Adventures in book-surfing

Sam Mills’s new novel begins in 2019, when two young people are brought together by Augustus Fate. The celebrity writer drugs his fans Rachel and Jaime with a special tea before summoning them into one of his future bestsellers. Having recently met online, the pair become inseparable in the ensuing five stories that form the bulk of The Watermark.

For much of the book the heroine is an artist with traumatic memories, while the hero has some connection to music. As Fate propels them through time and space, they enact different versions of their first encounter, courtship, love-making, arguments, and so on. Essentially, though, it is the same eternal plot, for “the stories of people do not change so very much”. Rachel and Jaime take turns narrating; every now and then they realize they are in a novel and, growing frustrated, attempt to break away, only to be sent on their next fictional journey.

Their first stop is Oxford in 1861, where their chances of happy-ever-after appear slim. On hearing the omnipotent author dictate their story – “Thomas began to search in vain for the source of the mysterious voice” – the protagonists decide to return to reality. Missing their target by five years, they reconvene in 2014, in Manchester, and have a great time together until things turn grim. A company specializing in “Booksurfing”, as this method of travel is called, offers an escape. On its premises unconscious people are convulsing in agony, biros stuck in their heads, but the adventurers take the risk.

Choosing a Russian novel as their next destination, they are reunited in Carpathia in 1928. “My fate was falling on me like snow”, the hero relates. His beloved has been denounced as an enemy of the state, but their romance continues among sacred wolves, regal tyrants and random bits of Russian, sometimes rendered in Cyrillic. The “dictatorial winter” is remembered fondly when the soulmates meet next, in 2047, in a dystopian London where robots abuse children, have sex with humans and undergo therapy. “We were supposed to be having our grand love story”, Rachel complains, “but we ended up like every other screwed-up middle-aged couple.” Forced to flee again, the lovers return to Oxford, this time landing in 1910, and make one last effort at independence.

The Booksurfing game would be more entertaining if its rules weren’t so complicated. How much magic tea to take, how to summon a deus ex machina, what happens if you die mid-plot – these details can distract from the main developments. It is also rather difficult to identify the author of each story. Fate has co-opted into the enterprise several writers, including one who was kidnapped in 2007 and dispatched to 1861, tasked with writing a novel set in 2014. As these layers agglomerate the protagonists can be forgiven for wanting out.

Characters desperate to take control are dropped into the action by means of another literary device, pastiche. “I longed to fill her with such a happiness that she would treat every meal like a joyful feast” is one of Mills’s tributes to Victorian fiction; elsewhere she turns to sci-fi and fairy tales. Read as parody, these stylizations mostly work, though the lack of subtlety can be jarring, whether we are being asked to consider “the hiss of snow falling on my tongue and teeth” or “the first stab of guilt [that] knifes me”.

The novel’s title refers to that unique ingredient present in the work of any true artist. In the case of Mills it is the irony that animates her dialogue, be it the characters’ reflections on feminism in the nineteenth century or their squabbles over how much toilet paper it is ethical to use in the twenty-first. Unafraid of meta jokes, Mills also mocks “the voice”, refusing to elevate the author to the status of a demiurge. Conversely, the questions of free will and authenticity are addressed in full seriousness, the better to deliver the novel’s key message: that the notion of being in control of events, let alone in some incontestable reality, is an illusion.

Fictional personalities have frequently tried to go real and enjoy life on their own terms, but their creators invariably get in the way. In Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), an aspiring writer closely watches his characters to prevent “unauthorised boozing”; in Money (1984), Martin Amis lightly disguises himself to follow his hero to the pub. Mills, too, plies her protagonists with drink, as if to make them forget their reality and toe the story line. The Russian chapter is, naturally, awash with moonshine, while in England they party like YBAs; sometimes the lovers drink “to tune each other to extremes”, and sometimes they take “one too many whiskies to ease our sadness”. Then there is that mind-altering tea, offered to them along with “the immortality of being preserved in a potentially prize-winning book”. Yet the ingrates keep longing for the real world, not content with getting wasted on the page.

What they – and we – struggle with is not the novel’s central question, “How much of our lives [is] ever real?”, stimulating as it is in itself. Had Sam Mills tackled it with more style, she might have persuaded the protagonists to stay put: when they need to step out for air, it is usually because they “have woken up to the birth of our hangovers”.

Anna Aslanyan is a freelance writer and translator. She is the author of a popular history of translation, Dancing on Ropes, 2021

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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