Whatever genre we encounter—by which I am not speaking of SF or crime, but more broadly of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or drama—the author needs to engage with us, the readers, on multiple levels. We need to connect with the written word through our emotions, our senses, our imaginations, and our intellect. Yet, and here’s the rub, we employ different languages for each of those needs. And again I am not talking about a crude linguistic division, English or French or Swahili or American English; but rather the vocabulary we employ, their register, the way words are employed for the effects we mean to achieve. The coldly impersonal writing of a scientific observation will rarely excite hot passions; the evocations of poetry rarely employ the precisions of technology.

There are ways to employ different registers in the same work, of course. There might be multiple narrative voices, footnotes, quotations, prologues and epilogues, all of which allow us to hear different voices. But generally one or other of these registers will be dominant in the text, while other voices are separated out. It comes as a shock, therefore, to encounter all of these languages bundled together higgledy-piggledy within the same narrative. But that is exactly what we fall into the moment we begin Love Chronicles of the Octopodes.

The dominant register is, of course, the familiar narrative voice of prose fiction, though with a tendency to stretch some metaphors further than they are perhaps meant to go. As, for instance, when the narrator describes her octopus self as having “limbs [that] sprout like altered pekoe buds of modified tea shrubs, hybridized with the grassy resilience of seaweed” (p. 23). And yet the register will suddenly shift to a more dispassionate, scientific vocabulary, as in the same paragraph, when the narrator switches to talking of her “musculature shot through with myelinated nerves” (p. 24).

At times these different registers can clash in something that could be discordant or gorgeous depending on mood, as when Lee describes something “Roseate as a tidal bloom of red dinoflagellates” (p. 29). At other times the author, herself a poet, can speak in a completely different register drawn from other American poets. Most commonly (for obvious reasons, as we shall see), it is the voice of Emily Dickinson who sounds out unexpectedly from this mishmash of languages, though other allusive and elusive poets are heard too—at one point I would swear there was an echo of Wallace Stevens.

This clamour of different registers all coming from the same narrator (“remixing her arcane—if not metaphysical and elliptical—lexicons” (p. 32) as Lee puts it) serves to highlight the narrator’s own ontological uncertainty. In a near future of rising sea levels and unregulated genetic engineering, Emily is the result of an experiment gone wrong. A lock of hair preserved from the nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson has been used to generate a number of clones, but the automatic programs employed to slice and sew the genes have made a mistake in the case of our Emily. As a result she finds herself with the perceptions and memories of a human poet but the body of an octopus. Physically she is certainly an octopus—nine brains, eight limbs, three hearts—but psychologically she is human, even afraid of going into the water for fear of getting lost.

The engineers of Genzopolis, the ominously named Genome Omnibus Database, dispose of their mistake by dispatching Emily to the wrong side of the universe, through a black hole that smells suspiciously of rhododendrons. When I read that I find myself inescapably recalling the conclusion of Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy, in which the other end of the universe is revealed to be the starting point. Certainly the place where Emily finds herself is noticeably unalien, though apparently devoid of any life bigger than shrimps and sea cucumbers and the like. Indeed, the paradisal lagoon in which she makes her home comes complete with such amenities as a roll-top desk and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of jars of olives. Olives are among her favourite foods, along with such dishes as “seared papaya on black jasmine rice drizzled with ponzu sauce and garnished with scallions” (p. 131); as I say, Emily is hardly a typical octopus.

Here, when she is not wearing a kelp leaf as a sun hat or squeezing her entire body into one of the empty olive jars, Emily tells herself stories that might help her to understand why she is here, why she is an octopus. These memories, dreams, and imaginings, with no clear way of telling one from the other, or of identifying where one might end and another begin, constitute the bulk of the novel. There are fragments of fanciful sea myths, there are glimpses of the original Emily Dickinson (though what we see doesn’t always conform with what the historical record tells us), and there are scenes that follow some of the other clones, each living very different lives in very different circumstances. Sometimes we see our octopoid Emily working for Genzopolis and helping to establish the circumstances with will lead to her own exile, at other times she seems to have had human form back on the right side of the universe. There are visions that are romantic, such as the way the moonlight becomes transformed into a human visitor, a lover who is a mailman bringing her letters, though these letters are the G, A, T, and C of the genetic code. (Letters of the alphabet have a recurring symbolic importance throughout the novel, reappearing for instance as musical notes or as types of vitamins.) Other visions are dystopian, such as when the octopus Emily flies over a landscape looking down on a scene of environmental and genetic collapse in which the remnants of humanity have regressed to some brutal, pre-civilised state. Still others have a spiritual, almost religious overtone, such as when she encounters the maker, who might variously be identified as the gene editor who created her, as god, or as the author of this novel, and who, in whatever guise we might assume, greets every question with silence.

Love Chronicles of the Octopodes is not an easy novel to read, because there is no through-story to drag the reader along. Rather it is a book to be savoured for its extravagant glee in the use of language, as for instance when we are told of “the luxury underwater spas of ancient hydrotherapy galore, those centuries-old aquarium bathrooms of faux splendor, doubly kitsch, sadly flooded, short-circuited, inoperable” (p. 104). The double vision of a water cure that is itself under water is oddly exhilarating. As you close the novel you may be no closer to understanding our octopus narrator than Emily is herself, yet the richness of imagery will stay with you.