel has strange dreams that Jo refuses to take seriously (oh, dear).  After Jo mysteriously disappears,  Mel does her scholarly research and discovers that she's seeing the ghost of a female parricide, drowned in a sack with several animals.  Once she becomes genre-aware, though, things go very badly.  Trying to imagine what the ghost wants, she comes up with "Revenge [...] Justice.  Company.  My child.  A retrial.  None of those was what the woman had whispered for" (162); the only motives she can ascribe to the ghost are conventional ghost motives, all intended to disrupt the cycle of haunting by completing what she herself understands is a "lack" (166).  But believing she can understand the ghost according to the traditional rules proves fatal.  Meanwhile, "The Junket," more black comedy than horror, satirizes twenty-first century outrage culture (and the fad for undead mashups) by imagining the mysterious fate of one Daniel Cane, a filmmaker who makes a huge splash with the (ahem) problematic Anne Frank, Vampire, a "jewsploitation" (363) movie which triggers the rage of Jews, white supremacists, lefty activists, and just about everyone else you can imagine.  Cane's death by suspiciously anti-vampire protocols appears to be the story's primary mystery--aside from the film's actual meaning, itself left unexplained--but the narrator, set up as a stereotypically counter-culture film journalist, instead winds up refusing to investigate further: "Some stories, though, it doesn't help to finish" (370).  Here we have an over-the-top murder mystery, in other words, chock full of potential suspects and complete with bizarre informant, and yet it simply rejects the necessity for an explanation.

What do the stories offer instead of closure? On the one hand, they invoke a decadent, degenerate, and/or decayed environment, frequently of the late-capitalist variety, in which things are very obviously in the process of falling apart.  With the exception of the final male couple in "The Design," whose love is both obvious and, it would seem, never stated, human relationships are often twisted and tense.  (In another example of black comedy, the psychotherapy jargon of "Dreaded Outcome" morphs both horrifically and hilariously into something else.)  Sites of terror, like Guantanamo, turn out to have infused objects with inexplicable powers that react upon those who try to use them.  Unexplained cultures of cruelty to animals run through multiple stories, from the execution technique of "Sacken" to the bizarre animal head rituals of "After the Festival" to the deer on fire in "Estate."  Yet manmade objects frequently escape human control, most startlingly the living oil rigs in "Covehithe"--which are even producing cute little baby oil rigs--but also the ominous ships in "Watching God" and the collapsing freight elevators in "The Rope," all intended vehicles for profit that take on literal, and sometimes destructive, lives of their own.  (In a no doubt deliberate paradox, the "godnapped" idol in "The Buzzard's Egg," which is supposed to do something, clearly does nothing, while meaningless wars swirl around the enslaved narrator.)  On the other hand, the stories provoke a strange sense of suspension, as the reader is momentarily caught up in the troubled mood of the narrative's incompleteness.  And surely the stories' unwillingness to explain their unsettling events, let alone to offer anything more than just the slightest hints of apocalyptic world-(un)building, is what makes them such discomforting, or upsetting, reads.   Much as the trailers hint at the other stories' form, so "Watching God" suggestively addresses our yearning to settle on a singular interpretation.  Characters on an island that is clearly of this world, yet just as clearly after some unspoken apocalyptic event, watch mysterious, unmanned boats pass by their shores.  Their remaining library consists of mutilated books and out-of-context quotations--the title, as the reader can probably guess, is from Zora Neale Hurston--with which our narrator becomes "obsessed" as a child (94).  Narratives break down; sentences are appropriated and reconfigured.  But the ships are believed to construct a "deep grammar" (97; Chomsky repurposed!) beneath the surface, and the wrecked ships themselves are each a "word" (98)--an apparently orderly yet unintelligible language.  The narrator's friend Gam, we are told, is "one of those intent on decoding the sentence" (98), another obsessive act of interpretation that yields no results (and is just as likely to be the product of conspiracist thinking). Suggestively, the narrator that "[y]ou can't decode it or translate it yet, it's not finished" (98): if the sentence only becomes readable once it is completed, where does that leave narratives that only "end" in the sense of coming to a halt? How does one understand language that always defers closure? (Derrida would probably have a field day.)  In the end, after the boats mysteriously stop and start again, thanks to an ominous and (again) unexplained "hostile takeover" (107) by a corporation that appears to employ no people, the characters are left with, not a resolved sentence, but simply the shattering of one and the beginning of another.  Yet they also bring something else: "Ships at a distance come not to collect, but carrying freight.  They come carrying fear.  And it is our fear but it is not our cargo.  It has been ordered and is delivered on behalf of someone else.  They bring it to be rendered.  It is on their behalf that it will be rendered here" (107).  No fixed and determined meaning, then or ever, but a state of indeterminacy that proves to be its own undefined horror, brought from somewhere mysterious according to the behest of some agent never seen.