C.J. Cherryh's Fiction

Literary Review, Spring, 2001 by Burton Raffel

Consider, first, a novel about a thirty-seven-year-old ship's crew-woman, thrown up on the beach by an economic squeeze, unemployed and unemployable because unwilling to change a way of life that simply does not exist on shore. She has been left in a dying port, where ships seldom dock and those that do cannot offer her employment. Without alternatives or resources, she contemplates starvation (or even suicide). She is becoming physically shrunken; her clothing is worn, almost tattered. "She smelled strongly of soap, of restroom disinfectant soap, a scent [one] had to think awhile to place."

A local resident, struck by her persistence and pride, gives her what work he can, illegally; a sex-driven barkeep gives her a place to sleep (with him, of course) and a bit of food. The barkeep turns sadistic; trained in violence as well as ship-board mechanics, she kills him. Unexpectedly, a disguised quasi-military ship arrives, and she talks her way into a rock-bottom berth. But before she can leave, the dead man is found, she is arrested--and then freed when the ship uses its military status and authority to claim her. Safely on board, still half dazed, "she avoided looking at people, especially looking them in the eye or starting up a conversation, just stared blankly at the main-deck [which she has been ordered to clean] and all those possible footprints people were making walking back and forth--footprints had occupied her mind all day, still occupied it, in her condition--and she mentally numbed out, tasting the food and the tea down to its molecules, it was so good, and finding her hands so sore [that] holding a fork hurt."

Written throughout in consistently clear, probing prose, perfectly suited to both characters and subject matter, C.J. Cherryh's Rimrunners (1989) is obviously a tale of adventure. Less obviously, it is also a close, intense psychological study and a keen exposition, in strongly presented, deeply imagined detail, of complex interrelationships between and among individual and social forces, in a time and place not our own. In pure stylistic terms, some of B. J. Traven's work comes to mind; so too does other determinedly nonLiterary literary fiction. Cherryh writes: "... they were a little gone, having a damn good time, but gone, and NG [short for `no good'] was gone too, out-there, deep-spaced and having trouble breathing." Plainly, her prose has strong rhythms of its own--but how different is this, qualitatively, from, say: "Helene was not a teetotaler by any means. In fact, Ed encouraged her to drink. She was more fun when she drank. But she was liable to get drunk tonight, because it was Christmas, and Ed didn't want her to become reckless with the spirit of giving." That comes from John O`Hara's Appointment in Samarra (1934), which Alfred Kazin called "the best of the `hard-boiled' novels ... [and] a very serious book indeed" (On Native Grounds, 388). Nor would there be any difficulty setting out stylistically related passages from other American writers, notably the original hard-boiler himself, Ernest Hemingway.

The "beach" in Rimrunners is literally a space station; the "ships" are space-going. The fiction is science fiction. But genre labels become irrelevant, at such fully realized and masterful levels. The Lord of the Rings is high-quality fiction, period. It is not simply or primarily fairy-tale or fantasy fiction. Alice in Wonderland is high-quality fiction, not a children's book. Both are unassailably (and enduringly) literature. And so too are the adventure tales (though we tend for obvious reasons not to think of them as adventure tales) of Joseph Conrad, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and Joseph Roth, Robert Louis Stevenson and Herman Melville--and those of C. J. Cherryh.

Like most genuinely literary (not Literary) writers, Cherryh is not limited, either stylistically or in subject matter or approach. She employs "hard-boiled" prose when the particular book or approach seems to her to require it; from time to time, unpredictably and driven only by authorial impulses, she chooses to write of proletarian, feminine, or epic, or heroic, or genetically alien characters and themes, for, as she quite typically says, different subjects and approaches "stretch different muscles" (Amazon.com interview):

   It was from the air that the rawness of the land showed most: vast tracts
   where humanity had as yet made no difference, deserts unclaimed, stark as
   moons, scrag and woolwood thickets unexplored except by orbiting radar.
   Ariana Emory gazed down at it from the window. She kept to the passenger
   compartment now. Her eyesight, she had to admit it, was no longer sharp
   enough, her reflexes no longer fast enough for the jet. She could go up
   front, bump the pilot out of the chair and take the controls: it was her
   plane, her pilot, and a wide sky. Sometimes she did. But it was not the
   same.

      Only the land was, still most of the land was. And when she looked out
   the window, it might have been a century ago ...