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Aliya Whiteley
(Solaris, January 2024)
Review by Nick Hubble
THE NARRATIVE OF Three Eight One is framed as ‘Personal Project PER59683758’ with an introduction, footnotes and conclusion by Rowena Savalas, and dated 7 January 2314. Savalas helpfully informs us that she lives in the Age of Curation ‘which commenced with the global adoption of the Magnaman method in 2168’. This method, sometimes referred to in the footnotes but never explained in detail, seems to be a system for sifting useful components from the infinite detritus masquerading as information produced across the Age of Riches, a period dating from the end of the twentieth century to the early part of the twenty-second century. In solving the challenges that plagued it, humanity has become posthuman by incorporating ‘the vast wisdom of the streams into the delight and discovery of organic living’. The problem for someone wanting to be a historian, as Savalas describes herself, is how to make sense of any of this vast quantity of data surviving from the past. For example, she tells us, roughly five quintillion bytes of digital data were created on 23rd July 2024 including the quest narrative, The Dance of the Horned Road, which forms the main body of text in Three Eight One.
Aside from some metadata, and Savalas’s footnotes, The Dance of the Horned Road consists of consecutive segments of prose, each 381 words long, with the breaks between segments marked always by the number 381, which therefore occurs on just about every other page of the novel. It is the story of Fairly’s quest, quite possibly written by Fairly, herself, although it is narrated in the third person. We learn how Fairly was chosen and what sort of things are useful to have in your backpack if you are on a quest. We follow her along the horned road through various adventures, such as swimming in a lake and working in a bar in the city. We encounter various beings, such as the ominous ‘breathing man’ and lots of small, red furry animals called cha. We stop, like all humans who are on quests and might happen to need a break, whenever Fairly is approaching an ‘ILR’ (important life realisation). It’s often very funny, as are Savalas’s footnotes, which begin to tell her own story in counterpoint to Fairly.
So, what’s with the 381? At one point it is directly mentioned in the text, not as a section break but as a helpline number providing care and assistance for the servicing of a certain device that recurs throughout the story. In one of Savalas’ footnotes, in which she references a source titled Optimal Suffering—States of Ecstasy and Swiping Right, while discussing the concept of love at first sight, she notes simply that ‘381 is love’. Of course, 381 is somewhat bizarrely internet slang for ‘I love you’ in our world but as Savalas, also points out, using the basic code of A = 1, B = 2, 381 = CHA, which takes us back to the red furry animals. In other words, you are going to have to decide for yourself what this means!
I’ve explained the set-up and structure of the novel in some detail because I think it is useful to highlight how, despite the science-fictional framing and the deeply strange quasi-allegorical quest that follows, this is very much a novel concerning our contemporary condition in what are now the mid-2020s. In fact, it is exactly what a contemporary novel would look like if you have a writer clever and different enough to be able to cut through the accumulated cultural baggage of our profoundly-messed up late-capitalist society and write from the perspective of the only kind of future there possibly can be: one in which people have moved decisively and irrevocably beyond most of the nonsense that characterises current everyday public discourse. This novel confirms, once again, that Aliya Whiteley is exactly this type of writer and we should treasure her highly.
It is not a spoiler to suggest that Savalas never really achieves the task she initially sets herself: of understanding what The Dance of the Horned Road means. Imagine, for example, trying to explain in full what Whiteley’s previous novel, Skyward Inn, means even to a contemporary audience who are deeply versed in contemporary British culture and who’ve lived through Brexit and the age of Musk; people don’t always get it and they may even find it all quite upsetting. What’s required though is not so much the capacity of ‘getting it’, as the willingness to let go of the old self and dance to a strange beat. Therefore, any attempt to understand and explain this novel in quasi-authoritative terms is simply the wrong approach. I realise this might appear as though I’m excusing myself for not really telling you what happens in the novel and thereby depriving you of the possibility of making an informed decision on whether you want to read it. Therefore, as a nod to reviewing etiquette, I will simply say that if you are the sort of person who gets unreasonably squeamish at the thought of hairs in a hot tub, don’t read this novel, but if you can live with the kind of polymorphous messiness such an image suggests, then you very much should read Three Eight One.