JM Frey’s TRIPTYCH – alas, friends, Ursula le Guin did it better

“You know…” she said slowly, and almost so softly that Evvie didn’t hear it.”You know those movies where the aliens come to Earth, and they… I dunno, they try to steal our natural resources, or create a nuclear winter so they can turn the Earth into slag, or they melt the polar ice caps and New York is under fathoms of water, or they clone us for slaves, or create terrifying bioweapons and wipe us all out and use our cities for farmland, or…all that stuff?” Gwen looked up. “It was nothing like that.”

Part District 9, part Lost in Translation, part Stranger in a Strange Land, Triptych is a poignant, character-driven science fiction story about tolerance, love and loss.

You know, if all I ever read of this book was the sample chapter, I would never have read any further. Why? Because the first chapter contains the kind of writing that I can only describe as buttock-clenchingly awful. It’s so embarrassing to read that your buttocks just go a-clenching and there’s no help for it. So by second chapter, you’d expect, you’d be getting constipation and that’s just not something you’d ever want to inflict on yourself, goodness no.

It gets better. But not by much. And I’d like to have said that this book has its heart in the right place–except its heart is of the “bleeding-heart liberal singing kumbaya” variety. What could possibly be more loathsome?

To start with, let me explain where I’m coming from by quoting a bunch of positive reviews (which the author has helpfully compiled here):

#1 Kalp, the main alien character of the book comes of not only as a believable, well-rounded individual, but at the same time you can tell that he’s alien and that everything he sees is confusing and new, without feeling that Frey is just masking a human viewpoint with a few alien words or ideas.

#2 She also explores gender identity from the view of an alien so confused by how humans conceive of gender it leaves the reader shaking our heads, too, at what we think of as “male” and “female” anyway.

#3 Anyway, Triptych is a book that I’m delighted to say falls comfortably outside the norm, pushes sexual/racial/gender boundaries, and leaves you quite delighted to stop and think.

#4 It’snot that the book deals frankly with difficult questions of sexuality to a degree that has the potential to shake-up mainstream audiences, though you’d be forgiven for thinking that.

Well you know what? These reviews? Are grand, honking, fucking bald-faced lies. Where do I even begin. Maybe I should begin that this is a story of little substance, that is about nothing and which goes nowhere except plowing right into the comfort zones of conventionality, that it is full of sound and fury but ultimately absolutely meaningless? Maybe I should eviscerate the author for trying to deal with racism through furry blue aliens? (Yes, yes, if you are wondering the author is a blinding shade of white.) How do I even get started on the flat stupidity of it all, the naivety of its politics, the way it pays lip service to progressiveness while failing to actually engage with or advance it?

Let’s begin here: the alien, the furry blue alien, who’s supposed to be so edgy and so outside the gender binary? Is referred constantly with male pronouns, unchangingly, insistently. He has a penis. He identifies as a male–there’s a very telling passage regarding this–and his greatest claim to the fame of gender unconventionality is that he likes strawberry daiquiris. Because, whereas Ursula le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood were written by adults, with adult comprehension of gender politics and for the latter, race politics, JM Frey’s Triptych is written by someone with a sophomore’s understanding of the former and a sheltered white person’s understanding of the latter, and the type of empty bleeding-heart liberal correctness that is fandom-approved but which doesn’t function or work for a minute in the real world.

If you like this book, at this point you are probably frothing at the mouth.

So, where do I start again.

The story is one of first contact. A bunch of furry blue aliens refugees–who are feline in some ways by the way, so yes we are hitting James Cameron’s Avatar at full speed, and yes there are almost as many problematic issues–arrive on Earth, because their tree of souls home planet broke due a freak accident. This led to much wailing, gnashing of teeth and woobiehood. One of them, Kelp Kalp, is introduced and integrated into a team of specialists working to acclimate the aliens to Earth and vice versa, and they get sweet on each other, and then Kalp is framed for being traitorous and shot. This led to much wailing, gnashing of teeth and woobiehood.

In fact, this is how the novel starts: long before we are introduced to any of the characters, or given any incentive to give a fuck, Kalp is shot and everyone cries.

The writing of this section is easily some of the most embarrassing thing I’ve seen on or off fanfiction.net. My buttocks! They clenched, and clenched.

Kalp blinked, just once, and turned his head towards Basil. And then, somehow, he was gone. There was no death rattle, no dramatic final breath, just… life in his eyes, and then… none.
Kalp was dead.
Kalp was dead on the living room floor.
Basil jerked backwards, away from the thing that he now touched, the thing that wasn’t…that was still so warm, and dead bodies weren’t supposed to be warm. They were never warm in the movies.  But Kalp radiated heat like a little rain forest. Hadradiated, no longer in the present…goddamnit all to hell and goddamn the tenses too. Then Basil’s other instinct, the desperate need to deny, jumped to the fore and he surged forward to try to shake Kalp back into breathing. The purple-red blood was still oozing out of a fist-sized wound, growing ever more sluggish as the seconds ticked by, becoming sharply chilly in the still air. Basil jammed his hand over the blooming injury, pushed in his fist in a desperate, futile effort to stop the flow. Limp blue fur tickled his knuckles. Dark skin cooled irrationally rapidly, making goose pimples burst upwards along his arms.

You simply don’t abuse ellipses like this to convey deep emotion and expect people to read it with a straight face. And then, of course, I came to the “limp blue fur” and wondered if I was reading a furry roleplaying chat log. At this point, if I was a reasonable being with good self-preservation instinct, I’d have turned the car right around and driven away at full speed, screaming.

I am no such being. Fuck.

The other parts of this wacky edgy envelope-pushing menage a trois are Gwen Pierson and Basil Gray, respectively a geek-gone-soldier and a geek-gone-engineer. You will notice that this book is an endless fanservice of geek-types, with characters firing off pop culture references at each other (ugh). They time-travel back to Gwen’s childhood, does some shit, and convince her mother to become a true social justice warrior within less than a day.

No I’m not kidding. We are talking about a woman who starts off thinking like this–

What about that gay disease? All these fags, allowed to marry, allowed to take more than one lover…is that where the world is going? “Wise up,” Gwen said. Like it’s the dark ages.

–and ends up, less than twenty-four hours later:

“I don’t see how it’s my business, telling people where to fall in love,” Evvie said tightly, because she was wising up fast. If she wanted to be able to accept, to love her daughter, she would have to also accept that this was how she chose to live her life and there was, clearly, literally nothing Evvie could do about it.

And this is where, roughly, I came to the realization that this book is dreadfully, insufferably sophomoric. Bigotry is solved by a little hand-waving, a little joining of hands and kumbaya, and presto! It’s gone forever.

In this ham-handed, inept and fumbling fashion the author pounces on one hot-button issue after the next, in a whirlwind of dropping anvils and meshing of every kind of bigotry into one big hot mass: Gwen gets pregnant by Basil, but by that point the two are “married” with Kalp, so when they go out to a concert people beat them up screaming “faggots!” and “freak baby!” because homophobia and racism are the same thing, I guess (homophobes would kick a pregnant woman into miscarriage because…? How much more heteronormative do you get than being pregnant and in a relationship with two men? Gwen is not queer!), oh and did I mention the author tries to engage with racism through furry blue aliens? This would be the time to inform you, gentle reader, that there are exactly two characters of color in this book. One is Director Addis, Gwen’s and Basil’s superior at the Institute. The other is Doctor Zhang.

Gwen and Basil are, naturally, Caucasian: Canadian and Welsh respectively (Basil, by the way, says “innit” a lot and adores tea–Frey is a Dr Who fan, you see). Addis has a few speaking lines. Doctor Zhang has zero. Now consider this passage:

“Finish your shopping, dear,” says the woman from the herb cart. She comes over and pats Kalp’s arm affectionately. “Go on. Don’t take nothin’ old Rudy says seriously. He’s always off on ‘those Pakies’ and the ‘dirty blacks,’ huh! As if he weren’t the boy of immigrants himself.”

Rudy being a xenophobe who was mean to Kalp, you see. And do you see he’s always going on about “those Pakies and the dirty blacks.” Do you see. Fantastic Racism too is a meaningful way of fighting real-world racism! The author, being white, surely knows best.

Do I mention a third time that Kalp is a furry blue alien with feline characteristics? Nah, instead I will reiterate that, despite her lip service to the ideals of anti-racism, JM Frey completely forgot to write any actual character of color into her id-vortex shitnovel. Kalp is never taught anything but English, exposed to no other culture than Anglo-American/British, because that’s all the author’s imagination can conjure: a future, and first contact, conducted with and entirely by English-speaking whites.

Gwen [...] turns out of the comforting embrace to fetch Kleenex from the multicoloured box on her desk. She mops at her face. Basil stands in place and fidgets, digging at the mechanical grease under his fingernails, and waits. It is a small relief to note that it seems that males all over the universe, no matter what species, have no idea what to do with an upset female. Kalp feels just as agitated as Basil, and they share an ironic look. 

Remember the reviewers lauding this book for its amazing exploration of gender? That Kalp is a fine example of the same, in the tradition of Ursula le Guin? That he’s so confused at how humans perceive and stereotype gender roles?

Remember?

Remember? 

You will be glad to know that Gwen gets annoyed with both Kalp and Basil for leaving the toilet seat up. I’m not even joking. There is zilch about their polyamory that’s going to make anybody except ultra-conservative middle-class Christians uncomfortable, outside maybe Basil’s homosexual moments with Kalp: and those are written in such a perfectly vanilla way that the only startling aspect is that Kalp makes cat noises. Cat noises being not so much “oh my god you are breaking my bigoted conservative worldview” as “Jesus fucking Christ, furries!”

After Kalp dies and they have resolved the nonsensical bigots’ conspiracy–

And maybe, yes, maybe Basil wanted to marry Gwen, too. It was true, Basil was that guy, the one who wanted the picket fence and the cats and the babies. He wanted to play ball in the yard and curl up with his wife on the sofa and do the dishes after dinner. This was something he wanted, the affectionate curl of warmth in his chest when he realized just how damn much he loved Gwen, the stupid grins, the silly fights. He wanted it. He wanted it proper.

Even if you want to pretend the book ever went somewhere amazing, edgy and unconventional–some imaginary place that pushes you out of your comfort zone–it ends, essentially, on this note: the deeply, deeply conventional. Middle-class picket fences and a sofa.

It’s not that I don’t understand why people loved this novel: after the buttock-clenchingly awful section (though no doubt it is, to many, a moving and emotional exploration of grief, including the screams of “No!” and the craaaawwwwling-in-my-skin moments) it becomes a very easy book to read. The prose style is transparent, speeds along, and does not attempt to obstruct you with interesting language, unusual sentence construction, metaphors, or anything more demanding than references to Star Trek, BlackBerries and geek culture. It’s exactly the thing you would adore if you believe geeks are an oppressed minority, and so are furries/otherkin. Essentially, as a fanfic this would have passed scrutiny fine. But as a piece of fiction for which you must pay to read, it falls short due to its childish politics, its nonsensical conspiracy plot, and its inability to do much more than throw a man in furry blue suit at you and pass that off as “alien with alien thoughts and alien gender constructs.”