253Geoff Ryman
Flamingo paperback, 364 pages, £6.99
Review by David Clark (1998)
In which a full Bakerloo line London Underground train en route to Lambeth North crashes, and that’s all, really. Or is it?
‘The print remix of the acclaimed internet novel’, the form of 253 is that of a game of numbers. Web designer and novelist Geoff Ryman wrote a novel on a website (which I haven’t seen), using hyperlinks between 253 character profiles (of 253 words each, of course) to allow us to follow the (few) multi-character stories that exist, the similarities and differences. It attempts to demonstrate the ways in which people are linked together. Presumably the 253 word limit reflects the shortness of attention span of the mainstream online reader. The printed version has no links (though we do get footnotes), is linear, and emphasizes difference, even isolation. How much of this was in the back of Ryman’s mind when he wrote it is anyone’s guess.
There are, Ryman says, 252 seats on a tube train; the driver makes 253 (Ryman’s unable to resist having exactly one person per seat and no more). Because the universe is held together not ‘by cause and effect alone, but by mysterious patterns, every one of those people reached an important point in their lives.’ A difficult book to describe. ‘The oceanic sense of how big life is . . . is enormously reassuring. The space, the endless opportunity . . . If you miss a train or a potential lover there will always be another along in a minute.’
That’s life in London, of course. A novel set in some rural village or other would be very different; 253 is really a book about Londoners. The universal (London's universal) in the particular. A load of nothing, or the world in a grain of sand on an overcrowded beach.
It would be a mistake to say that this novel (253 is a novel like any other, regardless of form) is an imposition of narrative upon a random group of tube travellers. The characters are (almost; what’s he trying to get at with that undeveloped William Blake thing? If it’s just what I think it is then I’m distinctly non-plussed) all fictional; Ryman is a writer of fiction, not a sociologist and, at best, has made up back stories for people he’s sat near on the tube. And he's done it very well.
The fatal flaw of 253 is that there isn’t necessarily ‛another along in a minute’. If one misses something or someone, then that’s gone, lost, the moment passed. Second chances occur but are rare. Lovers aren’t trains. Presumably this is why the train crashes, to introduce a sense of things passing. Or, maybe, the train crashes just because something had to happen to make 253 a proper, finished novel in Ryman’s mind. Whatever, I can’t help thinking of Kim Newman’s Life’s Lottery, in which stuff does happen. And inevitably of Tales of the City, and of any novel or series in which a group of discrete characters leave the moment and move through time. That’s what 253 really is, a moment in time. And being such, it's limited.
These kind of games – telling stories from more than one angle, adding lists, etc – have been played before, of course, one way or another. 253 probably does provide a new spin, a new way of narration that will, perhaps, become more common. I think, however, that more than a few years will before this kind of storytelling, and reading novels online, becomes widespread. It isn’t quite human nature. One tells a story. My guess is that it’s more likely that people will play some kind of collaborative game on mobile phones, kind of a role playing game in real life with real people, based around idle chat and perhaps dating. That would, then, be only semi-fictional.
Whatever, this form stuff is incidental. I have not chosen to write this review in 253 words, or to scribble it while on the tube, and look, it hasn't come out at 253 words, it's come out as an entirely different number of words. I am, however, running out of space, which perhaps demonstrates that the internet will turn out to be a better place for reading after all. I know I’m sick of cutting things down because of length. See how this red herring of form gets in the way of discussing the stories and characters?
Still, we’ll be generous, and count 253 ahead of its time. More importantly, most lives are like this, most lives don’t ‛have impact in the 80 or so years most people get’. So 253 is about the smallness and importance of many lives, and of interest as a London novel. However, it isn’t the book of the year.
And I can’t help thinking that it might have been better to leave out the crash, just write a stack of fictional online profiles and leave them online. Maybe even unsigned. •