Review - Splinter, by Adam Roberts

This is a book I wanted to read for quite a while now. Having read, by Adam Roberts, only A Distillation of Grace, in The Solaris New Book of Science Fiction, it was a pleasant surprise to read Splinter. First, I must confess, because of the delicate, exquisite cover design by Darius Hinks, which made people turn their heads and sneak peeks in the subway, in cafés, or wherever it was that I settled myself to read it.

And the content didn´t disappoint me at all. Not exactly exquisite (for that wasn´t Roberts´s intention), but at the same time intricate and vivid, and inspired by Off on a Comet, a Jules Verne story which is available for free download here, Splinter tells the story of the last days of Earth - and what happens to its very few survivors after that.

The story begins when Hector, a thirty-eight old American man living in Europe, returns for a few days to California to see his father, with whom he doesn´t have the best of relationships - in fact, he almost never talked to him since his mother died and he left for Europe. Hector is a very rational guy, who likes to see everything through a intellectual lens. So it´s kind of a shocker when he comes to visit his dad in a ranch in the desert, a ranch he bought to live with a small, very simple and friendly community - of people who strongly believe the world will be destroyed by an asteroid very soon. In fact, they explain to him, everything is going to end in the night of Hector´s arrival.

Evidently, he doesn´t believe a bit neither in all the talk of the members of the community, nor in his father, who seems pretty convinced of that as well, but who´s also a rational, straightforward man, and doesn´t make any effort to win his son´s trust on that matter, because he has studied the matter and just know for a fact that it´s true. So, he just goes with the flow, a thing that annoys Hector immensely. In the first part of the book, we are led through the convolutions of his mind, almost a Woody Allen-esque essay on mild post-adolescent paranoia. It´s even laughable in some moments.

But the end of the Earth happens pretty early in the book - or so we are told. Of course, despite a great earthquake that almost kills Hector (he bumps his head hard when he gets off him room in the middle of the night, but doesn´t quite fall off the stairs because - for him it´s certainly his imagination doing the trick - he feels himself weightless for a second and a half before landing on a couch that cushions his fall), things doesn´t change much... at least, not in the beginning.

For a thick fog descends all over the place and they can´t see the sun any longer. Days and nights become shorter and shorter, much to Hector´s amazement. But all these strange phenomena can´t convince him at all: he always have a scientific explanation for them (even though he knows that he isn´t a scientist, and even his own explanations are nothing more than sheer speculation). He even tries to get away in his father´s car, but he can´t bring himself to do it. That first try is reminiscent of Luis Buñuel´s The Exterminating Angel. There will be a second one later in the book, but this time he, his father and another member of the community will get out of the ranch, but they won´t be able to ride very long because of the terrain, now strangely sloped (it was flat before).

The second and the third parts of the book are written in different paces - and in different tenses, which give the reader a very strong sense of intensity and finality. The first part is narrated in the past (Hector did, he said); the second is in the right-now, in the present (he does, he goes), and the third, of course, is set in the future (one of my favorite tenses, much used by the OuLiPo authors, like Georges Perec and Italo Calvino).

Splinter is not exactly a post-apocaliptical story, at least not in the classical sense. It reads more like a mix of the abovementioned Buñuel movie and a locked room mystery, in which the characters are in a place and simply go along with a situation that has been established for them before, so all that they can do is to worry about other things - like survival, for instance. But before long Hector can see that they aren´t exactly fit for this task. He certainly isn´t, and he doesn´t offer to be the savior of the community, on the contrary; he almost becomes their Enemy, their Antichrist, before attaining, at the end, a kind of holy man status, due to strange daydreams he experiences, daydreams that his father also have, and that are interpreted by everyone as the asteroid (who, after shattering Earth, ripped off the part of the planet they were in and took them for a wild ride through the Solar System) trying to communicate with them.

Very well written, Splinter is not only a page-turner, but it´s also a veritable meditation on how one can choose to cope with a situation (any situation) or simply remain apart, but never entirely aside of it. It´s an elegant twist of the old Eldridge Cleaver saying "You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem". Hector is torn apart for not knowing even if there is a problem in the first place - but he chooses not to discover the truth. And that´s his undoing.