Mockingbird

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https://www.amazon.com/review/R3D622ZD5GL9G3/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm


I started this book with low expectations. I thought it was going to be a fairly typical “New Wave,” futuristic with a dated 1960-era psychedelic setting, long on drugs and groovy sex, but ultimately shallow and silly. What I found was a bit of strong literature about the importance of literacy in maintaining a human civilization.

The story is set in some undefined future. The introductory character is Robert Spofforth, a “Make Nine”robot with a suicide fixation, who, because he cannot commit suicide, returns to work as the Dean of New York University. Spofforth, we learn, is the last remaining Make Nine, which makes him virtually human but immortal. As the last remaining Make Nine, Spofforth ultimately commands the robots who control the world.

And it is a sad, decaying world, New York seems deserted. The population of North America is about 1 million. There has not been a human born in 30 years and the people who remain are kept in a perpetually drugged state, with unlimited access to marijuana and tranquilizers and television entertainment. Everyone - including Spofforth - is illiterate. No one keeps track of years anymore, instead they talk in terms of “yellows” and “blues” and “reds.” People are trained to respect “Privacy” with mantras like “Don't ask, relax” and “Quick sex is best.” There is a fashion whereby people in groups of three immolate themselves publicly. The robots are barely able to keep themselves in repair. In another 70 years at the most, the tired spectacle of sentience will be over.

Enter Paul Bentley, a professor of meditation in an Ohio university, who contacts Spofforth about rediscovering the lost of art of reading. Spofforth does not permit Bentley to teach reading but, instead, has Bentley translate record silent films onto recording BBs. Bentley does his task but wanders the city until he meets Mary Lou, the only woman in the world not taking drugs. The two become close and briefly begin living together.

Then, the book kicks into a higher gear as Spofforth arrests Bentley for the crimes of “cohabitation” and teaching Mary Lou to read. Sent to a prison, Bentley discovers inner resources and strength and escapes the sloppily-run prison and begins his trek back to New York. At the prison and during his journey, Bentley rediscovers the idea of community and the importance of literature in making a person an integrated human being. Meanwhile, Spofforth has taken over Bentley's role with the now pregnant Mary Lou, which, I believe is where the title “Mockingbird” really comes from (as opposed to the line of poetry often repeated in this book: “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,”)

This turned out to be a very effective work of literature. I was surprised, although what is more surprising is that I have never read it. It was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1980, but for some reason it never made it across my mental grid.(Admittedly, 1980 was the year I started law school, which made keeping up with science fiction somewhat problematic.)

There are repeated references to the illiteracy of the world, and the importance of Paul being able to read, which helps him repair robots and find food on the beach and to make sense of his alienation from his social world. Wikipedia says that the author Walter Revis was a college professor who was concerned about the growing illiteracy among his students during the several decades before 1980. This concern - and his theme - seem even more palpable in 2016, when, if anything, students have become more aggressive in their demand to have their sacred ignorance protected by facts that they can describe as biased or hateful or disturbing. Make Nine Robot Spofforth explains the reason that illiteracy was imposed on humanity as follows:

“‘Reading is too intimate,' Spofforth said. ‘It will put you too close to the feelings and the ideas of others. It will disturb.”

This seems a strangely prescient vision of the 21st century. Previously, censorship was imposed because it might cause people to act against the social order. Today is the first time in history that censorship is imposed because it might make some people feel bad or “disturbed.”

And:

“said, ‘Reading is the subtle and thorough sharing of ideas and feelings by underhanded means. It is a gross invasion of Privacy and a direct violation of the Constitutions of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth ages. The Teaching of Reading is equally a crime against Privacy and Personhood. One to five years on each count.'”

In Tevis's world, it seems that people fetishized individualism and privacy, until they became a shallow mass with no private life. In one part of the book Tevis has this image:

“Behind the judge was the Great Seal of North America, just like the one in Piety House at the Thinker Dormitory. It too was covered with dust, which had settled thickly on the relief images of dove and heart; and the plasticasts of the twin Holy Goddesses of Individualism and Privacy, which flanked the Great Seal, were also covered with dust.”

(Parenthetically, this made me think that between the individual and the State, there must be the community, and it is the task of totalitarians and Statists to eliminate the intermediate levels of society, without which the individual is reduced to a slave of the State.)

Perhaps, Tevis's point was that the ability to read creates a community of the mind with the past, which amplifies and extends the individual. On his journey back to New York, Paul observes:

“Driving along the rutted, ancient green highways as I am now, with the ocean on my right and the empty fields on my left under the bright springtime sun, I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.

I wish I could be writing these words down, instead of dictating them. For it must be writing, as much as reading, that has given me this strong sense of my new self.”

Of course, Tevis could not be totally prescient: he missed computers. I was amused by this observation, supposedly made in the year 2557:

“Although the manufacturing of typewriters had ceased years before and spare parts and ribbons were almost impossible to find, typewritten scripts continued to be turned out.”

Little did he know that typewriter ribbons would be passe within 20 years, not 500.

And this:

“So I managed to rig up my phonograph and the generator, but when I tried to play records the needle, as I had feared, would not stay in the groove while the bus was moving. I stopped the bus on the road for long enough to play the Mozart Jupiter Symphony and a part of ‘Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.'”

Here we are less than 40 years later, and phonographs are virtually impossible to find.

This is a strong, well-written book that deserved its Nebula award nomination.