Pigs fly
Yesterday I read “City of Truth”. It’s the third book I’ve read by James Morrow. I like the way his imagination works; all sorts of weird, fantastical things happen and his characters (almost) don’t bat an eyelash. It’s a shame his books are rarely available here in the Philippines. I only happened to see a copy of City of Truth because of a late lunch, rain, and a pervading laziness to return to work which led us to browse the shelves of a bookstore which sold previously-owned books. I bought it on the spot and read it once I returned to my OJT, despite the fact that my two companions and I were half an hour late. Not that there being on time would have made any difference; it was an unnaturally slow day, which was why I had enough free time on my hands to finish the book before going home.
It was more a novelette than a full-sized book, which may be the reason I found it less than satisfying. It would have probably benefited from a bit more length. Even so, it touched something fundamental inside me.
The plot is something familiar in many ways: in the city of Veritas, people are forced, through a process called brainburn which they undergo when they are ten years of age, to always tell the truth. As usual, rebels exist, and underneath the city of Veritas is the city of Satirev, where dissemblers go to recondition their truthful minds and learn how to tell lies once again. In the middle is Jack Sperry, a faithful Veritasian until his son Toby gets bitten by a rabbit and falls ill, whereupon he gets caught up in Psychoneuroimmunology and other New Age healing methods and is convinced that lying in order to keep his son happy is the only way to cure him of the disease.
Veritas, being a city of absolute truth, destroys any art which it deems is a lie: paintings of angels, literature riddled with metaphors, and similar works of the imagination. This is Jack Sperry's job, as a so-called “art critic.” It’s funny seeing art critics with sledgehammers. Meanwhile, Satirev attempts to teach lies by creating a wonderland wherein lies literally exist: pigs with wings, hot snow, talking dogs (they have a chip in their throat), and huge, genetically modified rats that chase cats.
I like this book because it shows both extremes (extreme truth and extreme falsity) and exposes the failings of both. Veritasians and Satirevians alike seem somewhat absurd and two-dimensional, and only when Jack denies both cities and sails away into the night (literally, since he leaves by the sea with his wife and an old sea captain) does he finally seem fully human.
So let me tell you why this book touched me:
I’ve always tried to avoid extreme positions; when I was in high school, neutrality was one of my main mottos. For a while I wanted gray to be my favorite color, even if it technically wasn’t even a color (I couldn’t stand it, so eventually I ended up with the standard blue). Eventually I realized that taking a stand was important sometimes; however, I also maintain that absolutes, strictly speaking, do not exist, and that humans cannot have absolute truths without losing something in return.
The point, the whole point of this contrarian café isn’t to just be a smartass and take the opposite view of every point but to see that, by taking the opposite view on everything, you actually take in all possible views and mold it into a somewhat messy but still coherent whole. You don’t need either/or. Recognizing that we are both honest people and liars every day of our lives is what makes us human.
To cut a long entry short: this café exists because, well, every story has two sides, even if that story is only being told by one person.
posted by Jael @ 12:31 PM
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