Speaking in Tongues reviewed by John Clute

Review of Speaking in Tongues by John Clute. Originally published in Interzone #66 (December 1992), page 60. © Interzone 1992. Reprinted in Look at the Evidence: Essays and Reviews, Serconia Press 1995, pages 370-371. Reprinted with permission.

With a condign humbleness of mien, Ian McDonald entitles his second short story collection Speaking in Tongues (Bantam, 1992), and provides exactly what the reader might expect from an announcement of this candour. Speaking in Tongues is a series of exercises - none more cunning and engaging than the title story, whose riff on Gene Wolfe is hilarious - in doing the police in different voices. It is an assemblage of assays in style, tone of voice. The subject matters are of less interest (indeed there is hardly an unfamiliar theme or trope in any of the 11 tales included). What counts is the profusion of registers. "Rainmaker Cometh" does a heat-lightning jangle of Bradbury/Sturgeon/Lafferty to a nicety, though the death of one of the protagonists at story's end seems utterly gratuitous; "Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" much improves on the flytrap paralysis of D M Thomas's The White Hotel; "Approaching Perpendicular," though its representation of the Artist is singularly naff, neatly juices up M John Harrison with a Robert Silverberg transcendental slingshot epiphany pompadour you're flying! prong. A couple of stories say themselves as well as the exercise, too: "Toward Kilimanjaro" may polish itself a bit on J G Ballard's Crystal World (1966), and explicitly quotes Conrad on Darkness, Heart of: but the tale itself is remarkably well characterized, Kenya is neatly anatomized, and the alien transformation of Kilimanjaro itself into a new post-carbon domain is neatly conceived. And "Floating Dogs," though not unpredictable, carries through. And "Fronds," set on a colony planet visited by a Japanese plenipotentiary while imported dolphins attempt to justify their own immoral behavious in an absolutely inspired re-creation of bardic narrative verse, is very superb.

McDonald is a strange case, a singularly accomplished maker (and pusher) of material. He is a monster, perhaps, a tropical feeder on the compost of century-end; and someday he is going to have to stop repeating words ("pecking, pecking birds" appear twice in different tales); but there is something going on. You begin to sense he may be turning toward the sun.


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