A glowing review from the Wall Street Journal for Monica Byrnes new novel, The Girl in the Road. Hear Monica read and discuss her book this Wednesday in our store! regulatorbookshop/event/monica-byrne May 23, 2014 5:22 p.m. ET A classic sci-fi genre is the novel centered on the GBA, or Great Big Artifact. Think of Arthur Clarkes Rendezvous With Rama (1973) or Gregory Benford and Larry Nivens Bowl of Heaven (2012). In Monica Byrnes The Girl in the Road (Crown, 323 pages, $26), the GBA is the Trans-Arabian Linear Generator, or the Trail. Its a kind of 2,000-mile floating bridge across the Arabian Sea from Mumbai to Djibouti that generates power from solar rays and the motion of the waves. Though its forbidden, people naturally try to walk the Trail, Ms. Byrnes heroine, Meena, among them. Her survival kit is another engineering marvel: bottle-size desalinators for water, sunbits for power, a pozit for navigation and a submersible pod for shelter that filters oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, all described with verve and conviction. Meenas green world is not far off but already seems very different from ours. The baton of dominion has been passed from America to India, so the world language is Hindi-English, or Hinglish. Soon the baton will pass to Africa: Ouagadougou and Djibouti will be the new great cities of culture. What will tip the scales? Climate change. The Trail can ride out any tsunami, even one of unimaginable proportions. But can New York and Mumbai? Ms. Byrne earns top marks, then, for technological and future vision, but she also weaves in two human stories. Theres Meena, walking the Trail west from Mumbai to Djibouti. And theres Mariama, a little girl riding a truck east to Djibouti from somewhere on the other side of Africa. We never learn where that was, for Mariama has no pozit; indeed, she owns nothing at all. Both are heading for the same place, both are on the run. Until late on its satisfyingly hard to guess how their stories connect. For a long time, sci-fi has been bragging that it is the truly multicultural literature of the future—while remaining U.S.-dominated and cybertech-oriented. Ms. Byrne has imagined a different mind-set, rooted in Hindu myth, ancient ritual and non-Anglo language and cuisine, with a technology beyond the virtual. She still holds, however, to the sci-fi faith, that all cultures are determined by their technology and that even the most ancient will have to adapt to tech-change, as her brave, inquiring, non-aggressive heroines do. The Girl in the Road is a new sensation, a real achievement. Now lets get that survival kit on sale.
Posted on: Sat, 24 May 2014 15:11:27 +0000
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