Out (1964):

After some kind of catastrophe referred to only as "the displacement", an unnamed country, apparently somewhere in East Africa, finds itself coping with a big influx of Colourless refugees, most of them former Ukayans or Uessayans. The government does its best to retrain them to useful trades like welding and gardening, but the Labour Exchange still has to overcome a lot of prejudice to find them work - respectable local people are convinced that the Colourless are genetically inclined to be work-shy, unclean in their personal habits, and so on. Moreover, they are subject to a mysterious illness of the mind...

It's pretty obvious what point this novel is making, seen from the point of view of British (or American) society in the early sixties, but there's a lot more going here than dystopia and crude political satire. The book is written in a peculiar style where the narrator makes repeated attempts to re-write essentially the same scene, changing it a little bit each time and reapplying key words and bits of descriptive language in completely different contexts to undermine what has just been written and remind us that this is all happening in someone's imagination (ours and the writer's), not in the real world. There's a kind of three-steps-forward, two-steps-back progress that eventually makes up something like a story, although it's never quite complete and logical, and we gradually get a sense of who the characters are and what the situation is, but it isn't at all obvious. It reminded me a little bit of the way villanelle form works in poetry - you keep bringing back the repeated lines, but make sure they mean something quite different each time they come back.

There's also another oddly disturbing stylistic game played by introducing very precise and carefully-used scientific language at unexpected points - hexagonal paving stones become benzene rings and the movement of a character's feet across them turns into a lesson in advanced organic chemistry, for instance. And there are a lot of Kafkaesque echoes of the bureaucratic jungle that you can't help thinking of as coming from the author's time at Bletchley Park. And the glamorous Mrs Mgulu, who introduces an oddly Firbankian note into postnuclear Africa.

Very strange and disturbing, but also strangely absorbing, and it managed to overcome my prejudice against dystopian fiction for the space of 200 pages...

Such (1966):

This novel uses similar non-linear techniques to Out, but applies them to a completely different setting, a first-person view by a narrator who has been resuscitated after his heart stopped during surgery, and is now trying to make sense of the experience of "dying" and coming back to life, which amongst other things seems to have upset his concept of time and his grasp of the relation of names to things and people. He is a psychiatrist responsible for treating the science faculty members at a university (where his wife is a computer scientist working in the astrophysics department), and the text keeps spinning off into images and language taken from astrophysics, quantum mechanics, complex-number theory, computing and medicine. And there's jazz music, B-movies and T.S. Eliot in there somewhere as well. Astonishingly enough, it all reads as though it hangs logically together at a certain level, and is written by someone who originally knew what all those words mean, but then goes on to improvise and bring them together in interesting new combinations. More like experimental jazz than narrative, and might work a little better read aloud in a smoke-filled basement than it does on the cold page, but still fun to read if you don't allow yourself to get too distracted into trying to look for narrative sense.

Between (1968):

This one explores language itself, looking especially at the liminal zones where different languages meet - bilingualism, translation, travel vocabulary, Your lifebelt is under your seat, mineral water labels, toilet doors, menus, shopfronts in foreign cities, and all the rest of it.

The central character (who, as usual, only starts to emerge clearly from the circling clouds of words about halfway through the book) is an interpreter on the conference and international-organisation circuit, who spends a lot of her time in aeroplanes and hotels on the way from one glass box to the next. She's never quite certain when she wakes up whether the person who brings her breakfast will be saying buenos días, Morgen, bonjour Madame, kalimera, or günaydın. And of course, her mind is full of different language equivalents for the little texts seen on notices wherever you go - safety instructions, customs regulations, use the bag provided for sanitary towels, breakfast is served from to, OMO washes whiter, please use the postcode - and those phrases keep popping up unexpectedly, in between (apparently) random snatches of the speeches she is translating, documents she receives from the Vatican concerning the annulment of her marriage, love letters from an unknown admirer, tourist brochures and informal conversations with colleagues, conference delegates, and hotel staff.

This must be a very niche sort of book. About a third of the text is in languages other than English - mostly French and German, but also quite a lot of Italian, and odd words and phrases from (at least) Romanian, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Turkish, and Polish. And you need to understand at least French and German pretty well to be able to follow the story. The rest are mostly obvious from context, especially if you've been a business traveller. If you happen to have the right background to follow it, it's great fun - even though the texts of many of the little notices have changed in the meantime (we would have to add "no smoking" and "save the environment: re-use your towels"), her boring speeches in French are still exactly the same boring speeches in French that open every international meeting I ever went to, and the conversations in the conference foyers still take place in the same mish-mash of languages.

One word that had me puzzled in this book was tutungerie. I noticed it several times, slipped into spots that don't seem to have any relation to each other semantically ("la Verité, la Justice, l'Humanité, Tutungerie"), and I was guessing by the end of the book that it must be a made-up word put in to check if we're awake. Not so - I googled it afterwards, and it turns out to be Romanian for tobacconist. Checking back, I saw that the first time it appeared in the book it was actually in a list of Romanian shopfront texts, so it's disappointingly legitimate!

Thru (1975):

Where Such deals with collisions between language registers, and Between with collisions between different languages, Thru could be said to be exploring what happens when language meets meta-language. The story of Larissa and Armel is being analysed and criticised in real time, as it is written, by an assorted cast of professors and students, in a crazy mix of every kind of analytical approach from classical rhetoric through to Lacan and Chomsky. But the students also seem to be writing the story, or perhaps living it, and their contributions carry the professor's handwritten comments and marks. And from time to time the layout of the prose text itself jumps over into concrete poetry, acrostics, lecture-timetables, and diagrams from the professor's overhead slides (which she writes with a Spirit Pen). And things keep getting interrupted from all directions - faculty meetings, student protests, interventions from Jacques le Fataliste and from professors Brillig, Slithy and Tove. And there's a running joke about the alphabet (A for 'orses, C for yourself, I for Novello, etc.). And much more craziness, including a joke index with greek-letter student marks (α+, β-, etc.) instead of page references.

Having presented us with rather more than seven varieties of pastoral (or rather past-oral), having killed off various authors and narrators, Brooke-Rose also seems to be asking not so much whether there is a class in this text, but rather whether there is a text in this text. And coming up with no clear answer... (and so on)

Probably even more niche than Between, as most of it will be unintelligible to anyone who hasn't served a sentence in a literature faculty at some point (and quite a lot of it - intentionally - even to those who have). This seems to be CBR at her most cryptographic, but it's also a lot of fun, even if you don't quite know what's going on - the puns and mangled quotations keep taking you enjoyably by surprise, and you'll find yourself holding the book at strange angles to try to make sense of the acrostics. Less scary than it looks, but only a little bit. ( )