(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
It never ceases to amaze this reviewer that you can pick up a novella, a slim volume of storytelling that thought it might not have the physical heft or presence of its bigger novel counterparts, and that it can pack an almighty storytelling punch that stands in inverse proportion to its elegantly limited page count.
It’s the T.A.R.D.I.S. of storytelling forms, slight in physical form perhaps, but in the right hands, full of so much world-building and compelling characterisation and impactful narrative that you often have to stop and wonder at how so much story could find its way into so few well-chosen and well-executed words.
Sitting back in wonder happens often when reading Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon, a 162-page gem of a book that serves up a story so epically big and yet emotionally, powerfully intimate that you marvel at how so much can be said in a series of pages that represents the third-or-quarter-way-in mark for many far longer efforts.
It is also reassuring how queer the novella is unafraid to be; it doesn’t pretend at any point to be anything other than the story of one person, an immensely capable but emotionally, economically and physical vulnerable trans woman called Wylla, who finds in the most extraordinary of circumstances, a place where death and competitive ruin rule to the exclusion of all, someone who exists in a way that challenges everything she’s ever known and yet who feels gloriously and hopefully like home.
Behind you came the shouting; fearful accusations of your parents, telling you that if you lived like this, you were choosing your own demise. Corporate Federation couldn’t abide individuals.
No one would ever hire you. No one would ever want to be with you.
No one would ever love you.
And you chose yourself anyway, because you wanted to live.
A scavenger by vocation, Wylla does not expect to find her heart’s true home when she answers a call from an “outskirt moon” called Pholan’s World which sits in what’s called the Beta Quadrant of the mercenarily dystopian Corporate Federation, a political entity so toxically neoliberal that everything and everyone has a value; well those who add value to the bottomline, of course.
But as is the way with many a fascistic worldview, the definitions of who value are suffocatingly narrow indeed, and it comes down to whether you are a breedable heteronormative player of the mainstream game, which Wylla, who has always struggled to find worth and value in a society, and sadly, yes even family, which constantly tells her she is a worthless Other.
The reason Wylla lives hand-to-mouth scavenging for the scraps that fall from the corporate table is because in a caste-heavy society, she has been frozen out of just about every other avenue of earning a living.
It’s an horrific civilisation in which to live, and Volatile Memory makes no bones about the damage it does to people like Wylla who have all the value in the galaxy and are worth everything but who keep being told and ingest without realising it, that they are, and will only ever be nothing.
The reason why a random call to scavenge a MARK I HAWK mask – in this universe, masks, which usually come with animal names and characteristics, are worn by everyone, a tool to live and a badge of identity all rolled into one – becomes far more than picking up scrap is that Wylla finds in the mask someone who shouldn’t be there, someone who comes to love her in ways she never thought she could be loved or was worthy of being loved.
These masks are supposed to simply an AI-powered tool, a way to augment strength or insight or intelligence or a thousand other characteristics, but the mask Wylla recovers from Pholan’s World is so much more and it absolutely blows her small, subsistence, small “l” living world wide open in ways that absolutely capture your heart and soul as a reader.
What starts out as a salvage job which could provide the biggest payday of her much out-upon life becomes so much more as Wylla and the person in the mask unexpectedly join forces, reinforce and build each other and set out to get answers from the one person with the power to explain how Sable’s consciousness, as we come to know her, is housed in a mask which is simply not designed to house it.
The beauty of Volatile Memory is that it takes what is a chase story full of action, violence, near misses and corporate bullying on a galactically cruel and vicious scale, and imbues it with a metric ton of love, compassion, belonging, hope and family.
Unless you have existed on the margins of acceptable society, which this queer reviewer did for many years growing up in the church where definitions of acceptable personhood were frighteningly slim, you can never really understand how seismically powerful it is to find your person, even in the most amazingly unexpected of times and places.
We sat together for a while as this one being. Existing close to you, your warmth on me and in me, our shared heartbeat and organs and limbs, was divine. A holy thing. An evolution.
We were something new.
But Haddon manages with masterful elegance and soul-slamming emotional truthfulness to communicate how much it matters when you are told that you are worth all the beauty and wonder and love in the world.
When you’ve been told repeatedly that you are a worthless nothing, a freak show, a nightmare and a sinful abomination, all of which have been visited upon Wylla in some form or another, having someone like Sable, even if she is a disembodied consciousness (though even here Volatile Memory makes it abundantly and joyously clear that she has value and agency and worth) tell you otherwise is as revelatory as it comes.
What powers Volatile Memory, beyond its cracking pace of an action-fuelled plot, is what happens when two mistreated and misunderstood people find each other and realise that here is there is mythical other half, the person who completes them, not by filling in the missing pieces – Wylla and Sable are presented, and rightly so, as two complete and eminently loveable and complete individuals – but adding to who they already are in powerfully transformative ways (when Wylla wears the Hawk mask, she and Sable become in many ways one person with access to each other’s thoughts, feelings and memories).
This novella might be slim and small in comparison to the hulking novels with which they share shelf space, but Volatile Memory roars with the tremendous power of queer identity, of the immense liberatatingly alive energy of being told you are unconditionally loved and accepted for exactly who you are and the calm reassurance that here is home and that no matter what happens, and honestly a lot of incredible stuff does in a stuffed-to-the-gills-but-not-overdone plot, you never have to run to find solace, sanctuary and purpose again.