April 9: Borne Thoughts IV

[kinetic_elaboration]

A few more miscellaneous thoughts on Borne and then I’ll finally put this book behind me.

The Wizard of Oz: I really can’t connect this to anything but the confrontation between Rachel and the Magician in the Company had Wizard of Oz vibes for me for real. Mostly the Wizard of Oz in popular culture since I’ve never properly read the book or watched the movie. The main character goes on an arduous journey to the place where all secrets should be revealed, meets the Magician (Wizard) there, finds her lacking. The strange mirror is described as being similar to a curtain–is this a clue to how very unimportant the vision beyond it is?--and at any rate it’s also broken, so even if it had import in the past, that’s gone now. I do think that anything anticlimactic with the Magician is on purpose: as I wrote before, she’s a figure who plays by obsolete rules, so she is herself easily made obsolete, and that’s the whole point of her in the narrative. Tying this denouement to a famous anticlimactic twist makes sense to me, although maybe it’s a stretch, as the novel in general isn’t very Oz-like, I would say.

Borne’s fate: Another criticism I saw–this one from the ‘Rachel is evil actually’ post–was that Borne’s ultimate fate was an insult to him. As in, Rachel continuously misunderstands and judges Borne, and then in the end the story traps him in house plant mode, which she purposefully maintains for him, always threatening to kill him if he should ever grow bigger. I read this before finishing the book (whoops) and I see something of the argument. Borne has no agency at all anymore and Rachel treats him, admits to treating him, as ‘good salvage.’ He has undoubtedly been diminished and we have no idea what he might actually want for himself. We know he has sentience, or could develop it again, but he’s incapable of expressing any of his inner thoughts or feelings anymore. One might guess he would prefer returning to the Balcony Cliffs as Rachel’s house plant to being picked up by a different scavenger, separated for parts, or otherwise destroyed. He expressed beforehand a desire to live with her again ‘as before.’ But she doesn’t express any motive based in Borne’s wants. SHE wants him back and SHE is perfectly willing to destroy him should he even begin to express the sort of thought and agency that made him a ‘person’ before. That’s deeply uncomfortable, given that Borne was a full character, a person in almost every respect, for much of the story.

But in context, I disagree with this criticism. First, I’m not convinced that Rachel has any control over Borne’s size and shape. She didn’t the first time. She’s only ‘keeping him’ as a plant in the sense that if he became anything else, she would kill him. And this is cold-hearted but practical, honestly. More importantly, though, reading about Borne’s fate made me think of war stories in which a soldier returns home so damaged that he might gain some sort of peace or calm but he’ll never be the same. His story has that same sort of melancholy stillness. Because he is not human we don’t know exactly what he gave up: his memories, his ability to think? Or just his ability to speak and communicate with humans? But his life isn’t fully unenviable: he no longer wrestles with his instincts; he no longer causes harm; he no longer engages in terrible battles. He’s cared for and he lives in the sun.

Then on the other hand again, is he what Rachel wanted to be, and Wick refused to give her: a blank slate, without any of the bad of the past, or any of the good? Impossible to know.

The theme of secrets between loved ones: I don’t have anything to say about this, but I just want to acknowledge it as a theme I noticed. Interesting, but pretty straightforward. Borne and Rachel hide things from each other. So do Wick and Rachel. Even at the end, Wick and Rachel need to not talk about things to function–and yet, do they really have secrets? He must know that she read his letter and he probably figured out what happened to the Magician. As she says, what matters is not whether or not they know each other’s secrets, but whether or not they stay. Anyway, there’s probably a significant thread to be pulled here through the novel, but I don’t have anything deep to say about it.

The Magician: Oh the Magician. I thought circles around this one but I don’t know what I still have left to say in written form. I  have very mixed feelings about her. This novel has a lot of stuff in it; it’s balancing a variety of threads, plotlines, characters, histories, themes, worldbuilding. I think most of it comes together well in the conclusion: Mord versus Borne, Mord as Wick’s creation versus Borne as Rachel’s, the end of one era and the beginning of another in the City, and in the Balcony Cliffs. Rachel’s personal arc coming to an end with the reveal of the content of her missing memories. But the Magician.

I have mixed feelings. Intellectually, I feel like she has an obvious purpose and her story’s conclusion makes sense. She provides a menacing potential villain throughout, threatening Wick, Rachel, and the Balcony Cliffs; and before Borne becomes the real counter to Mord, she’s the alternate power in this era of civil war. But she’s also increasingly obsolete, as humans are obsolete. She can’t ever truly defeat Mord, only another biotech monster can. And her desires for power and domination are unrealistic, to the point of being pathetic, as the City exists on the precipice of its new era.

So, I mean, upon some thought, I can make sense of it. And even while reading, I didn’t necessarily find the final confrontation with her disappointing or weak–maybe because I just came in with no expectations of that finale at all, though.

But the more the Mord versus Borne conflict becomes so clear at the end of the book that the Magician starts to feel like she’s just floundering around the edges of the narrative. Maybe that’s on purpose. Maybe it felt like that more to me than to the average reader because of the big almost-a-year break I took from reading. She often feels more like Wick’s adversary than Rachel’s, one removed from any sort of main or central conflict. She’s connected to her weird modified feral children experiments, but not overly closely–she’s not actually seen with them, and for me personally, it was hard to remember that the fault for those horrors lies at her feet. Her lack of certain backstory creates mystery but at the expense of a reason to care about her. Yes, her whole deal is being smoke and mirrors. But is she TOO smoke and mirrors?

Do I ever REALLY fear the Magician?

She only appears in person twice in the novel, interacting with Rachel: once very early and once very late. I didn’t need this book to be longer, but it felt like maybe not enough. I was also fully convinced, after their first conversation, that she was going to end up being another version of Rachel, for example, a clone or a time traveler. I wasn’t totally wrong: her creepily excessive confidence in ‘really knowing’ Rachel, having some sort of connection to her, was based on sharing memories with her, or rather, having taken memories from her life. And if we think of memories as a form of identity creation (you are what you remember experiencing), they are “the same” person. But that’s a stretch. And yeah, my theory would have involved introducing some rules to the universe that it doesn’t seem to have: for everything else going on, there’s no hint of clones, not really. My three responses to that are that I came up with this theory pretty early in the book, and for all I knew, clones and/or time travel were about to be revealed; clones sort of ARE in the book, in that Borne can take on other people’s shapes–it’s more mimicry but it creates the problems of identity verification that clones create; and, finally… some other revelations come late in the book that arguably change or go beyond what we had previously been at all led to believe was possible given the rules of this universe.