Reviewed by Ted Gioia
Some of Your Blood stands out in the oeuvre of Theodore Sturgeon as
a grand, unclassifiable novel. Readers who associate this author with
science fiction will be surprised to find none of the trademarks of that
genre here. The book is sometimes presented as a horror story or
fantasy, but no elements of the magical or supernatural figure in the
tale. “I thought I was buying a hardcore crime
novel,” writer Steve Rasnic Tem has noted,
recalling his first encounter with the book;
“but by the time I got home and into my
bedroom, I wasn't sure what I had.”
Sturgeon may have been ahead of his time,
for this odd book has all the trappings of a
post-modern mystery. The novel is
presented in the form of a lengthy text,
and its deconstruction—an unraveling of
the story that points out the ominous gaps
and ambiguous signifiers. At some points,
the “author” intrudes to provide meta-
fictional reflections on the narrative, and
at the conclusion even offers a range of
alternative resolutions to the story,
inviting the reader to choose a favorite
ending from among the available options.
All the usual plot elements are reversed here. The story starts with the
criminal already in custody. But it is not clear whether George Smith
has broken any law. He is being held in a military hospital for
observation, because a major was worried about his violent
tendencies. To all appearances, the charges are overblown, and the
supervising officer wants to release Smith, and hush up the whole
affair.
In other words, the mystery is over before it begins. There is no
crime, no criminal, no victim, no evidence, and not even an accuser—
the major who made the original complaint is killed in a C-119 crash a
short while later, so no one can even explain the original charges.
Apparently Smith, while stationed overseas, wrote a disturbing letter
that alarmed a military censor and set in motion the whole matter—but
no copy of the letter has been preserved. Smith, for his part, is the
least talkative individual in the US military, and has nothing to say
about his predicament.
In other words, the plot is dead on arrival, with apparently nowhere to
go from the starting block.
Yet a doctor who is charged with closing the case and releasing the
soldier is suspicious. He asks his taciturn patient to write an account
of the circumstances that led to his confinement, and is surprised when
Smith delivers a novella-sized manuscript a few days later. Smith has
written the story of his life. This document, which is both
scrupulously true yet deeply false, will serve as the departure point for
a thought-provoking hermeneutical exercise. Some of Your Blood
amplifies on the details related in Smith’s memoir with letters,
transcripts, case studies, and other supplementary materials. Yet the
more we learn, the less satisfied we become with the answers at hand.
Long before Barthes' SZ and Lacan's Écrits, Sturgeon is showing that
the real story often starts with the silences in the text.
Some of Your Blood gradually evolves into a dark, twisted
psychological study. Novels of this period often reveal a fixation with
headshrinkers and psychoanalytic concepts—almost to the same
degree as stories by twenty-something writers these days are dressed
up with elements of Internet, email and text messaging culture. Yet
Sturgeon digs deeper than the pop psychology trappings of his peers,
and recreates with vivid verisimilitude the real clinical atmosphere of
era. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sándor Ferenczi and other early
theorists of the unconscious even show up in supporting roles.
Sturgeon has done substantial research into the literature of aberrant
behavior, and this allows him to impart an aura of plausibility to his
tale, a sense of realism that remains even after the plot begins to veer
off into the bizarre and unseemly.
Like your standard mystery, this one ends up with a solved crime, an
apprehended criminal, and justice upheld. Or does it? Our estimable
genre writer shows that he can dish out experimental techniques with
the best of them, and Sturgeon caps off his strange book with an even
stranger ending . Often when a novelist opts for an ambiguous
conclusion to a complex plot, I am left unsatisfied. But in this case, the
multiplicity of possible outcomes offers the perfect closure to a book
that started breaking the rules from the outset. The result is a gripping
novel that relies on pulp fiction conventions without ever falling into
the conventional.
This article originally appeared on Blogcritics.
Some of Your Blood
by Theodore Sturgeon
Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/tedgioia
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