Let me put my cards on the table at the outset: I have never been a science fiction fan, my last sampling of the genre having been about sixty years ago with John Wyndham’s Triffids. However, J.O. Morgan has come close to converting me. His book “The Martian’s Regress” manages to combine humour and invention with a sense of rhythm in verse that is truly poetic:
"Waking from his nightmare in the rocket Was like waking from a nightmare anywhere else The pressing blackness of the air Failed to hide the martian from himself. The nightmare too had woken."
After the humdrum prosiness of so much contemporary poetry, it comes as a relief to find this underlying iambic meter. J.O. Morgan seems pleasantly immune to fashion, with a variety of formal structures as well as free verse. And capital letters at the beginning of lines? It’s as if Tennyson is meeting Ted Hughes. Indeed, this sense of the continuity of the canon, combined with the fearless inventiveness of a dystopian future, accounts for much of the attraction of the book.
“The Martian’s Regress” appears at first sight to be a collection of poems in the conventional sense, but the reader soon discovers that there is an underlying narrative. The central character, the martian, has been sent to earth on what seems to be a surveying mission – the first line of Kindred is “He wanted to begin his survey work”. But he becomes diverted: “When they said he should be at the first test location/He was lounging in the bows of a rowing boat…” He is meant to be returning home with samples – The Martian Goes Hunting describes his search for appropriate items. He discards a tin-opener, a telephone and discarded umbrellas and chooses a wrought-iron poker: “A worthy trophy for the long trip home”. But he finds a deserted building “By far its best feature, the real selling point/Was its walled garden/Vast and vaulted – /An ample enclosure”:
"One could surely make a go of it Somewhere to settle, somewhere to grow old And with such a head start With patience One might even be happy there."
In the penultimate poem, The Martian Stands Back, the return rocket is wrecked – whether by accident or design is unclear: “He didn’t much care/It wasn’t his problem any more”.
The martian has a robotic companion:
"A womanly shell with the woman removed Refilled with simple logic gates Bloodless thoughtless yet obedient."
Operational Guidance describes how he recharges her, in stanzas that alternate with what appear to be extracts from an instruction manual:
"(And if you raise your voice against her She'll only work harder She'll burn out her coils Straining in her utmost efforts to please)"
Feminist readers may be uncomfortable with this reduction of the female sex to a mindless robot. I found myself wondering whether it would have been more interesting if the martian had been portrayed as a female and the robot as a male. It is probably immaterial. For the martian, sex is not a lot of fun: Of Martian Lovemaking is a hilarious description of the sex act:
"He jiggled until he felt a small part Of what he presumed was still him Inflating somewhere deep inside her. She winced and reached forward for a magazine. He counted dark spots on the ceiling to stop himself Reading over her shoulder."
However, the companion is not entirely devoid of personality. She ministers to him when he is in pain; she waits for him when he goes out; in an empty department store she picks up a gingham shirt, washed-out dungarees and an auburn wig.
All of this occurs in a deserted wasteland. The earth’s last inhabitants flew out to Mars, “seeking solace, a refuge, a future” and were allowed “measured, mixless integration”. The martians sent robotics to the earth, which brought back “small sterile packets of gas and grit”, enabling the martians to engineer “new strains of plant life” which escape, turning their world toxic. Whereupon:
"Those responsible turned their attention Back to the desolate planet And took great comfort in knowing They had alternative measures already in place."
The martians do not operate in the same way as earth-dwellers. Interspersed with the poems weaving the central narrative are others which J.O.Morgan describes as creation myths and folk tales, which delve into the martian past. Thus Ancestral Tales describes the original martians, and how their
"...numerous progeny, greasy, small And black inside and out Roamed the land through the silent night Seizing those to whom they took a fancy Men and women and children alike, Spreading further their blackness Infusing the whole populace..."
In other poems a more sinister picture is conjured, where the faceless beings in charge prepare for different eventualities. Thus in The Natural Course of Things the deterioration of the natural world is countered with deliberate actions. Dying birds are replaced with “superior flying machines”. When fish slowly rot, alive in their ponds, detergent is added to clean up the water. “The planet may have been going downhill/But we were forging ahead, we were leading the way”. Frequently Asked Questions satirises the opaque responses given by authorities to a questioning population:
"Now death can be postponed and birth prescribed to them that ask, what proportion of funding has been set aside for the hungry? We've deconstructed matter to its darkest particles. The loops of our magnetic tunnels now run beneath five continents."
There is an inflexibility in the martians’ approach. An attempt to create food results in a fungal mould that has to be destroyed. Undeterred, they start the same process over again. Similarly, when assessing their own way of life and finding that “the likelihood of their own complication of living/Was just too dubious to be conceivable…/They chose to mark this revelation down/ As anomalous/Such results were to be expected once in a while/And could be disregarded…”
This inflexibility is mirrored in the microcosm of the central character’s own consciousness. He is casually destructive from the start. In the spaceship he breaks a mirror and tears up wallpaper. Once on earth he batters mannequins in a deserted department store; creates hideous works from combined exhibits in a natural history museum; systematically wrecks elements of a cathedral – all out of what appears to be a bored vandalism.
The “Regress” of the title can be interpreted in two ways. Literally, it refers to the return from Mars to the earth. But on another level, in the martian’s discovery of a place where he can possibly find happiness, it is a regression of the species to an age of innocence. This is the only moment in the book featuring a positive emotional response. For the rest it is a depiction of a world in which nature is ruthlessly depleted by a skilled and authoritarian master-race who find it difficult to accept that they may be making mistakes. The reader may find this disturbingly familiar.
J.O. Morgan achieves his effects with great variety of form and structure. He is skilled in a use of repetition to create form – for example, Ancient Trickery consists of four stanzas, of which the first three begin with the words “The trick with…” The Martian Ages is in three numbered sections of ten lines each – a tercet, a couplet, a quatrain and a final single line, where the final line describes remedial action taken by the martian’s “pale companion”. This is a book created by a poet who has fully mastered his art, with a control that mirrors the eerily controlled environment of his creations. It is a relief to find that the martian finally seems to rebel.
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J.O.Morgan’s “The Martian’s Regress” is published by Cape