Beginning to read any speculative fiction story means piecing its world together from the words the author gives us, one by one. What kinds of being live here, what spaces they inhabit, what laws their physical and social worlds must follow, what common sense they have that we do not, what technologies they know and how supernatural the cosmology will be—all come piece by piece as we interpret the words. And especially the names.
Generations ago, the people of Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song had to reconstruct their understanding of the very world around them in the same way, after a catastrophe called the Silence which wiped out all knowledge of names and language overnight. The story does not tell us what form of apocalypse this was. More to the point, it cannot tell us—because all the words that could have been used to explain it went away.
All that the ancestors of Berry’s characters were able to learn of the event—once a pair of legendary founders discovered how to divine names and make them stick in memory—was the chillingly vague saying that “something” had fallen “from the something tree.” The fabulist tone of Berry’s narration makes it meaningless to speculate whether the apocalypse might have been, say, an iconoclastic religious cataclysm against language or a disastrous outsourcing of human memory to a failing digital cloud; what matters, as in 2006’s The Road (Berry has said), is the archetypal nature of the world it has left behind.
Before the narrative even begins, The Naming Song’s character list is already an active instrument of storytelling, through which we immediately start to learn what is known and what is strange. There is a courier, our future protagonist, who works for the names committee and delivers new words. The committee has a chair, who brought the courier on board, and diviners, who specialize in discovering the words for sets of objects such as machines or flying things. Humans have the names of common items, sometimes coinciding with present-day English-language given names (Beryl; Ivy) and sometimes not (Ticket; Rope).
In the cities there are people who research ghosts and monsters, and beyond the city limit there’s a travelling show called the Black Square, headquartered on a train, where ghosts, monsters, and humans live together, far from the authorities’ control. There are ominous lawgivers called sayers, in charge of deletion committees, who can order wrongdoers to be forgotten, and there are figures from this society’s creation myth who first learned how to rediscover the idea of names.
Readers start to map the world along with the courier’s missions. There are gorges and rivers. There are boxcars and factories. There are empty houses and abandoned household items which people have forgotten are brass. There are moths, which exist in so many varieties that “moth” could be “bird” all over again, and farms, on one of which a farmer has reinvented the harrow on her own. There is whiskey, which a sayer’s son has sent to the names committee as an obvious bribe, and a well-fortified border, where settlers and watchers guard palisades against some threat as yet unnamed from outside. Apart from the names committee, committees for maps, ghosts, and dreams manage the other three pillars of the sayers’ power, but only the names committee are exiled to Number Twelve, a train which runs on tracks left behind by the old world, never permitted to stay in the same place for too long.
Limiting itself to the society’s known lexicon, the narration reveals this world only through words that have already been divined in its characters’ world—though more names are being discovered every day, and sometimes an image near the end of the story would not have been sayable at its beginning. Initially, we might not even trust that words describe what we expect them to. “Ghosts,” for example, are ubiquitous, performing manual labour, registered by another committee under the sayers’ control, and sometimes sent for calibration when they start acquiring human whim—a fate that the courier’s own ghostly companion has somehow escaped because he is exceptional in knowing how to draw.
Reading between the lines of what the text allows us to name, a suspicious reader might question what the language of “ghosts” could conceal. Are these ghosts as we conventionally know them, or has the practice of naming rendered the subjugation of a living population so invisible that they have been made social ghosts? Any such obfuscation could be possible in a setting where the very words people use to describe their reality are doled out by a bureaucracy this sinister.
The narrative holds back, it turns out, from playing with readers’ perception to quite this extent. Once the plot starts to see humans take fatal blows and ghosts appear from their bodies—in an asymmetrical war between the sayers and the “nameless,” who live in unmapped spaces invisible to the law—we start to be persuaded that these are ghosts in the plain-language sense. But they are put to work in factories, or anywhere else the capitalist class has need for workers who require no sustenance or pay, and ghost-wranglers are charged with bringing them in from the borders, in a system which still echoes frontier violence and a society where policing evolved from slave patrols.
The origins of ghosts are somewhat clearer than those of The Naming Song’s other main supernatural phenomenon, dreams. At some point between the old world and today, dreams began to emerge from human minds at night. Some manifest as small material scraps, or “draff”—the only invented word in the book’s vocabulary—while others become full-grown monsters, taking the half-shaped forms of characters from our dreams. Certain individuals, like the courier as a child, create this latter type of manifestation with particularly vivid minds. Hunters, another branch of armed law enforcement in this frontier society, are the dream committee’s agents for rounding up loose monsters, which serve as fuel for the army’s war machines.
It comes as little surprise that the sayers have been keeping secret the monsters’ true capacity for sentience, reason, and emotion, nor that the courier will discover how humans and monsters can learn to live together once she breaks away from Number Twelve.
Numerous details throughout the story remind us how incomplete the characters’ consciousness still is, by working within the limits of what has been named—until we realise that a story of discovery and delivery must lie behind every word which Berry has allowed himself to choose. Objects that readers can clearly recognize often go unnamed, like the two-wheeled machine with pedals and a saddle seen in a junk dealer’s warehouse among a heap of nameless items that is overloading even to look at for too long. Similarly, a furry, four-legged animal that darts between shadows, hunts vermin, and makes rumbling noises in its throat acquires several names after it befriends the courier, but never “cat”—very much in the nature of said creature.
Other things have taken on new names, but also new implications. The deck of cards from which the Black Square members draw lots to discover their new identities and roles in the troupe is clearly an everyday pack of American playing cards, Bicycle brand no less. But the names for kings, queens and jacks have never been relearned, nor in fact has the concept of monarchy itself, and the pictures of men and women in heavy clothes bearing weapons and tools are classified into Beards, Scouts and Gardeners instead, appropriately enough for this anarchist ensemble.
New players draw cards to join the set design, scriptwriting, caretaking, or engine maintenance crews according to their suit (rediscovered as Stones, Leaves, Shovels and Trees), and name themselves after their card henceforth; whoever draws the Gardener of a suit becomes the nearest thing to its leader. Two mysterious cards known as the Rider—jokers in the Bicycle pack—denotes the bearer is destined to take some future action that will permanently change the fate of the show, but have a way of disappearing for years (until, of course, the courier and the monster based on a dream about her long-lost sister pass through town).
Does this society have names for the most profound of human experiences, and—once we learn more about what it takes for couriers to deliver a word—what has to happen for them to be named? A handful of “border words,” which change the human understanding of the world forever, have been discovered since the couriers began their work. “Word” itself was one such, divined by the legendary first namer, Hand, to be able to speak about the practice of associating sounds with ideas. “Sleep,” “dream,” and “monster” have all become border words since, hinting at how important dreams are to the book’s cosmology (and how frustrating it becomes when their dynamics remain harder to grasp than the creation of the ghosts).
The courier believes there is at least one more border word, which it must be her destiny to find and deliver. In this, at least, she is right—and there will probably be a moment where the reader comes to notice what word is never spoken as the danger rises, and what might change in the world if it were known.
Like Berry’s first novel, The Manual of Detection (2009), The Naming Song’s chief conflict is between a secretive bureaucracy and an anarchic carnival, this time in a postapocalyptic setting and with reflections on language and naming that his first book did not attempt. The sayers, whose sinister leader Frost has the dystopian villain’s habit of inviting the courier to tête–à–têtes that give away his plans, want to keep their monopoly over names, maps, ghosts, and dreams so that their manipulations of the first namers’ history will go undiscovered and the economy’s dependence on ghost labour will be undisturbed. But ghosts, monsters, and humans live together on the Black Square, which retells the first namers’ myths, has access to hidden knowledge about the past, and has been banned from performing in cities since a play staged by the previous Rider turned a player into a ghost.
Naming, identity, and humanity are as closely connected in the story as one would expect, within the limits of what the characters know how to name. Ghosts are known by a description of their appearance, not a name, and monsters are beyond naming, until the outsider customs of the Black Square allow one monster to name herself. Family names and collective identities are beyond human knowledge. Most infants are given the names of everyday items or things from the natural world when couriers come through their town. The war between named society and the nameless drives the plot, with rumours of one last nameless city at the western edge of the known world propelling both sides into greater shows of force: this conflict, too, will be the courier’s to resolve; and she might be the first person in history to choose a name of her own.
Queer and trans people know very well the power of being able to find a name for oneself and having autonomy over it: The Naming Song has sympathies with this, without overtly broadcasting a metaphor. Sexual preferences seem to have no effect on how individuals are seen in society (the courier has had relationships with men and women, and both her intimate partners during the story are female). Gender seems to have no more impact than which pronouns are used to describe a person—but, deeper down in the gender order, all the sayers we hear of seem to be men. Yet the first namers, Hand and Moon, lived before anyone had delivered the names for “he” and “she” (the only gendered pronouns which have been delivered), so remain genderless to memory.
Whatever cultures existed before the Silence, they have been forgotten now, and the idea of cultural difference is something that, according to how the committees have constructed knowledge, cannot be thought. Racial, national, and ethnic identities, and the ideas about power and categorization which make them meaningful, are similarly beyond the scope of what humans can name. The text rarely even gives physical descriptions of characters that might suggest heritage as known in our world: perhaps the words that would make it possible to do so were not priorities for the names committee.
One must dig deep beneath the surface of language as it has been made available to grasp the implication that, when whatever fell from the “something tree” ended the world, cultures which had already weathered the near-erasure of their knowledge and identity through colonization and forced assimilation must have disappeared overnight, along with every other facet of history. With them would have disappeared the many creation myths of indigenous origin in which creators speak the world into being through naming and song.
The Naming has preoccupied fantasy since Tolkien and LeGuin, and elements of The Naming Song resonate with several different currents of speculative fiction. Players traversing the postapocalyptic world with fragments of prelapsarian lore and old-world memory are a trope renewed by Station Eleven (2014). The earliest known disagreement about the world before the Silence is whether the stories of The Child Who Went Underground and The Child Who Went Through the Glass are about the same child; the courier’s ragtag band of companions remind her of a story that we know must be The Wizard of Oz (1900). Riddley Walker (1980) inspires authors to ask how language could fall apart and be remade; the trope of a quasi-monastic institution trying to piece knowledge back together recalls A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), only with more scepticism about the priestly class. Like Snowpiercer (1982) or China Miéville’s Iron Council (2004), much of the story takes place onboard trains.
For his part, Berry has described the spontaneity of his plotting for The Naming Song as inspired by what running tabletop RPGs has taught him about the importance of preserving the inventiveness of childhood play. Play is another rarity in the book’s hardscrabble world until the courier’s journey ends, and yet another element of human life that we might not realise could be alien to the characters until we start to question whether they have the words. This realization—that no words can be trusted to exist—is what makes reading this apocalypse different from the others on which it builds.