Mark de Silva’s “Square Wave” is a maddening puzzle of a book. Set mostly in 2027 in the fictional East Coast metropolis of Halsley, it is a novel long on concepts and hypotheses, but sometimes short on character development. Still, if pondering the looming apocalypse, while listening to esoteric music and working out how one’s ancestors have contributed to the current geopolitical moment in history is your cup of tea, this may be just the book.
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Carl Rutland Stagg is a philosopher moonlighting as a government agent. His life’s work is a murky treatise which attempts to link the imperial conquest of Sri Lanka in the 1600s to the unstable political situation he finds himself complicit in. The link to the past is personal to Stagg, as several of his ancestors were among the Dutch and English forces trying to colonize the Sinhalese kingdom he is researching. While ruminating on the distant past, he wanders the night-time streets, tracking the movements of prostitutes and their clients. Someone is beating the working girls and the government is trying to get to the bottom of it.
Stagg has a girlfriend about whom he has unresolved feelings. She is the subject of elaborate masturbatory fantasies yet he has trouble actually having sex with her. It’s a telling insight, which can be extended to most of the characters in the book. Most seem to get off on ideas a lot more than their actual lives. And the ideas come at the reader often with little warning or context. Oftentimes it takes a few paragraphs at the beginning of a chapter to figure out which century we’re in and who the narrator or speaker is. By giving little guidance, de Silva forces us to make our own narrative linkage between disparate voices and to draw our own conclusions.
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Every now and again, de Silva has a character think something the reader may very well be thinking: “Stagg’s sense of what Ravan said was vague in a way that pleased him. That he was under no obligation to grasp more than half of it, that he didn’t need to pose smart questions — he’d smoked and couldn’t reasonably be expected to, however interested, however bright he was or wasn’t — made him want to hear more, to revel fecklessly in Ravan’s words, which had poetry in them.”
The near future of the novel is an odd amalgam of very specific late ’90s-to-early ’00s period detail and dystopian speculation. The musical groups which serve as inspiration for Stagg’s friends are post-rock bands like Dianogah and Tortoise, which would only be known to a particular subset of the reading public, but the concerts where these musicians work out their elaborations of their often impenetrable compositions take place in a fictional city. The uneasy melding of the actual and the imagined gives the book its own peculiar rhythm but sometimes leaves the reader perplexed. There are strange anachronisms peppered throughout. Why, for instance, would blogs still be a viable publishing platform in 2027 when they are nearly extinct in 2016?
The most compelling and horrifying concept in “Square Wave” concerns well-meaning scientists working to create clouds and disperse advancing storm systems. Their intent is to alleviate drought or prevent flooding, but the potential to cause unintended harm grows with each successful field test. Malevolent, shadowy forces are at work behind the scenes, but we are never made privy to their true aims. De Silva piles on philosophical, musical, aesthetic and political ideas until we are made to feel truly at sea.
The fact that no solution or resolution is offered is not a drawback. It is not the job of fiction to give answers. But after spending nearly four hundred pages with Stagg and his friends and enemies, they mostly remain ciphers. Perhaps the heavy conceptual load each of them must bear leaves little room for a better acquaintance. Were de Silva to show his people a bit more of the love and attention he showers on his ideas, the future he forecasts for us would be an epic deluge rather than the intermittent storm he has conjured here.
Dmitry Samarov is a painter and writer in Chicago. He is the author of “Hack: Stories From a Chicago Cab” and “Where to? A Hack Memoir.”
“Square Wave”
By Mark de Silva. Two Dollar Radio, 384 pages, $17.99