James Marsland
Any work of dark prophecy reminds you of the inescapable shadow cast by George Orwell and 1984. That the TV phenomenon of last year should have been called Big Brother reminds you how much its ideas have entered the cultural lexicon. Others like "Room 101" and "doublespeak" have also lingered on long since Orwell gave his last tubercular cough. Many other writers since have attempted to stare down the unremittingly bleak gaze of Orwell. Tania Glyde, like all the others, blinks.
Although 1984 predicted the future, the world it described was recognisably similar to the pinched and grey world of postwar England. Anybody alive in the nineteen forties might well have believed that popular novels and songs were being mass-produced by government departments, and the monolithic propaganda ministry sounds peculiarly similar to the BBC. It gave a dystopian prophecy a double life as a vehicle for satirising the present. Glyde endows Junk DNA with the same quality, and it is as a satire that the book works best.
Junk DNA begins as the Human Genome Project is drawing to a close. The project, begun in 1990, seeks to map out the location of every gene on every human chromosome, unlocking information on the genetic basis of disease. It turns out that the content of the genome is the least of humanity’s worries. The Britain in the future is menaced by marauding gangs of armed children, and the Parental Support Agency which forces children to care for their ageing parents. Most people are employed by the heritage industries in unremitting re-enactments of historical events, and are turning to an eclectic range of natural remedies. It says much for the dysfunction of this world that Glyde’s heroines are Regina, a hands-on sex therapist, and Lucy, a dyslexic ten year old who paints pictures with blood and faeces.
Glyde provides an accurate commentary on the consequences of early twenty-first century excesses. Parents now communicate with their children over the in-house Mininet and the children wear clothes that are purposefully obscure, available only from a warehouse in the East End. There are some similarly dark observations on overworked teachers, but the most astute is the revelation that all PCs are spiked with addictive substances that make you want to buy a new one every six months.
The problem with Junk DNA is its lack of restraint. The spartan prose of Orwell was a masterpiece of control. Orwell edited, edited, and edited again until every surplus word had been removed. Aldous Huxley, Orwell’s contemporary and fellow prophet made the horrors of Brave New World seem worse by describing them with utter urbanity. Glyde never uses a rapier when she can cram the blunderbuss with adjectives and let fly at random. Sentences like "Past is rammed into future like a wet fist in a bulb-less socket" are the rule, not the exception.
So despite its good ideas and its interesting premise, Junk DNA reads like an interesting linguistic variation on the ten monkeys and ten typewriters theory. Glyde keeps churning out the epigrams and extended metaphors in the hope that she’ll sound like Oscar Wilde. She occasionally hits the mark, but no more often than you would after five minutes alone with the Magnetic Poetry Kit and the fridge door.
The problem gets worse as Junk DNA reaches a climax, and its world becomes more dysfunctional. Women wholly bereft of maternal instincts take for the hills, Regina decides to become a genetic poet by experimenting on animals and people, and Lucy becomes a homicidal megalomaniac. Satire, meanwhile, retreats before excess, and the reader begins to wonder whether this book might not make a nice present for a teenage cousin the one who hates his parents but asks them to pick him up from Slipknot concerts.
Both the heroines are desperately irritating. Regina is supposed to be abandoned and inspiring, Lucy should have the allure of the wholly amoral. You care what happens to Winston Smith, you care what happens to Huxley’s savage. They manage to be eponymous everymen, desperately compromised but wholly decent, and never bland. By the end of Junk DNA, when you’ve been epigrammed half to death and metaphored into the ground, you actually hope that Regina and Lucy end up dangling from a noose like the savage, or like Winston Smith, wearing a metal hat full of rats. Or perhaps a recherche combination of the two.
The ending has none of the understated power or desperation of either 1984 or Brave New World. Rather, it gibbers on into a brainlessly extravagant finale which says everything several times and means nothing. You’re glad it’s all over, but never entirely sure what it meant. Junk DNA neatly connects with the sense of post millennial angst, and makes some darkly satiric points about the present, but it lacks the control that might have made it more readable. Its says much for Orwell and Huxley that fifty years on, they are more relevant than a book written last year.
