by Mx. Kris Vyas-Myall
The Pushback
We have been living in a more permissive society over the last few years, with less censorship and more flexible norms, particularly as displayed in our media. However, this kind of change is always going to bring a reaction. And this has come in the form the National Viewers and Listeners Associations (NVLA) led by campaigner Mary Whitehouse.
A former art teacher, she has declared the director general of the BBC to be “the devil incarnate” and that they are putting out “the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt… promiscuity, infidelity and drinking” when they should be trying to “encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the heart of our family and national life.”
Since being founded last year, the NVLA has been growing, with over 100,000 member and around 600 churches being associated. As they hold their annual conference at the start of next month, it might be worth looking at what they are objecting to.
Speaking at the conference, Rev. E. L. Taylor took aim at popular rock musicians, declaring that Christian songwriters were needed to “out-compose Tin Pan Alley” and Christian singers should appear on television to out-sing The Animals and The Kinks, comparing the latter to “savages” from Africa.
Factual programming has also come under fire. Whitehouse herself has objected to a documentary episode on the concentration camps in Belsen as “filth”, the production of The War Game for it prejudicing “the effectiveness of our Civil Defence Services, or the ability of the British people to re-act with courage, initiative and control in a crisis”, and to the coverage of warfare in the world as too pacifistic.
However, BBC Drama seems to draw the most ire from the group. In her speech to the conference, she declared that in the name of the word “reality” viewers were asked to accept a tiny part of human experience as the reality of the world we live in. For example, objecting to Neil Dunn’s play Up The Junction for not demonstrating that all abortion is wrong and that it could be prevented through “clean living”.
Whether the more liberating or conservative forces will win out over British media remains to be seen, but where could this kind of reactionary and totemic obsession with morality lead? That is one element that is discussed in the latest book from Compact, The Symmetrians.
The Symmetrians by Kenneth Harker
Starting with the situation, the book is set after a great disaster (strongly hinted at being a nuclear war from the start), people in Britain now living in a feudal society where symmetry is worshiped as a religion and any deviation from this is punished. Those with non-symmetrical faces are sent to work camps. We follow the young DavaD RaiMMiaR as he begins to question the society he lives in.
For British readers, they will probably find John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (apparently published as Re-Birth in the US) brought to mind. In Wyndham’s text, a fundamentalist society in a post-nuclear Canada obsesses about normality and considers that any deviation from the norm should be killed; but David and some other telepathic children begin to dream of a society outside.
Whilst I don’t agree with the curmudgeons of SF that think every book needs to have a new idea central to it (even though they seem to be happy using the same situations over and over again), it would be easy to see Compact trying to cash in on Wyndham’s current success with a pale imitation. After all, they did it with Bradbury\Moorcock’s turgid Kane of Mars novels. However, though there are a number of obvious similarities, I think Harker manages to make it his own skillful piece of fiction.
First of all is the extent of world he has built. The Symmetrian religion has grown to a point that it encompasses so many facets of life. Mirrored surfaces are banned, fields have to be ploughed symmetrically with the emblem of symmetry in them, and all names have to be symmetrical. By which we don’t just mean palindromes, but they have to be symmetrical in three dimensions. There is an in-depth explanation on this in the book which I don’t want to repeat in this section, but it makes sense and really shows the effort gone into this.
Secondly is the real-world critique of religious reactionism and eugenics. As I cited above, the conservative religious pushback is emerging to the current liberalism of British culture. Seen as people sticking to rigid codes of what is pure and good and enforcing this belief on the rest of the population, there is a large degree of overlap between the Symmetrian authorities and the aims of the NVLA. At the same time the field of eugenics was a big part of the cultural discourse until the last war. Even today we see still see an idolization of the symmetrical face as a symbol of beauty and physical health. And there are still far too many people who still believe in pseudo-scientific justifications of racism (just read one of the many editorials John W. Campbell has written on the subject). The horrible truth is that these beliefs will probably not die off in our lifetime and it is all too reasonable to see a catastrophe resulting in this kind of prejudice returning to the mainstream.
Beyond these points, The Symmetrians is a really great adventure and coming of age story. The journey DavaD goes through is relatable in the tragedies he goes through and the realization that he does not have to blindly accept the teaching of his elders, reflecting the real-life experiences of so many of us. Whilst there is much that will still appeal to the adults, it is an excellent story to give to a teenager who reads Catcher in the Rye or A Clockwork Orange.
Kenneth Harker has stated this book was just created to entertain rather than convey a message. On the strength of this and his great recent short story in New Worlds The Cog, I cannot wait to see what happens when he tries to produce something even more spectacular.
A very high four stars; eagerly expecting a fifth in his next novel.
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