Eric Korn

Emma Tennant, former editor of the magazine Bananas, has produced a shiny package in the manner of an inter-war weekend book, but in a contemporary idiom to which no one can be indifferent.

In 1598 John Florio called his dictionary A World of Words, and the joy of a new dictionary is the traveller’s joy, the joy of entering a new world, or at least a new state in some loose federal union, recognisably part of the same nation, but with its own eccentricities and prejudices, more rigid or more lax in licensing laws or taboos, more or less committed to conservation.

‘Let the eye of the traveller consider this country and weep,’ said Auden about Ostnia. I’ve spent the last week reading three books that invite tears – and speculation about that curious organ, the eye of the traveller. The traveller may come from antique lands or from modern ones: the essential is that he comes from, which distinguishes him from the pilgrim, who journeys towards, defined by his objective, as the traveller is defined by his origin. Or often undefined. There has been a tradition of English travellers who assume a certain air of mystery, a lack of candour about origins and motives: ‘I’ll ask the questions,’ said the traveller, knocking at the moonlit door. Usually, it was an ambiguity of sexual, social or national identity that drove the traveller: out of the social context, he or she could pass, pass for detached sightseers, concealing their natures and motives (all those cool detached retinas floating around the Med with secret agendas, usually looking for boys). The type has largely gone now. Technology progressed, the eye became a camera, or came out (as artificial eyes will), grew pinpoint pupils, or turned the other way or shut in sleep. The traveller of the Eighties explores the ever-interesting territory of himself, every man his own Patagonia.’

When I was somewhere between one and nine I brooded over the possibility of finding a new number, an integer between one and nine that had somehow been overlooked. Their names and shapes seemed so arbitrary, ten shapes out of a million trillion thousand hundred and eleventy possible arrays of lines and loops, so how on earth could the adult world, the world no longer in single digits, be so smugly sure it had got them all? This worry has not entirely gone. Like so many people who are good at sums, I turned out to have no aptitude for mathematics: the ciphers continue to haunt me, entering my dreams and my prayers and my obsessions.

In the novels of William Gibson and other writers of cyberpunk, the new SF sub-genre, in the glittery non-realism of the movies, cyberspace is crystalline and neonlit and shiny, a place of infinite depth and detail, of towers and canyons and technicolor hypergeometry, the ‘consensual hallucination shared daily by billions … a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity … clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding.’