Ian McDonald’s Brasyl is almost as sprawling as the country that serves as its setting, and just as hard to categorize. I've traveled around Brazil many times, both for business and pleasure—that binary opposition, beloved by customs officials, and supposedly representing incompatible states; but these, like much else in this nation, blur together. In fact this country seems to thrive on paradox. The most commonly heard pronouncement from its citizens is a self-canceling bon mot : "Brazil is the country of the future and always will be." The first time I heard a Brazilian say it, I laughed. But after a while, I stopped treating it as a joke.
McDonald's novel takes that quip, and treats it as a springboard for a plot. In his story line, incompatible time lines coexist, an infinity of favelas and Copacabanas, mixing together like a cosmic feijoada stewing over a quantum theory fire. The narrative leaps from story line to story line, in the manner of Cloud Atlas (probably the closest counterpart to McDonald’s book), Gods Without Men and other recent works in what I have called the "fragmented novel" genre. But while other b ooks in this style sometimes seem contrived —excuses to turn short stories into a quasi-novel— Brasyl comes across as pleasingly holistic and integrated despites its built-in disjunctions.
Three stories intersect, representing the past, present and future of Brazil. In 1732, a Jesuit priest named Luis Quinn arrives in the Portuguese colony on a mission to discipline a rogue missionary who has set up an authoritarian fiefdom, built on slavery and syncretic religion, in a remote Amazonian hideaway. In 2006, a reality TV producer gets caught up in high profile scandal when an impostor who looks exactly like her seeks to destroy her career and closest relationships. In 2032, the cross-dressing Edson finds himself entangled with high-tech criminals who use quantum computers to elude the mass surveillance state of a futuristic cyberpunk Brazil.
Each of these three stories is written with extraordinary vigor and rhapsodic prose. There isn't a lazy sentence in this whole book. I might even accuse McDonald of veering into poetry, if it wasn't for the action-packed plots, slangy dialogue, larger-than-life characters and crazy pacing of Brasyl. The poetry on display here is more like a poetry slam marathon, perhaps viewed through a psychedelic haze. At no point does this book even approach the formulaic writing of the genre world, and it almost certainly displeases those who are trying to turn the whole sci-fi category into a home for young adult narratives, teachable moments, and downsized sentences. Make no mistake, this book is a challenging read, but in the best possible way.
I mentioned, at the start, that Brasyl is hard to categorize. That hasn’t prevented the book industry from squeezing it into the sci-fi category, even if its close counterparts (let me mention Cloud Atlas , again) get embraced as serious literary fiction. I imagine McDonald is happy with that decision, which gives him access to readers, reviewers, and awards consideration in the genre world. I note that Brasyl earned nominations for the Nebula, the Locus and the John W. Campbell prizes, and picked up a British Science Fiction Award for best novel. But this is a book that really deserves to find readers in MFA departments too, and among those who hand out the more illustrious Booker Awards. Those barriers are breaking down, but not fast enough, and much of the crossover is driven by marketing considerations rather than the books themselves.
Eventually the characters in these stories cross over into each other’s plots. Of course, this must involve heavy-duty technology—after all, this is supposed to be a sci-fi story. I hope I’m not disappointing you when I say that some of the most advance tech here is extracted from an Amazonian frog. Okay, there’s some very advanced quantum computing at play in Brasyl , and a super-duper knife. But that pretty much exhausts the list.
At times, this novel will remind you more of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River than of anything from the Asimov-to-Zelazny playbook. But it's a lot more fun than either of those pessimistic tales of human failings. You can’t really capture the spirit of Brazilian life in a book unless you throw in a bit of Carnival as well as some World Cup excesses, and McDonald doesn't stint on either of those categories.
In fact, my favorite character in Brasyl is real-life sports figure Moacir Barbosa Nascimento, the goalie often blamed for the nation’s defeat in the 1950 World Cup. This loss would follow Barbosa the rest of his life. He once quipped that even murderers in Brazil only get sentenced to thirty years, but he was punished for a full half-century—in fact, he served as a symbol of national disgrace and target for abuse until his death in 2000. What a wonderful notion, possible only in a book with alternative Brazils in other time-space continuums, to give our goat (no, not GOAT) of a goalie another chance to prove his mettle.
If this sounds very futuristic, let me add that our author does not shy away from going old school. You will get sword fights, car chases and martial arts—the latter in the guise of the stylized Brazilian combat dance known as capoeira—and other staples of traditional adventure stories. I am almost tempted to say that this story would work better on the screen—as a film or TV miniseries—than as a book. But that wouldn’t be fair. Brasyl is a m asterful literary achievement, and even the best computer-generated special effects couldn't quite replicate what McDonald delivers on the page. Even so, some smart producer ought to snatch up the rights.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).
This novel may remind you more of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River than of anything from the Asimov-to-Zelazny playbook.