Aliya Whiteley
Solaris, 18 January 2024
Available as: HB, 44pp, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781837860753
I'm grateful to Solaris for sending me a copy of Three Eight One to consider for review.
This is a tough book to review. It's hard to hang one's thoughts on what actually happens in the story, because the events are designedly fantastical, contradictory and, well, suspect. And their nature is in any caseanalysed in the book itself by one of the narrators, who makes her points much more clearly than I can.
To try to clear this up, the main narrative is about a young woman called Fairly, who decides to leave her village on a Quest, following the "horned road". Her part of the narrative, set in 2024, is therefore called "The Dance of the Horned Road". It's suggested (from the one concrete geographical clue) that Fairly's village is in Southern England, though with a sea voyage, the story may decamp across the sea (so - to France? But there is no idea of a different language being spoken?) However, while familiar in details - a campervan features, as do pubs, hotels, a jukebox - the atmosphere, motivations and assumptions of Fairly and everyone she meets are odd, definitely placing this in a different world, I think, a point driven home by the presence of a Spire from which rockets are launched.
The other narrative is a commentary, by way of footnotes in Fairly's account by Rowena Savalas in 2314. Rowena inhabits a future where the boundaries between human and machine are blurred, and the conservation and interpretation of data from the past has become a subject of philosophical and practical interest. Rowena's interpretation of Fairly's journey is in some respects her life's work, the footnotes yielding new and startling information both about Fairly and her world and about Rowena's own far future. As the footnotes grow longer, the two women almost seem in dialogue, Fairly's "quest" and Rowena's task of interpretation paralleling one another.
There is a lot to interpret - or perhaps wonder over - including the "Cha", animals that feature heavily in Fairly's world though whether they are real (and if so, what they are) and the roles they play (variously, saviours, currency, food and teachers) are both mysterious. The Cha are deeply embedded in the story (and in the mythology that underlies Fairly's society) but they are ambiguous, subject to contradictory narratives and often only known in a frustratingly oblique way - though you may find traces of them where you don't expect!
The other central theme is the "Breathing Man", a person whom Fairly suspects of following her and whom she sees as a threat although we're never actually told what this might be. More than a mere bogeyman, the Breathing Man also seems to have a place in the mythology of Fairly's people, but given that Quests such as hers are an assumed part of a young person's life the threat of an encounter with him seems oddly binary - very threatening but, surely, inevitable - and also unclear: Fairly doesn't tell us what other Questers experienced of him (but, nor does she tell us the purpose of her quest, a lot is unsaid).
These, and other elements, of the story could provoke lengthy speculation which would I think be to miss the point of the book, which must be about experience - the Quest, again, has an obscure and ill-defined purpose, necessary but with no clear object or end. In Fairly's case it perhaps catalyses changes in her society which must be a focus of Rowena's interest as she lives in a society that presumably developed form Fairly's - yet Rowena absents herself from commentary as this story nears its end, so that is only speculation.
A complex, involving story, at once simple on the surface but fiendishly complex inside, Three Eight One was like nothing I'd read lately, calling to mind for me puzzle filled, treacherous narratives such as Charles Palliser's The Quincunx or John Fowles' The Magus.
For more information about Three Eight One, see the publisher's website here.
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