The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith, Josephine Saxton

The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith, Josephine Saxton (1969)
Review by Joachim Boaz

The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith is an experimental (but approachable) science fiction fable set in a world which, at least on the surface, is very much like our own. The buildings remain, food dispensers still dispense food, and undisturbed store shelves are fully stocked. However, the majority of the animals have disappeared and people are almost all gone. Cannibalism is hinted at. A few other individuals flit on the outskirts of the narrative, phantom-like, unsubstantial in their physicality. Are they hallucinations, or external viewers of the spectacle who intrude when needed before vanishing with no evidence of their arrival?

Josephine Saxton deftly utilizes the coming of age narrative, the quest (more character related than goal oriented), and a fabulist’s eye towards metaphor to weave together a touching and alluring tale. The ending (warning: discussed in more depth below) at first glance is too elusive, too unresolved. But on second thought, the ramifications of the slight reveal are so beautiful.

The narrative begins with “the boy” who wanders aimlessly without shoes around the town of Thingy. The environment is so absent of life that the mere sound of a bird “excited him until he had tears running down his face” (p 7). He discovers a hollow where a dying woman lays alone in the final throes of birth: “the belly of the woman was a soft mound of wrinkled skin, with a fan of black hair, all wet with red blood, and her legs lay wide, striped red, and between them lay a tiny baby, wet and streaked with blood and shining moisture [...]” (p 12).

The boy is simultaneously repelled yet intrigued by the girl child. He realizes that if he decides to take care of her he will be forced to depart, at least for a while, from his aimless solitary wanderings. He decides to care for the child. He slowly learns how to keep her clean, how to procure cans of milk, how to keep her from getting cold, how to convey her effectively while he wanders…

The boy himself is an intriguing/peculiar character. In a land mostly absent of other life, he is preoccupied with unusual longings to “bathe and decorate himself” (p 25). He carries around a bottle of almond shampoo (p 29), decorates his fingernails (p 32) and spends lengthy periods of time looking for clothes in empty department stores (p 31). Because he feels the drive to move from place to place his own body, becomes the site of intense ritual. For example, disruption of ritual, when he catches himself biting his nails, is looked at with horror and revulsion (p 39).

At certain moments in the narrative the boy and the small girl come across inscriptions on monuments, graffiti in bathroom stalls, spray painted signs that force them to consider certain emotions. For example, his carefree existence is further interrupted by an inscription that reads, “To the memory of those brave men of the town of Thingy, who gave their lives in the First World War” (p 35). He is so overcome with grief that he is forced to consider more carefully the young child in his care – and immediately after this insight, he comes across Universal Stores, Inc. A gigantic department store with all the necessities for the child.

Eventually he decides to cease in his wanderings, stay in the store, and nurture the child (p 58). After a mysterious visitor leaves him a pile of books, the boy spends his time reading vociferously. The child amuses herself soundlessly with toys for the boy has yet to teach her to speak. His need to wander is transferred from the external world to the imaginative world of books. The list is multi-varied (one can’t help but speculate they are books found on Saxton’s own shelves): “the writings of Nietzsche, the Pilgrim’s Progress, the books of Charles Fort, three volumes of the Mathnawi, the published works of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, Nicholl, Bennet, Collin, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Secret of the Golden Flower, the Upanishads, CG Jung, TS Eliot, CS Lewis, James Blish, William Blake, and a most remarkable poet called Dalo Makinen” (p 64). This list is revealing. Ouspensky and Gurdjieff are proponents of higher states of existence – a potential way to interpret the world our characters dwell in. Likewise, Jung’s collective unconscious (a theme Saxton returns to frequently in her work) could be the mental state in which the ritual unfolds. This list has the potential to be mined for other interpretations.

After years go by, the two finally decided that they must leave the store, the fertile ground of childhood. And once again, they begin to wander. A sequence of memorable scenes usher their development: Graffiti in lavatories, naming games, self-naming, The Osborne Palace hotel, the slow realization of sexuality, and the culmination [s] of the ritual. And they return to Thingy, and the place where the skeleton of the girl’s mother lays, undisturbed…

The name of the book, The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith, combined with the final sequence imbues the boy and the girl’s wanderings with added meaning. I recommend not looking up the Greek term “hieros gamos” before you finish. I found the most intriguing aspect of the work the appearance and disappearance of other people. Each, for example the woman who leaves the pile of books for the boy in the store, is a catalyst for an important emotion or unrealized concept. Combined with the textual messages they come across, the reader becomes aware of a voyeuristic quality of looking in on the development of these two characters The uncanny artificiality of the world – completely intact but mostly lacking in people/animals – and how objects appear and disappear all add to the feeling that their lives are part of a complex ritual. The cyclicality is striking as well – most notably, their return to the skeleton of the girl’s mother for another birth.

The power of ritual is a central theme – the boy is obsessed with ritualistically adorning/caring for his body; the girl’s arrival threatens to unbalance this ritual, and eventually the girl is slowly integrated into his ritual of wandering. One of the more gorgeous sequences in the entire work depicts the birthday ritual: The boy is resigned to the fact that the girl will eventually leave, she packs her things, begins to walk away, he calls for her to come back, they embrace, she says she will stay, “Well, I will, just this one year, just this one” (p 100).

I recommend Saxton’s The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith for fans of restrained, fabulist, and well-written science fiction. The prose strikingly conveys with simple phrases and words the landscape, the development of character, and the landscape they traverse. My only complaint is the Saxton’s interest in psychoanalysis provides a series of interpretations that explain away a large portion of the ambiguity of the surreal world. A delightful fable nevertheless…

This review originally appeared on Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

Vector for Seven, Josephine Saxton

Vector for Seven, Josephine Saxton (1970)
Review by Kev McVeigh

Vector for Seven, Josephine Saxton’s second novel, follows a pattern begun with her first, The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969), in having an increasing group of people wander through a dreamlike landscape seemingly detached in time and space from our world. The setting however does resemble our world more closely than previously.

The wonderful opening lines introduce us to Mrs Amelia Mortimer (for whom the novel is subtitled – “The Weltanschaung of Mrs Amelia Mortimer and Friends”) and Sophia Smith, two very different women brought together to await departure on holiday from a remote aerodrome. Their respective transports have deposited them there in isolation, and there appears to be nobody else around.

“There are undoubtedly much worse things that can happen to a person than to be splattered with the shite of swifts,” said Sophia Smith in a rather unsympathetic voice. She was addressing her remark to Mrs. Mortimer, whose first name she did not know because they had only just met.

Mrs. Mortimer was deeply shocked by the use of the word “shite,” but she showed it no way whatsoever. She continued to scrub with the blunt end of a nail-file at the offensive bit of ordure that clung to her hat, which she held in her kid-gloved left hand. The mat felt was marked permanently, there was little doubt of it. She looked upward at the source of the offence, and observed birds flying to and fro from a bunch of nests in the eaves of the wooden building outside which they now sat. It was the only place to sit down, or they would have been sitting elsewhere.

That deadpan tone, formally stylised prose and the dry humour within made Josephine Saxton stand out in the New Wave where much of her otherwise unclassifiable fictions found a home. From 2011, it may seem at first to be dated, but bear with her, as Saxton who admits to being a devotee of Jung, takes her characters on a mysterious voyage through what she called in later books the Collective Unconsciousness.

Mrs Mortimer and Sophia Smith are gradually joined by others, including their driver, who proceeds through a serious of instructions left for him, and the semi-mute, alien-like boychild Septimus. Seven people, of assorted ages, classes and attitudes, set off on what they have seen advertised as a Super Tour. Where to? It is never made clear, to reader or characters, as they travel up and down newly built, near empty motorways, sleep and awake in new countries, in strange unpopulated places. Beyond the seven there are very few other people even viewed at a distance, the cafe waitress, the stewardess, momentary interactions outside of the group.

At some point they find themselves becalmed at sea listening to Messiaen, later a submarine, a plane and a hotel, but at all points effectively in a white room. Existence beyond the characters is blank. Yet they have memories. They have emotions, and needs. Saxton throughout her works excels at depiction of gourmet experiences, and Vector for Seven is no exception. Indeed the food scenes are the principal moments of realism in this otherwise abstract novel. Even the long multi-viewpoint sex scenes take on a rarified intellectual aspect as Martha ponders her orgasm as she has it yet Saxton’s prose is paced to the rhythm of the lovers maintaining an eroticism belied by technicalities. It should be noted that this, very English in many ways, novel has gay and interracial sex, and the older women in particular are seen to embrace it perhaps more than the younger for all their respective airs and pretensions.

For me Josephine Saxton is a clever, witty, even hilarious writer, though her detached style may not be to everyone’s taste. Re-reading her work I am convinced the style is deliberate, it is too thoughtful to be accidental, yet it frequently breaks so many so-called rules. Viewpoints switch mid-sentence, mid paragraph. Scenes fade into each other, and there is an artificiality to everything that will irritate the ‘show don’t tell’ believers. Sentences rumble on through multiple clauses to hundreds of words. Nevertheless, Vector for Seven works as an exploration of the Unconscious, and the prose style effectively conveys the juxtapositions, transitions and abstractions of our minds.

Suddenly, not fifty yards away from the boat, there was an iceberg floating in the ocean, forty feet in height perhaps, and thirty across, shaped exactly like an iceberg, and apparently travelling at a great rate towards their vessel. Amelia came alive again and flung the steering wheel around to no avail, for not only did the lack of speed in the boat make her rapid manoeuvre ineffectual, but she turned it the wrong way, besides which error, of no importance as it happened, the iceberg changed its course and headed directly for the little boat, which was helpless to avoid the impact, which came, not with the crash and crack of ice but with a soft yet mighty thud like the drunken body of a fat man at a party in Leeds one night near Christmas, pushed out of bed by a young student called Amelia, a virgin until her marriage at the age of twenty-five.

Ultimately, as in other Saxton novels, the seven individuals become a group and share experiences. They judge and are judged but they learn and are taught. In its early 60s upper middle class viewpoints Vector for Seven is very definitely of its time, but Saxton also cuts through this. Snobbery is mocked, pretensions are dashed, and barriers (race, gender, class, age, sexuality) breakdown into a collective.

It is an area Saxton returned to in a more feminist focussed way with the Jane Saint novellas, but Vector for Seven remains her best work after Queen Of The States.

This review originally appeared on Performative Utterance.