Geoffrey D. Morrison’s strange and philosophical novel The Coffin of Honey opens at some unspecified point in the nearish future, not so far off that people don’t still listen to 2030s acoustic disco when they’re feeling nostalgic, but long enough to have seen a reconfiguration of coastlines and a reshuffling of national boundaries. The world’s ideological binary is, once again, capitalism versus communism, under a new set of geopolitical alignments. A small but significant subset of the population is living “over the wall” as Communards. The date, as shown in the chapter headings, is Revolutionary Year 44.
Life on the Communard side seems pretty sweet. (Morrison’s author bio identifies him as a trade unionist, sending a clear signal as to the direction in which his sympathies would tend to lie.) Access to the internet is limited, which you could call either censorship or a digital detox in service of wellness. Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) is Communard, and so is Aotearoa (New Zealand), and the Isle of Skye. The state of Kerala is not Communard, but many of its residents would like it to be. They’re represented in the legislature by one Varughese, of the Communist Party of India.
Varughese is slated to give a speech about Kerala’s eighth Coastal Management Five-Year Plan, an event that is fittingly being held outdoors on the beach at a makeshift podium, but he’s late. He arrives, finally, looking a bit flustered and unkempt. He missed his stop, he says, when he got talking to an older woman on the bus about her son’s employment problems. He’s just launched into his presentation when he notices his audience seems to have become distracted. The distraction? Something on the horizon, something inexplicable. Not a ship, but something that moves in a dancing manner signifying an alien propulsion system, an otherworldly phenomenon: a sort of nacreous lozenge, silent in its approach. It stops in front of Varughese. A doorway opens. As he steps through it, he spontaneously begins to sing “The Internationale.”
What he finds inside is not a ship’s interior, but an exterior landscape of stark, barren beauty, a desert scene with two moons, one pink and one yellow. Alone in this unpopulated land, he realizes this is a “world without exchange” where he is “the only human soul on this whole world and for once in the tumble of human time there was a world someplace where every person upon it was actually free,” a world of “uncommodified rocks and sand” in contrast to that other world “where everything had its price.”
Varughese is the first to be taken inside the apparition and, in due time, deposited back unharmed on the Kerala beach where he started. Soon these inductions become widespread. There’s no obvious pattern as to who gets taken up, nor do all these people see the same thing. The landscapes vary (and assorted national governments get very excited when the dust on the returnees clothing proves to contain rare minerals of strategic importance). Some are returned to different locations than those from which they embarked, often landing behind Communard lines; some encounter fellow human travelers within the space and discover a facility for learning one another’s languages.
From the setup until nearly the final pages of the book, it isn’t clear what kind of a story this is going to be. Spy thriller? There are spies. Intergenerational epic? Plenty of characters have what you might call mother issues, friends or siblings lost to violence, all the pieces that could make up a compelling emotional drama of sweeping historical scope. Classic sci-fi with a big conceptual reveal? I won’t tell you whether there’s a reveal, but I will tell you that if there is, you really have to wait for it. By the time you get there, it might not matter anymore—the accretion of hints and details becomes greater than any bald-faced explanation of weird phenomena.
Structurally, the narrative unfolds largely through documents: journal entries, memoranda, and selections from books like The Rhizomes of Credo: Lifeways of Red Hyrcania. Most of these are brief, but, around the halfway mark, we’re confronted with a thirty-six-page manuscript titled “The Bell Letter” by The Bell Letterist. It consists of three paragraphs which run, respectively, half a page, thirty-two pages, and three and a half pages. It is worth setting aside the time to read this section all in one gulp, for full effect.
In fact, the book as whole demands careful reading. There is a lot packed into the corners of this narrative, things said offhand or indirectly that are easy to miss, or to misconstrue. As Nabokov said, “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it,” and The Coffin of Honey is a book of Nabokovian complexity that invites re-reading immediately upon completion.
For example: The text is sprinkled with historical and literary allusions which can add to the fun, though only to the extent that the reader is in on the game. The Revolutionary Year dating system uses the month names from post-Revolutionary France, such as “Pluviôse” and “Germinal.” The character Forough, resident of Hyrcania Kolkhoz in a Communard region, makes frequent reference to the Persian epic Shahnameh and to the Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds, about a flock of talking birds on a quest to seek a wise king called the Simurgh, whose name turns out to be a pun pointing back at themselves. Numerous characters invoke the history and myth of Alexander the Great, who according to legend had his corpse entombed in a coffin filled with honey—an evocative image susceptible to varied interpretations in relation to the themes and plot points of the novel.
Morrison seeds the narrative, too, with many delightful little moments. In the encounter with the first of the unknown aerial objects, told from a perspective close to that of the Communist politician Varughese, we hear that the oncoming apparition “… describes complex figures with no loss of momentum, turning not so much ‘on a dime’ as on the absence of a monetary system as such.” Is this a little heavy-handed? Arguably, but in the same way that Communist propaganda might be heavy-handed, so it works on two levels.
In another scene—one that resonated greatly with me as a person of rural background who’s often baffled by the norms of fancy literary events—when the Communard poet Forough travels into capitalist Qazvin for a poetry conference, she wonders during the service of the plated dinner “… why you didn’t all just go into the kitchen together and make your own. How else were you supposed to get to know the other attendees, if not by preparing a meal together?”
At home on the kolkhoz, Forough becomes close with a resident named Jiayun, whose intense focus on the collective’s chickens causes him to trail little white feathers everywhere he goes. At a certain point he starts teaching one of the chickens to speak by having her peck at Chinese hànzi on flashcards. Within this avian instructional scene Jiayun and Forough admonish one another for being too consciously strange and too effortfully charming, too much the “rare birds” to get along with genuine ease.
The narrative revolves around three primary characters (four if you count The Bell Letterist), none of whom we really get to know very well. The military agent [Name redacted] keeps a journal in which he commits to total honesty in the interests of self-knowledge, but it’s questionable how far his radical disclosure should really be trusted, given the nature of his employment and the redaction of identifying details. Varughese is an enigmatic figure, a representative of the people but still a politician, his public image clouded by rumour and certain improbabilities in his backstory. Forough is a poet but we never read her poetry, other than a snippet consisting mostly of ampersands. And of course the alien intelligence, if it is an intelligence, if it is alien, is most unknowable of all.
In the end, the question is whether the details, moments, allusions, half-drawn characters, clever phrasings, and evocative impressions cohere into a sufficient composite. I think they do, but a reasonable person could remain unsatisfied. The novel’s refusal of closure is its weakness and also, I believe, its point. A more definite conclusion would not definitely be better. The conclusion is not, ultimately, to be found in the book, but within the reader.