Fiction Reviews
The Night Alphabet
(2024) Joelle Taylor, Riverrun, £14.99, trdpbk, 417pp, ISBN 978-1-529-43094-3
A very poetically charged story set in Hackney, London, in 2233, in which a heavily tattooed woman, called Jones, enters a tattoo parlour to get the two tattooists, Cass and Small, to provide connecting lines linking the various seemingly separate designs together. As they work, the tattooists realise they are themselves in some way connected to the narrative and the often very different tales begin to link up in a way that is genuinely astonishing.
Jones is able to body hop, entering into the minds of other people to experience their lives, and often their deaths, before returning to her own body. Each Tattoo seems to commemorate a different mind-jaunt. There are elements of Ray Bradbury’s 1951 The Illustrated Man portmanteau novel, and the 1989-93 TV series Quantum Leap, but Joelle Taylor has a controlled, beautiful command of language that is very much her own. Many lines are charged with lyrical, near mystical beauty.
Jones goes into many heads, becoming a miner trapped in a pit collapse and the desperate people in the rescue team. She becomes a refugee in a boat where the boat owner plans to throw the desperate passengers into the sea to avoid capture. She briefly becomes a mosquito flitting between various other characters drawing a little blood from each.
As the mysterious narration goes on, two things become apparent. Jones cannot change the experiences she witnesses, as she is drawn along in a mind for the ride, often to tragedy. Also, Jones is not the only character with her skills, as she inherits the ability from her Mother and Grandmother, with whom she learns her craft and also shares some of her experiences.
If there is a flaw in the presentation it is that we have only one point of view throughout the work, that of Jones. Every incident, experience and emotion is her reaction to the events her targeted bodies experience, never their own, so while she can’t change their fates she never truly gets to see or feel anything as they might react to it themselves. Most, though not all the bodies she hitches a ride in are those of other women, and transcend time, as some experiences are from the 19th century, as with the mining disaster, while others are from our own time period, with yet more set in the future, as with the tale set in a lesbian bar community at a time when homophobia towards lesbianism has become extremely Orwellian and deadly. (The bar apparently also features in Taylor’s C+nto And Other Poems, a collection she wrote in 2021). The various futures don’t connect, or meet in any linear way giving a sense of Jones moving through parallel dimensions.
The mind-riders call their transportation experiences ‘rememberings’. The stories have a shared theme, the courage of women in a world dominated by cruel men. Sexual abuse, women forced into the sex trade, and having babies genetically modified in eugenic purification experiments.
The mystery is just how the two somewhat under-written tattooists link directly to the unfolding story, an enigma that is only finally explained as the final story is told, and it is truly gasp inducing.
Though most of the stories are bleak, the women, and especially Jones, have a bravery and resilience and hopes that never break and the poetry of the narration crackles like static, as binding as the threads the tattooists draw on Jones’s body. An incredible read that is full of surprises and subtleties, with a command of language few poets can carry into their prose as effectively as Joelle Taylor does.
Arthur Chappell
See also Peter's take on The Night Alphabet.
[Up: Fiction Reviews Index | SF Author: Website Links | Home Page: Concatenation]
[One Page Futures Short Stories | Recent Site Additions | Most Recent Seasonal Science Fiction News]