Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley
I would like to thank Jess from Solaris for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - Solaris
Published - Out Now
Price - £18.99 hardback £7.99 Kindle eBook
In January 2314, Rowena Savalas – a curator of the vast archive of the twenty-first century’s primitive internet – stumbles upon a story posted in the summer of 2024. She’s quickly drawn into the mystery of the text: Is it autobiography, fantasy or fraud? What’s the significance of the recurring number 381?
In the story, the protagonist Fairly walks the Horned Road – a quest undertaken by youngsters in her village when they come of age. She is followed by the “breathing man,” a looming presence, dogging her heels every step of the way. Everything she was taught about her world is overturned.
Following Fairly’s quest, Rowena comes to question her own choices, and a predictable life of curation becomes one of exploration, adventure and love. As both women’s stories draw to a close, she realises it doesn’t matter whether the story is true or not: as with the quest itself, it’s the journey that matters.
The quest is part of science fiction and fantasy’s DNA – seek the wizard, destroy the ring, find the grail or the mysterious hidden weapon or person that can save the galaxy. There are the adventures along the way, the people we meet and the prize at the end all to savour. Plus, we’ve had countless articles about the journey the person on the quest being changed themselves. It really is a story as old as time. What is the appeal? Is it still relevant? Do we read (and I mean particularly critics) read too much into it? These are all thoughts I had while reading Aliya Whiteley’s compelling mix of science fiction and fantasy Three Eight One. A quest is explored in a different way to many other stories and while we may not get the answers I really loved the questions it asks of the reader to consider.
Its 2314 and young academic Rowena Savalas an organic in the new ages of Earth has undertaken a new project researching a piece of literature from 2024. This is a novel entitled The Dance of the Horned Road. This novel from the period now known as the Age of Riches has spoken to Rowena for a long time and now Rowena adds her thoughts and commentary to this beguiling novel as footnotes. In the book we follow a character named Fairly who is now of an age to leave her village, follow a mysterious road and await an unknown outcome. She is though being constantly followed by the mysterious Breathing Man. It’s a story full of surprises, opaque references and yet will also be a story that impacts Rowena’s choices for the rest of her life.
This is not your ordinary novel at all. We have an unusual science fiction framing device around a more surreal fantasy novel. In doing so we get to ask some questions of the concept of the quest, reading and ourselves. It i a tale that plays with context with a subtle warning to readers (and very likely reviewers like me) about what we read into any tale, but it makes the point what we bring as readers to any story also shapes our reactions to any tale and what we then take away from it.
The idea of a person from the future reading a book from our time is fascinating and here the idea of context gets explored as we read Rowena’s many footnotes to the story. Living 200 years after publication date and some quite massive changes to life on earth there is for Rowena a lot unknown about how we lived. Rowena doesn’t quite realise this is a fantasy novel she reads it more as tales of tiny settlements and roads as how we actually lived! Which as the tale gets more stranger seems unlikely but if you don’t know our time how would you guess? There is mention of how people have though worked out based on geographical clues where it was set so it must be real. We also get Rowena’s speculations on tropes such as Love At First Sight, swearing and then we see her struggling that a book the story mentions itself does not exist. How ‘real’ is any book when we read It we may see influences and tropes but is it ever all true?
There is also a mystery that every section of story ends with 381. Every section appears to be 381 words long and the phrase 381 could have many meanings from acronyms to text speak for I Love You. We never really get explanations just ideas to why it is there. As someone who reads and then uses their blog it’s a little reminder that all speculation on what a book means can go a little out there and may be a million miles from an author’s original intent. But to be fair all reading is a blend of an author’s words and reader’s thoughts and perspectives. There is no right answer is how read what the story says to us. What’s unusual is the way that Whiteley starts with Rowena’s commentary on the book leading to us making commentary on both the fantasy novel, Rowena’s world and the wider book itself. Rather than passive reading this story is inviting you in to look all around and consider the structure and themes more explicitly than most stories tend to do but still reminds you it’s the reader who decides what they are..
Which leads on to another key theme - the quest. In some ways the initial tale of Faurly seems run of the mill chosen one adventure but after the Horned Road tale starts things change in unexpected ways. You don’t usually expect in fantasy a main character to work in a bar, have adventures in a camper van and exploring dangerous tourist sites. It’s a really interesting approach and with 2024 eyes it becomes more that this ‘novel’ would have been reviewed more as a satirical fantasy with a more modern focus. The original present-day reader (and look here I go speculating again) would note that as Fairly meets more and more questors and notes how often they visit parts of this world that there is a big analogy with the backpacking experience. All the young people go on a ‘quest’ and they feel unique but are one of a many others - some would say that its more an industry. There is an enigmatic creepy character named the Breathing Man – they start out terrifying, but they end up understandable and do the mysterious supernatural helpers known as cha. As the story nears its conclusion the objective of the quest itself is revealed as less world-saving and feels a lot more prosaic – the magic all seems to have faded. On its own you could say this mythical 2024 author was saying that our dreams of quests and adventures just all make us still get boring jobs, live boring ordered adult lives and have more to be responsible for. But ultimately with the wider frame I don’t think Whiteley’s novel is quite so cynical.
The key for me is how we get to witness Rowena’s responses. As the footnotes continue, they’re becoming less a wiki of this phrase means x or this situation is typical of y. Instead, Rowena explores why she relates to Fairly as a young woman, how Fairly’s brief love affair in the story makes her own ponder on will she ever fall in love. We also get to see how different Rowena’s own world is – organic and artificial life is blended, there are clues to a very different social order and as we find out now limited life spans.
Rowena is responding less now as a critic and more as a reader sharing her reactions to the power of the story, her responses to the adventure and the question the quest asks – what do you want to do with your life? One that still works two hundred years later (similar to us and our own regular responses to fantasy tales of the past). To show this impact we get a massive time jump in Rowena’s life that comes across unexpectedly in the footnotes. The woman now responding is telling us what happened to her because of the book. Now this version of Rowena has a different perspective on the tale; her own adventures and the highlights and lowlights of her own life lived. In some ways this becomes the more gripping final stage of the novel as we want to know as the footnotes come and go what happened next to Rowena. For me both Fairly and Rowena are characters who both found that the quest is not the summation of your life – it’s the beginning; you change, you explore who you are, discover your wider world and you find your place in it. Quest stories are constant parts of the genre because they work to give us a desire to explore both the story and our own sense of adventure and just perhaps inspire us to live. Rowena’s response is the story we may find ourselves responding to the most by the end which considering she too is just another fictional character is a testament to Whiteley’s inventive way of creating a character we feel we know a lot about purely from footnotes.
Three Eight One is a tale asking us questions. It doesn’t want to say it’s a book with all the answers. It interrogates the ideas of quests versus our real lives, our desires for books to explain the world to us even when no book can cover everything, but it is also about (for me!) the power of fiction to inspire us to new adventures and working out that painful question – who are we? One of those novels that I find a few days after reading it I’m chewing on again and again – my favourite kind of book. Strongly recommended!
