Sarah Canary Read online

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part i

  1. The Year of the Rooster

  2. A Full Moon in Steilacoom

  Part ii

  3. Morning at the Steilacoom Asylum

  4. Dr Carr’s Theories on Animal Magnetism

  Part iii

  5. The Story of Su Tung-P’o

  6. Burke’s Theories on God and Darwin

  Part iv

  7. The Wild Woman Performs in Seabeck

  8. Harold Recites Tennyson

  Part v

  9. Adelaide’s Theories on Seduction

  10. Morning at the Bay View Hotel

  11. The Story of Carmilla

  Part vi

  12. A Rainy Day on Hood Canal

  13. The Story of the Dragon’s Gate

  Part vii

  14. Emmaline Recites Lear

  Part viii

  15. The Capture Of Lydia Palmer

  Part ix

  16. The Story Of Caspar Hauser

  17. Afternoon in Woodward’s Gardens

  18. The Story of T’ung Hsien Nu

  Part x

  19. Chin’s Theories on Fate and Chance

  Part xi

  Website

  Also by Karen Joy Fowler

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Copyright

  You only comprehend things which you perceive. And as you persist in regarding your ideas of time and space as absolute, although they are only relative, and thence form a judgment on truths which are quite beyond your sphere, and which are imperceptible to your terrestrial organism and faculties, I should not do a true service, my friend, in giving you fuller details of my ultra-terrestrial observations . . .

  CAMILLE FLAMMARION

  LUMEN, 1873

  INTRODUCTION

  What do you do when you encounter something incomprehensible, something entirely beyond your experience? Do you try to learn how it works? Do you dismiss or ignore it? Do you work out how it might be used or exploited? Do you fear it or love it? Those are the kinds of questions posed by the subgenre of SF called the First Contact story, and by Sarah Canary. The classic version of the First Contact story depicts an encounter between humanity and aliens. Very often, the body of the story is a process of working-out, of two different viewpoints or conceptual worlds coming to understand each other. Sarah Canary is not like that.

  Before she published this, her first novel, in 1991, Fowler had written a clutch of superb short stories that had been collected as Artificial Things (1986). On the strength of this, she won the John W Campbell Award for best new writer. She’s since gone on to write stories both within and outside the fantastic. Probably her most famous work to date is the mainstream The Jane Austen Book Club (2004), which was subsequently filmed. Feminist concerns have been particularly prominent in her career, and she was one of the founders of the Tiptree Award, presented annually to works of SF that expand or explore our understanding of gender.

  The premise of Sarah Canary is spelt out within a few pages. A strange woman wanders into a railroad workers’ camp on the west coast of the US in 1873. She speaks no known human language, and seems oblivious to much of what’s going on around her. Chin, the worker who first encounters her, has his own theories about who she might be. The body of the book follows the travels of Sarah Canary, Chin, and a growing band of other followers through this milieu (the name ‘Sarah Canary’ is derived by one of these followers from her strange, fluting way of ‘speech’). By the end of the book, she has become a cause célèbre, an object of fascination for many. But the book offers no certainty as to what she really is.

  That brings up the question of whether, or in what sense, this is an SF novel at all. It’s true that it can be read as entirely mimetic, as a pure historical novel. Sarah Canary’s behaviour could be explained as some combination of disability or strange upbringing. As I’ve said, each of the major characters who encounters Sarah Canary brings their own interpretation of what she might be. Those theories are inevitably rooted in those characters’ outlooks and backgrounds. Among the other issues the book raises, not least is the question of how observation affects the thing being observed. My contention is that it’s much realer to create a reading of the novel as science-fictional. If Sarah is truly an extra-terrestrial of some kind, it makes much more sense of her eventual fate. It also gives much more sense to some emphases in the text that otherwise seem arbitrary, weirdly underlined for no particular reason. One of these are a series of references to butterflies, to creatures changing their form. A second strand is a set of mentions of ghosts and dream-creatures, especially in Chin’s thinking about Sarah Canary. Finally, the ‘Canary’ in her name echoes back and forth with images of wings and imprisonment that permeate the book. It is, I’d suggest, very much easier to see these threads of imagery as deliberate pointers to some kind of fantastic reading – though, of course, there’s no certainty about what kind. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Sarah Canary is (say) a ghost. I am suggesting that some of her characteristics might be describable in the same ways that we describe ghosts – or aliens, or butterflies, or . . .

  The epigraphs from Emily Dickinson are also a pointer here, I think. Dickinson’s poetry always hovers on the edge of revelation, on the edge of something that cannot be said. Its compacted syntax and sudden leaps of imagination hedge around things that are beyond words. So, for instance, the epigraph to Chapter Ten is clearly about the aftermath of something terrible, but something not sayable. It’s a difficult lesson for a book to convey: that the mystery at the heart of the book cannot be set out in the book. Moreover, the best efforts of some well-intentioned people (and some poorly-intentioned people) will necessarily fail at that task, and may even do damage.

  Hindsight is a wonderful thing. The reader now may look back on the world of the 1870s and raise an amused eyebrow at the weird conceptual schemas into which this novel’s characters try to cram Sarah Canary. Some of these ideas are set
out in the brief historical notes set into the book. Other fads and strangenesses are embodied in the main narrative. But are we any better now? Would our science, or our other tools for knowing, be any better at comprehending a Sarah Canary? The very last paragraphs of the book carry some strong hints that they wouldn’t. 1990 was just as strange a time as the 1870s – and no doubt 2012 is as well (imagine what the internet would say about Sarah Canary). For some questions, we’re stuck irretrievably with our own ways of seeing. SF is usually about solving problems in some way, about finding a definitive reading for them. Sarah Canary is about accepting that, sometimes, there’s no definitive reading. Fowler’s immense skill in this book is directed at a kind of reticence, at not giving us answers while still making us ask questions.

  Graham Sleight

  i

  The years after the American Civil War were characterized by excess, ornamented by cults and corruptions. Calamity Jane rode her horse through Indian country, standing on her head, her tangled hair loose along the horse’s sides. Chang and Eng, P. T. Barnum’s Siamese twins, hunted boar, fathered children, and drank like the gentlemen they were. The Fox sisters held seances and secretly cracked their toe knuckles to dissemble communication from the beyond. T. P. James, a psychic/mechanic in Vermont, channeled Charles Dickens, allowing him to complete his final book, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, posthumously. Big Jim Kinelly plotted the kidnap of Abraham Lincoln’s body. Brigham Young married and Victoria Woodhull told everyone who was sleeping with whom. Football and lawn tennis had their first incarnations.

  In 1871, strange events took place in the skies over the central and northern United States. Eyewitness accounts allude to spectacular meteor showers, ghostly lights, and, on the ground, a number of fires whose origins were unknown and whose behavior was, in some ways, disquietingly unfirelike.

  In 1872, the residents of the asylum for the insane in Steilacoom, Washington, were thrown out of their beds by earthquakes resulting from volcanic activity in the Cascade Mountains. The event was so profound it cured three of the patients instantly. These cures were responsible for a brief and faddish detour in the care of the mentally ill known as shake treatments.

  Across an ocean, in China, the Manchus prepared for the Year of the Rooster and the end of the female Regency. The power of the Dowager Empress shrank. The influence of the palace eunuchs grew. Neither had much energy to spare for the Celestials dispersed abroad.

  In 1873, in the fir forests below Tacoma, Washington, a white woman with short black hair and a torn black dress stumbled into a Chinese railway workers’ camp.

  1

  The Year of the Rooster

  To this World she returned.

  But with a tinge of that—

  A compound manner,

  As a Sod

  Espoused a Violet,

  That chiefer to the Skies

  Than to Himself, allied,

  Dwelt hesitating, half of Dust

  And half of Day, the Bride.

  Emily Dickinson, 1864

  The railway workers were traveling from Seattle to Tenino on foot and had stopped, midday, to rest. They hadn’t really made a camp, just a circle of baskets and blankets around a circle of damp dirt that Chin Ah Kin had cleared with his hands prior to building a fire. Chin was briefly alone, although in the distance to his left he could hear the companionable sounds of two men urinating.

  It was midwinter, the tail end of the Year of the Monkey and just before noon. There was no snow, but the ground was wet with the morning’s frost and the trees dripped. Underfoot, the fir needles were soggy and refused to snap when stepped upon, which might explain why Chin Ah Kin did not hear the woman approach. It was a mystery. She was just there suddenly, talking to someone, maybe to him, maybe to herself. Her speech had no meaning he could discern. Chin, whose mother had worked as a servant for German missionaries and later for a British family in the ceded area of Canton and briefly for a family of Mohammedans, had been surrounded by foreign languages all his life. People speaking a foreign tongue often appear more logical and intelligent than those who can be actually understood. It is inconceivable that extraordinary sounds should signify something trivial or mundane. But this woman’s speech felt lunatic, and it was cold enough to give Chin the momentary illusion that her words had form instead of meaning, were corporeal. He could see them, hovering about her open mouth.

  In spite of the cold, the woman wore only a dress with crushed pannier and insubstantial leggings. This, too, was a mystery. Chin Ah Kin had been told that the Puyallup Indians could sleep in the woods at night without blankets or shelter, but he had never heard this ability attributed to a white woman. Initially, he mistook her for a ghost.

  He had been hoping for a ghost. Ghost women often appeared to men of his age, luring them away, entrapping them in seductions that might last for centuries. Such men returned to bewildering and alien landscapes. The trees would be the same, though larger; there the apple tree that grew in the corner of the yard, there the almond that once shaded the doorway. Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come. But the house would be gone, the people transformed; granddaughters into old women, daughters into the grass on their graves. Popular wisdom held that these men were lucky to have escaped at all, but Chin had his own opinions about this. Chin was a philosopher, his uncle said. Philosophers and running water always sought the easy way out. No more mining. No more working on the railroad. No need to send explanations or apologies to your parents back in China. But I was enchanted, he could always say later. Who was going to argue with this? Who would still be alive?

  The ghost lover was so beautiful, she broke your heart just to look at her. She wore the faint perfume of your sweetest memories, a perfume that would be different to every man, depending on his province, the foods he liked, what his mother had used to wash her hair. The ghost lover dressed in clothes that were no longer fashionable. She seldom appeared in broad daylight, preferring shadows, and seldom faced you directly. There was something strange about her eyes, a light-swallowing flatness that always seemed to be an illusion no matter how closely you looked at her. Chin looked more closely at his apparition. She was the ugliest woman he could imagine. He revised his opinion. His second guess was that she was a prostitute.

  To the best of his knowledge, he had never seen a white prostitute before. It was always possible that he had and not known it, of course, since the white men called prostitutes seamstresses and they called seamstresses seamstresses, too, and occasionally, like the famous Betsy Ross, revered them. It could get tricky. He recalled briefly the prostitute he had seen last year in eastern Washington. He and his uncle had been sluicing on the Columbia when a big-footed woman from Canton was taken through the mining camps. She wore the checkered scarf, so there was no mistaking her, and also a rope, one end tied around her waist, the other in the hands of the turtle man. While the man talked, the woman’s head had drifted about her neck; her eyes rolled up in their sockets. She was ecstatic or she was very ill. She had a set of scars, little bird tracks, down the side of one cheek. Chin had wondered what would make such scars. ‘Very cheap,’ the turtle man assured them and then, to make her more alluring, ‘She has just been with your father.’

  The woman in the forest gestured for Chin to come closer. Chin asked himself what could be gained by any intercourse with a white woman who had hair above her lip and also a nose that was long even by white standards. He looked away from her and into the trees, where his uncle was returning to camp holding two small birds that appeared to be domesticated doves. It was not at all clear that the woman had been gesturing to him, anyway.

  ‘There is a small white woman with a large nose here,’ his uncle pointed out. Of course, he said it in Cantonese in case she understood English; it would not be so rude. ‘She is very ugly.’ Chin’s uncle dropped one of the doves onto his blanket roll and shook the other; its head bobbed impotently on its neck. He took his knife from his boot and spread the bird on
a tree stump fortuitously suited to this purpose. It was not a large stump, maybe two hands across, but it had many rings, each one fitting inside the next like a puzzle. People were like this too, Chin thought. A constant accumulation – each year, a little more experience, each year, another layer of wisdom. Old age was a state much to be envied.

  Chin’s uncle severed the bird’s feet in a single motion. ‘So very sad. So tragic, really. The life of an ugly woman. If she does not leave soon, she will bring us all kinds of trouble. You must make her go away.’

  ‘She is looking for opium,’ Chin suggested, opium being the obvious antidote to the woman’s state of overexcitement and the only thing he could imagine that would bring a white woman into a camp of Chinese men. He had smoked opium himself on several occasions and drunk it once. At no time had it left him in anything like this agitated condition. Poor ugly woman. He was overcome with sorrow at the situation. He moved to the other side of a tree, out of sight, and shouted at the crazy lady to go home. Her voice rose in response, an unpleasant, exultant clacking. It was possible she did not know that he was talking to her.

  ‘You must be forceful,’ his uncle said. He had an unusually mobile face and one mole to the left side of his nose, which quivered distractingly when he spoke. He himself held forceful opinions, which he hinted had brought him powerful friends as well as potent enemies. He lived life inside the fist, belonging, or so he claimed, to the secret Society for the Broadening of Human Life and the Chinese Empire Reform Association as well. He hated the Dowager Empress, Tz’u-hsi, with a particularly forceful passion. ‘Overthrow the Ch’ing and restore the Ming,’ he might say, instead of ‘Good day,’ or ‘The Manchu Dowager contains twelve stinkpots that are inexplicable,’ but only if there were no strangers present.

  He disapproved of Chin, whose philosophy of life was more flexible. Chin didn’t care anymore who was Emperor in China. Chin could read American newspapers and would say anything anybody wanted to hear, even when no strangers were listening. It was a shocking attitude.