Michel Nieva and his novel, Dengue Boy
We have read all sorts in the New Scientist Book Club, from Octavia E. Butler’s classic slice of dystopian fiction, Parable of the Sower, to space exploration in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay. Michel Nieva’s Dengue Boy (and this isn’t the article for you if you are yet to read it: spoilers ahead!) was something else entirely: a weird and technicolour vision of a dire future in a flooded world, where our perspective is that of a humanoid and homicidal mosquito.
There were parts of this novel that I loved, in particular Nieva’s wild inventiveness in dreaming up his future world. This is a place where the Antarctic ice thawed in 2197, and where rising sea levels mean that “Patagonia – a region once famous for its forests, lakes, and glaciers – was transformed into a disjointed trail of small, scorching-hot islands”.
It is a place where, thanks to “the total deforestation of the Amazon and all the forests in China and Africa, hundreds of thousands of previously unrecorded viruses now appeared every year”. And where the endless and awful ingenuity of humanity mean people are now trading on the Financial Virus Index. Powered by quantum computers, this is “capable not only of determining with 99.99% efficacy which of these new viruses would unleash a new pandemic, but also of gathering shares in the companies likely to benefit from their effects and offering them up to the market in packages which sold like hotcakes”. Brilliant idea!
I also think Nieva’s writing (ably translated by Rahul Bery) occasionally leaps to elevated levels. At one point, our protagonist is early to school (because she can fly there, unlike her classmates snarled in traffic). She has to “wait there, completely still, for several minutes, hours even, not knowing what to do with her excessive corporality”. Excessive corporality! What a gloriously apt description for this miserable mosquito.
There is an unbearable poignance, which has stayed with me since finishing, in Nieva’s vision of a Great Iceberg Gallery, where the super-rich can go to see bits of ancient ice floes. “One could not walk through the Great Iceberg Gallery and not feel the sudden weight of the world in its infancy. A reliquary of true planetary jewels, its combined age was greater than that of all humanity.”
And I can only admire Nieva’s virtuosity in thinking himself into the mind of a murderous mosquito. I think he largely pulls this off, and I enjoyed how my sympathies half wanted to be with our “stubbornly homicidal” protagonist, and half were violently put off by her actions.
Some of you also saw a lot of positives in the novel. “Once I worked out this is South American magical realism rather than science fiction, I’m enjoying it (big fan of Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco). It’s a completely different genre,” wrote Emma Weisblatt on our Book Club Facebook group, where all these comments are from. “It’s weird, surreal and allegorical and I think on those terms it works quite well.”
For Terry James, the start of the book was difficult, as it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief to accept Nieva’s mosquito protagonist (and its implausible size) – and then you have to deal with the “rough language”. But Terry was glad he kept going. “The more I read, the more I enjoyed it. I found the literary technique of revealing the inner struggle of the poor alongside the absurd wealth, privilege, and opulent extravagance of the rich as extremely effective,” he wrote. “This book is creative.”
I think David Jones nailed it when he said it “wasn’t comfortable reading”, but he “actually quite enjoyed it”. “It’s a very dystopian satirical and quite gory view of the future. A day to read and a day to digest how I felt about it,” he wrote.
But – and perhaps this is because I’m not a connoisseur of steampunk, as the novel is described on its cover – I found much to dislike too. That “excessive corporality” I so enjoyed in the mosquito comes out in various scenes of violence and sexual depravity that I found difficult to read. I’m a Stephen King fan – I don’t mind a bit of horror and gore. But I didn’t really understand what the abundance of vulgarity brought to the story here, other than totally grossing me out. I hated the sheepies! Really hated them! (Some might say: that was the point, but for me it was a point I wasn’t keen to see made.)
And I found the parts of the novel when our mosquito was out on its bloody adventures far more compelling than the Borges-esque “computer game within a computer game” section that we got to later on. That was on the wrong side of surreal for me, or I just wasn’t getting it. Terry James also took issue with the “Mighty Anarch” component of the story and failed to grasp any meaning in it. “I call this kind of ideology pseudo-intellectual because it sounds very smart but is not meaningful in a holistic, integrated system,” he wrote.
Overall, for me, this wasn’t a book I’d return to, and I would say the majority of our members were also more negative than positive on this one. Judith Lazell found it “disappointing”. “Gratuitous sexual fantasy and undeveloped characters; violence explicit and revolting. Perhaps that was the point,” she wrote – although she did add that Nieva’s “description of the local environment [was] effective in evoking an awful place to live”.
For Eliza Rose and Andy Feest, it was their least favourite book club read so far. Like me, Eliza also wasn’t a fan of the body horror – but she liked the corrupt corporations part of the storyline. “I feel he did tell a story and I suppose ended it satisfactorily but I didn’t need all the gore,” she wrote.
Andy described the story as “plain weird”, and felt that while Nieva had come up with an interesting concept, he could have used a lot more backstory and detail. “The end was disappointing (not to say confusing too),” wrote Andy. “Overall, I was thankful that this was a shortish book as I am not sure I would have finished it if it were a larger novel (and I hate not finishing books I’ve started… and paid for).”
Perhaps Andy won’t have to pay for the next book we’ll be reading: Larry Niven’s Ringworld, an old classic that many of you may have on your shelves. Come and tell us what you think of it on our Facebook page for book club members, try out an extract here and get an insight into how Larry came up with the mechanics of his epic creation in this piece he’s written for us here.
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