2023/178: Three Eight One — Aliya Whiteley

I don't know why I was so obsessed with end points. I think I was still imagining that every story had one. [loc. 2021]

Rowena Savalas is seventeen years of age in body, and six hundred and sixty-three in streaming years. She begins a personal project on 7th January 2314, somewhere on the 'reclaimed Jurassic Coast'. Rowena is studying the Age of Riches (basically the 21st century) which is defined as 'an intense and consuming explosion of digital information'. From her vantage point in the calm and rational Age of Curation, she's attempting an analysis of a document called The Dance of the Horned Road, which dates from July 2024. As her reading progresses, and her footnoted annotations reflect her attempts to make sense of its references, it seems increasingly likely that The Dance of the Horned Road does not describe 'our' 2024 -- that it is, in fact, a work of fiction.

The narrator and protagonist of Dance is Fairly, a young woman who goes a-questing, as many have done before her, on the Horned Road. The world in which she lives is part Bronze Age (the stockaded village in which Fairly grew up) and part Space Age (the Spire in Telezon, from the top of which rockets are launched into space). Fairly's quest begins with her pressing a button on a Chain Device, which changes her narrative from third-person to first-person. There will be more Chain Devices: also a camper van, an ominous and persistent Breathing Man, and a plethora of the mysterious cha.

The cha -- small furry animals, possibly reddish, with pointed ears and long back legs -- are the mystery at the heart of this novel. Sometimes (as painted pebbles) they're currency; sometimes they're friends and protectors; sometimes, to Fairly's initial revulsion, they're food. There's a cult that claims they are ancient cosmic deities who will save humanity. There's a woman who claims they are pigs, and fattens them up to be made into bacon and sausages. The cha absolutely fascinated me, to the extent that when I initially started to write this review I remembered them as the focus of the novel.

But I'm not sure that there is a focus, or an explanation, or a conclusion. Rowena's life -- her physical life -- is changed by reading Fairly's document: Fairly's life changes over the course of that document. But is it a journal, or a work of fiction, or something quite other? Rowena says, near the beginning: "I asked myself the same question over and over and over while reading: What does this all mean? I'm beginning to think that's the wrong question to ask." Perhaps by the end of The Dance of the Horned Road -- or by the end of Three Eight One -- the reader will conclude that 'meaning' is not the only, or even the most important, quest(ion) within a story.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review: UK publication date is 16 JAN 2024.