Every now and then I’ll post a book of the month on here, though my frequency of posting may be more like every quarterly….or so. Anyway this month as I said I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction and my nomination for Hope’s Book O’ the Month is The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon. I found an excerpt from the book in the Nebula Awards 2005 collection, along with a good long explanation about the book by Elizabeth Moon in which she detailed her motivations for writing it and how she researched it. All of which I found very helpful and enlightening when applied to the novel. I’ll let readers find the essay and read it rather than explain.
The main character, Lou Arrendale, is a highly functioning autist in the near future. Things aren’t all that different except everyone drives electric cars and medical technology has advanced to the point where conditions like Autism are fixed before the baby is even born. Lou and other autists in the book were born a little too soon to be able to take advantage of the treatments. There is also an interesting but expensive medical treatment called LifeTime that doubles a persons natural lifespan. Moon refers to the intriguing medical treatment several times during the story but doesn’t go into detail other than to say its very expensive.
What is so interesting about this novel is that Moon’s personal experience in raising an autistic child has allowed her the ability to provide her readers a glimpse into the mind of an autistic person. Readers can experience Lou’s almost distant emotional nature, although he by no means lacks emotions, but his way of interpreting the world alters his emotional response from what one would expect in a traumatic or intense situation. Readers can also see the difficulty Lou and his autistic co-workers have in dealing with everyone else, their frustration with being labeled and how they deal with those frustrations.
Lou also has to deal with a greedy boss looking to shut down his work section and ’save’ money by forcing Lou and his co-workers into taking an experimental treatment for adult autists. He is also stalked during the book by angry former fencing partner. Both problem people are soundly worked out in the book. The boss is outwitted by another employee at the company and Lou’s manager, while Lou himself manages to fight off the angry stalker.
In the end though Lou and several of his co-workers opt for the treatment. It leaves me with a bit of a bittersweet ending. Throughout the book, Lou shows himself and others that he can and does grow as a person, yet he still opts for the medical treatment to make himself more normal.
It seems as if Lou is still forced into the treatment because of the prejudice of those people he enounters on a daily basis, from the waitress at his regular restaurant to the security at the airport who stop and question him. The label, ‘Autistic’ keeps Lou Arrendale from leading a happy life no matter how hard he tries.
There is also the question in the novel of whether or not treating the autism will leave them the same person afterwards with the same personality and feelings. Lou’s doctors seem a bit dodgy, making guesses and ‘assuring’ Lou and the others that they will still be the same people. However, the Lou that we see after the treatments isn’t quite the same person. He doesn’t have the same friends, doesn’t keep up with his fencing and so on.
The author does give some indication that the same old Lou is still in this new person by giving the new Lou Arrendale an almost split mentality. He often refers to the old-Lou’s feelings in response to the current situation as well as his own and also reacts to situations by thinking how the old-Lou would respond and how he himself is now responding.
I’ve read a few reviews hinting that the book was too long and Moon could have done well to cut parts of it out. There were sections of the book where reading bogged down a bit and I was tempted to skip ahead. This indicates to me that Moon needed to work on keeping up the tension and interest in the story, but it may have been hard to do from Lou’s perspective. The book ends with the different points of view coming in shorter and shorter snippets so the reader is left with the feeling that Moon ran out of room or even felt like she was getting too long winded. Although I believe that the shorter snippets of the new Lou after his treatment are okay because this story is really about the old Lou Arrendale and his choices.
I just finished this novel and it is one of the more thought-provoking page turners I have read in a long time. Inevitably, I initially compared it to Flowers for Algernon, and even Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but Moon’s book soon proved that it stands on its own with a happy ending
I like the fact that she let Lou be an individual who can appreciate who he is before he chooses to take the treatment.