The Sea and Summer (1987)

My reactions to this novel in 1989 with spoilers. (My older self would now probably say Turner got the cataclysmic warming wrong and the massive unemployment due to automation right.)

Every once in awhile comes a book in which structure, style, literary technique, character, and concept come together as a brilliant whole. Turner has written a novel designed to provoke thought about the disasters of the future we may be creating today through complacency. Turner, in his postscript., specifically states this is not a disaster novel or a cautionary tale. I respect that since some feautures of his future seem improbable -- specifically massive unemployment due to automation though Turner does make the valid observation that international economic competition spurs automation and that Third World markets will develop and vanish as markets for foreign dumping of goods. Still, most of the book exhibits a sophisticated examination of economics and politics.

Turner postulates a political system of patronage and corruption between official and unofficial governments much like the Imperial Roman system. It seem entirely credible as does Turner's explanation of how history and circumstances trap people into currents of selfishness and complacency.

The book's greatest strength, though, is its humanity. Turner gives us an immense cast of very real characters from all stratas. Some seem corrupt, evil, debased, but all are emmenitly real, understandable, sympathetic. Ivan "Billy" Kovacs is the central character and crowning achievement of the novel. He is the man who will do anything that is necessary to survive and protect his own. He feels pain at his brutality, loves Allison Conway as a symbol of a life he aspires to but can never have, a man wasted in his environment, a murderer, torturer, thief of sentimentality and pragmatism. His hopes and attitudes are central to the book.

Turner constantly pounds his central theme of complacency's danger and cowardice. The structure of the plot is also very interesting. Turner does a neat job of setting up a society where -- like Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! -- the status quo is horrifyingly maintained and here by both strata of society for logical and emotional needs. Turner does a neat job of also showing the fear and cowardice which motivate the Sweet and the disguised envy and contempt of the Swill, the classes of this world. Turner takes the Cain and Abel plot of two feuding brothers going in opposite directions, fuses it with a family style saga (though for only two generations) and uses it, with the multiple viewpoints, to make a thematic point. We start out with Francis narrating his own story and simultaneously we see the Swill as brutish, violent, stupid. When the viewpoint shifts, we see Francis Conway depicted by other characters as consistently selfish and a brat. At the same time, the Swill become less evil, more human. We see their artists, values, necessities of evil and the corruption of the Sweet. As our feelings of the good and bad of individual characters change so do our feelings about the Swill and the Sweet. We never truly see each as exclusively good or evil merely pragmatic and selfish and interconnected. If there is any hero, it is the pragmatic, enduring Swill. However, as Allison Conway observes, it is not heroic to simply accept the necessary.

The theme of the book is the evil that ordinary folk can do and why and how they are changed. Turner gives us types: policeman, victim, traitor, scheming politician: and makes them human and quite real. The frame of the coming Ice Age and the moral that evil and good are intermingled in all was good. The torture scene with soldier Sykes participating in his brutalization was disturbing and courageous. The book's only weakness (only when compared with the rest of the book) was the subplot of the plague. It would have been ok to have a story of normal events (love, death, growth) in an extraordinarily grim world without the element of intrigue. Yet it enabled Turner to depict the whole state and introduce, all too briefly, the icy character of Arthur Derrick and explore, in passing, international relations via covert war in this world. It also allowed the bringing together of the Conways, the development of an effort to save culture for the Dark Age coming, and an explanation of the emotions at work in this world. On a rational, general leve,l a sterilizing plague is a good idea, but each family wants children, each country wants their population. The final chapter depicts a heroic effort at thought for the future made possible by the intrigues of the plague, and the subplot also explains the evolution of world society from a Greenhouse one to a post-Ice Age one. ( )

This novel is set right in the middle of a section of future history most near-future SF novels prefer to bypass. The book opens with the premise that "the Collapse" or "the Catastrophe" or "the Troubles" occurred about fifty years ago, and then set their action in the new world struggling to rise from the ruins. George Turner doesn't take this easy way out. His story is set in Melbourne, between ADs 2044 and 2061. And the Greenhouse Effect is in effect with a vengeance.

In Turner's future Melbourne, society is divided into the Sweet, the 10% of the population who still have work and a comfortable lifestyle, and the Swill, the 80-something percent who live on meagre state assistance. The Swill are crammed into the Enclaves, huge, overcrowded towerblocks which are being flooded from beneath as the sea rises. Giant children of the tower-blocks which already blight inner-city Melbourne, the Enclaves are a vertical Bangladesh.

The other few percent of the population live in the Fringe; they're people who've fallen out of the Sweet and are scrabbling to stay out of the Swill. The Sea And Summer revolves around two brothers demoted to the Fringe when their father is made redundant; their mother; and the Enclave "tower boss" who becomes her lover. The interactions of these characters, who have access to both the upper and lower depths of society, allows George Turner to paint a picture of a decaying society, in which Sweet and Swill are locked in mutual loathing and denial by a government unable to conceive of any other system.

It is, as blurb-writers say, "a story as real as today's headlines" - the day after I completed the book, a headline in the Otago Daily Times newspaper warned of the creation of a permanent underclass in New Zealand. But George Turner has written as a call to action, not to despair; the point he repeatedly makes is that the misfortunes of his drowning towers are the direct consequences of inaction by previous generations - by you and I.

The book has its faults; there's a rather clumsy framing story, set much further in the future, and towards the end the book develops thriller elements which don't add much - but those things don't really matter. The Sea And Summer is important, topical, well-written, entertaining as well as disturbing. And it's about our near neighbours, if not ourselves. Take it with you to the beach this summer.

(Review originally written for Warp magazine, New Zealand) ( )

A really interesting look at our current society falling apart due to the weather, etc. For a pleasant change, not set in 'ho-hum, not New York again, who the hell cares about there for the nth time', but in Melbourne. The characters seem real.

After a woman loses her job, and her husband, she tries to get by. One honorable man tries to organise people to help each other out.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2006/12/sea-and-summer-george-turner.html ( )

A really interesting look at our current society falling apart due to the weather, etc. For a pleasant change, not set in 'ho-hum, not New York again, who the hell cares about there for the nth time', but in Melbourne. The characters seem real.

After a woman loses her job, and her husband, she tries to get by. One honorable man tries to organise people to help each other out.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2006/12/sea-and-summer-george-turner.html ( )

A really interesting look at our current society falling apart due to the weather, etc. For a pleasant change, not set in 'ho-hum, not New York again, who the hell cares about there for the nth time', but in Melbourne. The characters seem real.

After a woman loses her job, and her husband, she tries to get by. One honorable man tries to organise people to help each other out.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2006/12/sea-and-summer-george-turner.html ( )