Fiction Reviews
In the Lives of Puppets
(2023) T. J. Klune, Tor, £9.99, pbk, 458pp, ISBN 978-1-529-08804-5
In the original story of Pinocchio the puppet’s bad behaviour and tragic end was intended to serve as a warning to children everywhere. This queer ‘retelling’ offers a multi-layered heart-warming inversion about the love to be had within a found-family. It opens with a young man, Victor (with its echoes of Frankenstein the name, like so many in the book, is significant), scrounging around an enormous scrap yard with his two robot companions: Rambo, basically a sentient Roomba whose excessive exuberance is nicely balanced out by the acerbic commentary of Nurse Registered Automaton to Care, Heal, Educate and Drill, or, for short, Nurse Ratched (I did say the names were significant!). These two side-kicks provide a hefty dose of humour that hauls the narrative back from sliding into mawkishness. Heading up their little family is Giovanni, also a robot, who ‘made’ the human child (that’s one layer of the inversion)) and built the elaborate tree-house in which they all live, back in the forest.
Unfortunately, their idyllic life is disrupted when Victor, Rambo and Nurse Ratched return to the scrap-yard and discover a broken android with what they surmise is the designation ‘HAP’ and which Rambo decides must stand for ‘Hysterically Angry Puppet’, given how he initially reacts towards them. Victor, however, decides to rebuild the android and their developing relationship forms the love story that lies at the heart of the book. But with love comes loss and in this case it is Victor’s blood, spotting the scrap yard dust after he cut his hand, that brings disaster to their door. While the four of them shelter in the lead-lined basement, the blank-faced agents of The Authority burn down their house and take Giovanni away to the City of Electric Dreams in their massive flying machine, The Terrible Dogfish (one of many resonances with Pinocchio).
Victor and co. are determined to rescue Giovanni and so we have a quest, one in which Victor must dress and act as a robot to avoid detection. Along the way they encounter the Coachman and his House of Human Curios and Curiosities, as well as the radical and powerful Blue Fairy (another resonance) who gives them the means to achieve their goal, albeit not quite in the way they had anticipated. The ending, then, is bitter-sweet with one heart, at least, literally broken but the overall message, of course, is that life and love, as ephemeral as they can be, are worth the pain and suffering.
And that message is driven home by the accompanying short story ‘Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!’ featuring Douglas, a factory android. Who, after working for nine years and fifty-one weeks, is given a final week of freedom to act like a ‘real boy’. So, he spends time in a flat, reads books (643 in 47 minutes!) and watches television (preferring the ads to the programmes). And it’s that last activity that prompts Douglas to seek a ‘connection’, which he finds not in the park, or a coffee shop but with the local LGBTQ+ community. Nevertheless, at the end of that week he has to return to the factory to embody the company slogan in the title. As a result, if the novel is heart-warming, this story is heart-clenchingly poignant, albeit not entirely without hope. That, perhaps, is the over-riding message of both: that even amidst the dystopian grimness, there is joy to be had and such moments can subtly disrupt the algorithms, opening up the possibility of alternative outcomes.
Steven French
See also Jonathan's take on In The Lives of Puppets.
See also Peter's take on In The Lives of Puppets.
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