Book review: The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

 

I have loved everything I’ve read from Sofia Samatar, and her latest work, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is no exception. It’s a strange, slippery, mesmerizing tale, a story that can feel like an abstract allegory, but then veer into wrenching intimacy. It’s science fiction, mysticism, fable, and also academic novel (or novella, to be precise).  In the dark Hold of a mining space ship, an unnamed boy is enslaved as part of an entire caste of people who are literally chained. But his artistic talent catches the attention of those above him, and he’s chosen for the recently revived University Scholarship for the Chained. His chain is struck off and replaced with a blue anklet. And he’s literally brought out of the darkness into light, into a world of air and light and campus quads, green lawns and classrooms and a flowing river. His mentor is a professor whose own father was from the Hold, and who was himself a recipient of such a scholarship. The boy’s new mentor, the daughter of a once-chained man, is well-meaning but naïve, and she will find herself as profoundly changed (if not more so) by the boy as he is by her.

 

This is a slim novella that’s dense with ideas, that blends and bends genres and operates at multiple levels. It’s sharply observed academic politics, a searching look at class and power and the often-superficial ways institutions address these, congratulating themselves on a name change or word games instead of even thinking to address real systemic issues. It’s a layered look at class and power in general, at differing layers of hierarchy and oppression. One of the most pointed ways in which the author shows the differing stations of characters in this story is through their names—or rather, the lack of names for certain characters. The boy is only ever referred to as “the boy.” His mentor is only referred to as “the woman.” The woman is a professor who has won awards, but she’s still part of an under-caste; like the newly unchained boy, she wears a blue anklet. And as both boy and reader come to realize, the ankleted may be above the chained, but they are not wholly free; they are beneath yet another class. As he adjusts to his new surroundings, the boy observes the ruling class of his world, those who live freely and easily and have never worn chains or anklets, and he realizes:

 

“The boy had been taught no name for this tribe. Instead of a name, they had names. They were Dr. Marjorie, Dr. Angela, Dr. Alvin, and Dr. Gil. The students were Ann and Pearl and Jack and others, on and on, always one at a time. What he knew about them was that they were far from the Hold.”

 

The ruling class doesn’t have a name because they are the default, the unmarked. They are not seen as a group; each one is an individual. They have the luxury of being seen as individuals in their society, not representatives of their class. “The boy” and “the woman” do not.

 

But although the boy and the woman are not given names, they are both rendered as memorably specific individuals to the reader, with some achingly specific details. In just a few sentences, Samatar can move one profoundly, as in the scene where the boy remembers being separated from his mother as a child, and then later seeing her from a distance, across a room, so far away that her face is “like a fingertip.” Abstraction and allegory coexists with intimacy, and as the novella progresses it becomes progressively wilder, weirder, and more mystical. The woman isn’t the boy’s only mentor; when he was in the Hold he was a student of “the prophet,” who told stories of old Earth, of a Wheel in the Sky, a River that is a Sea, and something called “a horizon,” a line that is neither up nor down. The prophet taught the boy the Practice, a nebulously defined concept that’s described as “the longing for understanding,” and which the boy sometimes feels during meditative breathing, or when absorbed in his art. With the teachings of the prophet in his heart, the boy finds himself in increasing command of an unexpected new power. And with that power, and with the solidarity of all the ankleted and chained, the boy and the woman might just upend their world and change it forever.

 

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is an exceedingly strange piece of work, mashing up genres, mixing the mystical and allegorical with the specific and real. It’s enigmatic, moving, haunting, and, like all Samatar’s work, lit with gorgeous, gorgeous prose. I don’t think I understood it all. But it casts a spell, and I’ll be thinking of it for a while.