Author and poet Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s Clone opens in the 24th century; the organisms that survived the ‘War against the Earth’ live within the walls of the Global Community. But much to her alarm, our protagonist, clone 14/54/G, has begun to mutate. Her “consciousness is morphing in an unplanned way” and she remembers experiences she’s never had, lives through histories she didn’t know existed, and feels emotions she can barely comprehend. It soon becomes clear that these “visitations” are residue, leftover in her from the mind of her Original, who was a scholar and rebelled against the regime. The clone soon finds herself caught between the authority of the community’s leaders, and the stirrings of a new rebellion.
Conceptually, Clone is a complex book. It’s about what makes us human. It explores the relationship between living and remembering, and illustrates the importance of carrying our collective and individual histories with us. Clone also has its mooring in Indian histories, mythologies, philosophies and aesthetics, and, in this sense, is a self-conscious but important departure from science fiction as we know it. Intent-wise, it has everything going for it. But it was when I jumped from blurb to book that things began to unravel.
One of the biggest letdowns is the sci-fi effect itself. The best science-fiction or dystopian stories are anchored on one of two things: They can hinge on pure plausibility — their impact is achieved by the fact that the world they describe is a natural extension of the one that we inhabit; or they are set in an alternative universe — a different planet, a different future, a different galaxy — where life is so radically different from what we know, that it makes us question the structures that sustain our reality. This is the thrill of the genre. It gives you distortion, a warped reflection. The world of
The novel, adapted from Chabria’s 2008 work
The stories appear designed to graze certain general thematic areas, such as the meaninglessness of violence, the cruelty of love, and the futility of all life and purpose.
Though each of these stories has some potential on its own, they jar against the main narrative thread and keep the book from coming together, while also seriously affecting any pace that the plot may have been gathering.
The clone herself does little other than have visitations and faint rather too frequently. Her voice is intentionally kept emotionally flat in the initial sections of the book, but this has the unfortunate effect of flattening reader engagement — she is so exasperatingly literal and deadpan that she evokes nothing in us. As a voice of dissent in her universe, and as the anchor of the novel, she lacks edge and character and is unable to draw us into herself.
For a Zubaan publication, Clone doesn’t particularly possess any insight into the nature of female experience. Opportunities to explore gender- and sexuality-related themes do arise, but the novel chooses to elide over them, rather than pause and make meaning. For example, we know that the Global Community is ruled by a set of oligarch-type leaders, but what is the relationship between gender and political power in this futuristic society? Or, is it not possible to bring some nuance to the issue of the clone and her love interest (an Original, a political figure, and referred to throughout the novel as “Leader”)? In a situation that she could have used to examine the dynamics built into an affair between a powerful man and a woman socially inferior to him, the writer chooses instead to explore the clone’s experience of a sexual awakening.
Something about Clone doesn’t feel true. She wishes to make the book science fiction-ey, but these aspects of the narrative fail to deliver, possibly because they are at war with so much else that the book is trying to do, such as teaching us that violence is bad but inevitable, or that “literature… is always dangerous…it makes us remember ourselves.” These aren’t, on their own, very radical propositions, but the book hopes that by clothing them in experimental garb, they will sound interesting, or novel.
Clone is so happy with itself for doing something unconventional that it gets lazy about its messaging and keeps meanings as literal as possible, as if in order to guide the reader in her interpretation.
Somewhere in all of this, it stops being an enjoyable read.
Dakshayini Suresh is a Bengaluru-based freelance writer