Nicola Griffith’s Slow River is the first selection of the Feminist Science Fiction Book Club that I joined. It’s also the first electronic book I’ve purchased from the Barnes & Noble bookstore. I am not impressed with the formatting job that Random House did to convert the book to epub (or whatever base format the B&N store uses). The book tells four stories of Frances Lorien van de Oest: before, during, immediately after and long after she is kidnapped. There’s no visual cue when the text transitions from one to another. No horizontal rule, no graphic, nothing. Every transition not done at a chapter break confused me until I figured out I was in a different setting. This could have been done much better.

The story itself qualifies as mundane s.f. In the somewhat near future, we appear to have suffered a slow ecological disaster due to pollutants. The van de Oest family business repairs environmental disasters, up to huge sizes. They also control the patents for a number of methods of clean up and for the genes for a number of bacteria and plants that are used in their methods. Consequently, they are very very rich. While the details are not central to the story, Griffith geeks out including some elaborate information on the running of a water treatment plant. Much more interesting than some of the hard s.f. that’s out there.

Slow River starts with Frances Lorien Lore van de Oest’s escape from her kidnappers. Bloody and beaten, she’s left on the street and no one will help her. No one except Spanner, who uses no other name in the book, who just happens to work outside the system in a number of scams. That suits Lore just fine; she does not want to resume her life as a member of one of the richest families in the world. She’s come to believe her father molested her siblings and wouldn’t pay the ransom to free Lore because she might reveal his perfidy.

So begins a life of grifting for Lore. But at the beginning of the book she’s also left Spanner, one of the four periods of Lore’s life that gets its own narrative. While still disillusioned by the rich life, she’s come to think of her life with Spanner as degrading. Assuming the identity of a recently deceased person, she takes a job as a grunt in a water treatment plant she’s qualified to manage and struggles to establish herself honestly based on her abilities. It’s not so easy though.

I didn’t care much for Lore in the first half of the book, but I did come to like her later on. Too much rich kid. Despite being a capable manager of large projects for the family business, she reverts to being a child after the kidnapping. I suspect I’m just a little too callous for wanting her to hold it together better. I also didn’t like that, at the water treatment plant, she couldn’t sit on her knowledge in order to maintain her fiction as a grunt. It was just too tempting for her to point out things that revealed she knew way more than a basic grunt would. I didn’t like these qualities. I kept on thinking If you want to live your life a certain way, you have to commit to it. Over the course of the book I gradually warmed to caring about what happened to Lore.

Still, my favorite character of the book was Cherry Magyar, Lore’s immediate supervisor at the water treatment plant. She’s got her position without adequate training and doesn’t have the power to do much about it, but was smart enough to know it. Magyar also had the self-assurance to listen to people who knew more even if they had a lower station. She treated her employees as genuine people on whose success hers depended. I checked Ms. Griffith’s web site, but I can’t tell if Magyar has featured in any other stories.

Pretty damn good book.

From here on out, I’m gonna write up some thoughts in preparation for the book club. These will contain spoilers, so look away if you care.

Everyone has a set of privileges that arise as a result of their race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, class, etc. For instance, I have the privilege of not working due to family inheritance and lucky timing in a former job. Some of my hard work went into getting me this position, but quite a bit more is the result of outside factors. More subtle is that I have different fears when travelling after dark than a woman generally would. I don’t have to worry about getting raped, for instance. I can also be driven and ambitious at work and be admired for it, while a woman runs a far greater risk of that attitude being viewed negatively. See how Hillary Clinton was treated in the media for a prime example of that.

In Slow River, Lore tries to renounce her privileges that stem from membership in the van de Oest family. She’s unsuccessful in a lot of ways. For one, she can’t unremember her education. She can’t unremember the confidence the family bred in her. Is it laudable to even try? Should someone give up their privilege just because someone else doesn’t have it? Most of Lore’s privileges are good. If she doesn’t use them as a sword, she could in good conscious keep them. Claire Light has a really good piece on privilege titled White Privilege in which she knocks out her thoughts on privilege that can and should be given up, and ones that can’t or are destructive to take away. I haven’t found anything to quibble with in her article, and I re-read it every few months since I came on it about a year ago.

Giving up privilege comes to a head in Slow River. Lore’s workplace is subject to sabotage, and people would die if Lore did not use her superior knowledge of water treatment to avert disaster. Her and Magyar’s budding attraction faces a test. Not only has Lore really lied, but their stations can no longer be viewed as equal.

While Lore can give up being van de Oest, she cannot give up the option of being van de Oest. Just having the option makes her different. When Lore reveals who she is to Cherry Magyar, Magyar’s reaction is angry:

I don’t understand. Why are you angry?

Because I feel like a fool Her nostrils were white. She was breathing hard. In, out. In. Out. Abruptly, she jerked her arm around, looked at her watch. We’ve already lost shift time. Time is money. Unless you’ve decided you’ve had enough of playing at poor little miss worker bee, I want you on-station in three minutes. And I’ll expect you to make up the time you’ve lost.

Just like that. Dismissed. But…

But what? Hand on hip.

But I’m Frances Lorien van de Oest! Didn’t she know what that meant? She could just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else … But she had. Which is what I wanted, wasn’t it — to be treated as a real person?

That she always had the option to return to the rich life meant she always had an out. It might be distasteful. It might have problems. But it’s something she can do that Magyar can’t. And for Magyar, the revelation of Lorien’s identity brings further complications. She’s now with someone who can walk away from her at any time. If she stays, it’s a testament to the relationship. Most of us, however, are with partners who can’t walk away from us free and clear. We shouldn’t want them with us merely because they have these ties, but they are something we assume and both get to live with and have to live with. Magyar runs a greater risk of her love walking away than most do, simply because she can without consequence.

A few years ago, I walked away from a high paying software development job. I took a job at Barnes & Noble shelving books. That I could walk away from that job at any time, that I didn’t depend on it in any way, made my experience there very different than most of the employees. If a customer got irate with me, I didn’t fear managerial backlash. Twice, managers publicly and overbearingly berated me. I shrugged it off. In fact, I told fellow employees to blame me if a problem came up, and I meant it. The job was a fun pastime for me.

A lot of the moral issues in Slow River deal with class issues. However, gender issues play a part too. Less as an item that is food for thought, I liked very much that the female characters got the majority of the ink. The Bechdel rule is so far in the rear view mirror that it puts the rest of the field to shame. Lesbian relationships merit no particular mention, they are presented as perfectly normal, and that’s exactly how it should be.

But Griffith does reverse some gender stereotypes though. Child sexual abuse features prominently, but the perpetrator is a woman. Not female sexual abuser as a sidekick to a male abuser, or even a teacher/counselor/person in power who exploits her position for favors from a vulnerable nubile young man. That’s something that rarely gets our approbation to the same extent that men using teen girls does. The van de Oest matriarch, the one who runs the business, molests her own children. I haven’t unwound my feelings toward this phenomena in general, and I haven’t the head space at the moment to do so even with the book as a spur. I think the role reversal is important to unpack though.

The last (at this time) moral issue brought to my mind by the novel is one of consent. For a chunk of the book describing Lore’s life with Spanner, Spanner’s normal scams are insufficient to live by, and Spanner turns to prostitution. Not only that, but Lore participates. Spanner drugs her. Griffith makes it somewhat less of a moral quandary later on by revealing that Lore got dosed only after the sex started. Things aren’t completely clear cut to me.

I don’t really call myself a feminist except in the broad sense of the word: I believe in equal political, social, and economics rights and opportunities for women. There’s a lot of different feminist theories, and I only know the beginning pieces of a few of them. I say this because I’m not sure where my next opinion falls in the grand scheme of feminism, if at all.

When negotiating consent, I don’t believe there’s a bright line that divides the acceptable from the unacceptable. There’s a lot of shades of gray. Things that fall to one end of the spectrum or another are clear. Situations in the middle are murky. One one hand, Lore has a (self-induced) power imbalance with Spanner, she can’t just walk away. She is also placed under the influence of drugs which make the experience pleasurable. Although after Lore’s initial decision has been made, she can’t change her mind when drugged like that, and she didn’t choose to take the drugs. On the other side of the ledger sit the fact that Lore participates for a year (if I remember correctly). She has ample opportunity to walk away, and eventually does. The length of time isn’t clearly on one side though. That inures a person. What’s one more time, since I’ve been doing it so long? Things can become acceptable in a person’s mind if they’ve been repeated long enough. In spite of Lore’s perception that Spanner holds power over her, she still holds her option of being Frances Lorien van de Oest, which tilts things strongly in her favor.

One reason why I don’t fall into the camp that consent is only legitimate if there is no power imbalance whatsoever is that power is never perfectly equal. It can be roughly equal. But at best, in my opinion, relative power between two people will shift from one person to another.

So I’m not sure where exactly I stand with regard to Lore’s consent to be pimped by Spanner. She doesn’t seem too worked up over that Spanner perpetrated a wrong against her, though she does question her own consent somewhat after she’s withdrawn it. Her attitude seems to be one of pragmatism, of moving on and not dwelling too much on it. That tends to be my own reaction to things, but I’ve also never felt as if I was pressured to do something sexually that I didn’t want to do. And I’m not likely ever to either.