I love novels about cities that manage to compellingly capture both the social mileau and the individual people who comprise it.
There are unfortunately too few of these. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, one of my favorite books, is the best example of this narrow genre. The Unconsoled is usually noted for its experimental style, a blend of magical realism in the image of Salman Rushdie’s with Ishiguro’s own elegant prose. Maybe it is no coincidence that John Brunner’s The Squares of the City, a not unlaudable “city novel”, is also an experiment, which succeeds more than it fails.
Brunner’s gimmick is that the novel is a fictionalization of a real-life chess game, with the pieces represented by characters, and all the moves corresponding to a progression in the plot. It is too easy to see how this would hamstring an author, and indeed Squares fails in exactly the ways you would expect. The plot, which for the first two thirds of the book manages to work these moves into a compelling political intrigue, falls apart completely in the final act when the author is forced to play out the endgame: characters threaten each other, maneuver and die in a sudden and impossible to follow storm of activity which is weakly tied into the overall arc. The denouement is both surreal and unsatisfying.
Despite this, Squares is a good read. Although the stage suffers from a crowd of minor players, the central characters are charming and surprisingly real. Brunner coyly eschews cliche: the protagonist is an introspective and intellectual traffic engineer, hardly a heroic archetype; his main foil, a stunning Latina widow, never quite becomes a love interest. Although the author explicitly groups the characters into “black” and “white” teams, the political struggle which forms the novel’s centerpiece is textured and morally ambiguous. Wisely, Brunner never tells us how it is resolved. Stylistically, Squares is also a success. The use of chess as both a central metaphor and recurring motif is deftly handled, and the apparently pragmatic prose frequently conceals sophisticated description and observation. Brunner’s occasional detours into the hard details of traffic engineering or government propagandizing are charming rather than jarring.
Above all, Squares succeeds as a city novel. Like the unnamed Central European city in The Unconsoled, Brunner’s Ciudad de Vardos, a recently constructed ‘ideal’ city in a fictional South American nation, is a major character and palpable presence in the book. Vardos’s squares, streets, offices, villas, plazas and slums are vividly imagined and are as one in the reader’s mind with its citizens, bureaucrats, artists, villains and heros. This is not least because, by a clever plot device, many of the residents had a direct hand in the city’s design and construction. The slow but inevitable embroilment of the protagonist, an outsider, into Vardos politics and society is matched by the reader’s. Unfortunately, the collapse of the plot in the final act disrupts this deep and satisfying involvement.
Read Squares if, like me, you love a good city novel and want something thoughtful and vivid. Don’t read it if you are deterred by overt experimentation, or think you are picking up a political thriller.
Image: “chess in the park“, by Duchamp. Shared under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
