SOMETIMES a novel is so complex it’s simple. Take D. G. Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe. The novel chronicles the dystopian adventures of a woman told she has four weeks to live, and builds an intricately imagined and believable near future not so different from our own, complete with wildly popular reality shows that feed the appetite of a “pain-starved public,” even as death from anything other than old age has been virtually eliminated. The story is told in chapters that alternate between narration from Katherine’s point of view and the first-person account of Roddie, the host of one such Human Destiny program. At its heart, however, Compton’s book is about two essential predicaments of the human condition: mortality and love. Harkening back to social realist novels by the likes of Theodore Dreiser, Compton’s structure methodically but brilliantly exposes Katherine to different strata of society as she reckons with her diagnosis and Roddie reckons with the man his job has made him.
Published in 1974 during an era of political and social upheaval, a quiet novel like The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe might have looked, at the time, out of step, not radical enough. The cold war had turned hot in Vietnam, college campuses from the United States to France were the sites of a series of activist-sparked uprisings that transformed or failed to transform society, and terrorist groups like Baader-Meinhof took the bluntest approach to dissent. It was an anxious time: People worried about the environment, racism, the status of women. New technologies that seemingly transformed everyday life were introduced: In 1971, the CAT scan was field-tested; in 1974, supermarkets began to use bar codes; in 1975, the first home computers made an appearance.
Early 1970s movies included Solaris, Slaughterhouse-Five, Silent Running, Soylent Green, A Clockwork Orange, and The Andromeda Strain. Among the novels of the day were Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the first English translation of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Hard to Be a God, and important work by Philip K. Dick, Joe Haldeman, and Ursula K. Le Guin followed not long after. In short, Katherine Mortenhoe appeared during a fertile period of speculative production. Only a few years later, Hollywood blockbusters like Jaws and Star Wars would commodify not just the film industry but also, eventually, parts of the market for science-fiction novels as well.
Most of Compton’s speculative peers were looking outward in their work, toward alien encounters or stories that played out across vast vistas of time and space—and most of the counterculture media would have seemed more revolutionary. A Clockwork Orange, for example, contains scenes that on first glance are similar to those in Katherine Mortenhoe in how they comment on society, though more direct and flamboyant and, perhaps, cruel.
Yet Katherine Mortenhoe remains as relevant today as more obvious classics from the 1970s. This is largely because the novel stands apart from its times, but it is also because it displays an astonishingly easy intimacy and interiority. These are the hardest effects for a novelist to achieve, and all too often novels that critique media take on a metallic patina, a shell-like hardness as a result of this lack of fluidity. Katherine Mortenhoe isn’t a symbol set in silhouette against the klieg lights of a dysfunctional society, she’s a living, breathing person. Compton gives us not only a wise story and a chilling appraisal of society that still rings true but an indelible portrait of an intelligent, middle-aged woman grappling with the ultimate existential crisis: How does one conduct oneself while dying?
Katherine’s gift for sussing out the emotional states and motivations of those close to her as she nears death—what they’re really saying, what they really want—is both remarkable and ordinary. What’s ordinary is that most people have this ability to read those around them. What’s remarkable is Compton’s ability to describe it. His psychological acuity is one of several elements that sets his book apart from cultural artifacts that do no more than evoke nostalgia for received ideas of a mod-era England. In Katherine Mortenhoe this tendency appears briefly only once or twice—in a scene involving rich swingers, and even here Compton wisely subverts the hackneyed idea of a ’70s drug orgy.
Interiority and intimacy push back against nostalgia by placing the reader always in the present, continuous moment. By grounding the story in the human dimension, these qualities open a space for the themes of the novel directly concerned with the superhuman, with media and machine. Roddie, who as we learn early on has been implanted with a camera that records all he sees, is “the man with the TV eyes.” He and his boss Vincent are the 1970s equivalent of today’s most parasitical reality show creators and hosts. Their world is an uncanny mirror of our own, of an age in which everyone really is a camera eye, or at least carries one around in his pocket.
And just like today, the communication is two-way for Roddie. Things come through the screen in our modern life all the time now and infect us. We let the pixels that gather to form images or words affect us mentally and physically—we let that happen, we in many cases wish for it happen. We, in a sense, allow a kind of hypnosis to occur, by which we are then transformed, not always in positive ways. Compton suggests that those closest to the epicenter of the ubiquitous image-making, people like Roddie and Vincent who manufacture it and benefit from it, are those who suffer its greatest deformation: “The state of communion withered. The bones beneath these people’s faces were just as true, and the heroism just as possible, but the people themselves were recently constructed, totally alien. They were NTV [network] people.”
In an age in which privacy isn’t just vanishing but willfully renounced, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe seems not only relevant but proactively current. Katherine’s motivations and reactions and thoughts about her world are familiar but not trite. They include the questions we are only beginning to puzzle out: What should I share? What is my private self apart from my public self? How do I get off the grid? How does what I share affect those around me? Why do I feel like part of me has to die for another part of me to be revealed? And while The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is set before the existence of an ever-flowing social-media stream, it depicts a society in which it’s possible to become media: Roddie is literally transformed into a recording and broadcasting device. The book forecasts a world in which people crave virtual emotion; they have to feel feelings much like vampires have to drink blood.
There are also things Roddie’s camera eye cannot convey to the voyeurs who watch Vincent’s show. There are images that cannot be captured on video or in a still photograph but exist fully only in the moment of human interpretation. Compton illustrates this notion in a remarkable scene in which Katherine bathes in a stream. In an act of absolute genius he provides two contrasting descriptions of the act: Katherine’s own is practical and matter-of-fact, but Roddie’s is emotional and imbued with tender pity for a dying woman. For me, these moments are at the heart of Compton’s achievement.
The great trap awaiting novelists who embark on a critique of media—new or old—is one Baudrillard might have recognized as the pop culture consumerist hegemony. The observer becomes devoured by the thing being observed and the results are so broad, lurid, salacious, and in all ways colonized by the corruptor that object or character and backdrop merge. Compton’s terrible insight, into both Katherine’s interior world and—through an account that amounts to a confession—into Roddie’s view of events, shows us that interiority can trump the voyeuristic tendencies of the camera, the coarsening that would have otherwise leached away the private, the personal.
Few fictions, in theory, date faster than novels that grapple with media, except perhaps films on the subject. Furthermore, of late it’s become clear that novels incorporating the very latest media—text messages, Facebook comment threads—tend to be compromised by such inclusions. The surrounding text seems poor in texture, devoid of richness. Perhaps this is because, as John Durham Peters writes in The Marvelous Clouds, “We live in a palimpsest of new and old. Despite occasional prophecies of decline, the most fundamental media are still with us.” But perhaps instead, as he further notes, media is still learning not to be afraid to die, that detachment, not documentation, is key.
And if nothing degrades or evolves faster than media, then nothing can seem less epic in scope than the intimate details of an individual’s death—especially the death of a citizen who is not a great civic leader or historical figure. But in this regard, too, Katherine Mortenhoe seems even more important today than when it was published. In a very real sense the progress of Katherine’s deterioration, the societal denial of death itself, subverts the orgy scene I mentioned and carries the novel forward into the modern. Physical evidence of her sickness has a similar effect on waylaying bikers in another set piece. Confronted with the real real, the fake real—the constructions by which groups or individuals enact ritual to get what they want, or even to try to forget the simple, basic truth that everybody dies—is torn apart or rendered inert, without agency.
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Big themes, like love and death, are what we say we value in our best literature. But in fact, the best novels about love or death often go unappreciated; they make us too uncomfortable. Great writers, like D. G. Compton in The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, understand, too, that the unfolding reality of an important theme never exists at some portentous or weighty level; it can only come to life within the deft, nimble, specific details of character and setting.
Small moments near the novel’s end stood out for me as a living memorial to Katherine’s life, a life that feels so very real: Roddie and Katherine shivering on the beach, their frank conversation in which Roddie’s truth is revealed, all set against a backdrop of fading but not quite fading away, so flawlessly existing in the moment that any excerpts here would ruin the immediacy (and point) of such scenes.
Perhaps the greatest testimonial to The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (and the power of an interior life) is its strength in comparison to the film version, Death Watch. An earnest attempt, the film hasn’t dated well in some ways and can never match the intimate interiority of the text. You could argue this falls to the choice of director and cast, something in the script, but I think that in writing a commentary on our relationship to media, the public world, and the dangers and limitations of an ever-watchful recording eye, Compton hasn’t just written a masterpiece. He’s also written something that is, ironically enough, deeply and forever unfilmable.
There will always be an inner world that no one can see and that cannot be expressed except through the medium of words.
—JEFF VANDERMEER