The Cell

First Impressions

“You’re not fooling me, you know,” she says. “Sociopath.”

Okay, today I read chapter two, Cell, for anyone incidentally reading along. Which would be surprising to me, but, where my dog-pound at, bow-wow.

I like this book so far; it's playing around with genre in a way I haven't seen much of. There's definitely a psychological-thriller spinal cord in here, but also the obvious theme of gender disquiet and the kind of low-grade austerity concern that hums on in the background. I think that the author's doing a really good job of using expressionism to let me fill in the details. I "know" what a prison-black-site looks like - I've seen movies or whatever.

The Culture!

I guess it makes sense that The Culture books would come up in this. Still, it was a nice surprise. Those books are a lot of fun, and it's pretty surface-level obvious why they'd be appealing to someone who feels like he missed his window to transition.

• No stigma around transition; people are alive forever and Banks assumes that if you were alive for long enough, you'd probably get around to trying something different with your body.
• Yes scifi/magical medical tools to assist. Banks' The Culture is set in a post-scarcity utopia. Which also contrasts with The Grim Austerity chapter 1 set up as an economic backdrop.

That all said, I think those books are kind of liberal-guy-power-fantasy-stuff?

Spoilers for The Culture

Spoilers until end of paragraph, but Banks likes his protagonists to get cat-women pregnant (Consider Phlebas) and not to transition even when that's a social faux pas (Player of Games), so I always kind of assumed they'd be a little too schlocky to end up in here.

End of Spoilers

What, is this thing?

end up in here

On that note, I guess I still have no idea what the cultural valence of this text is. Is this on par with Luminosity or is this going to be a Wittgenstein's Mistress, basically?

It strikes me as odd that Stefan's sort of casually convinced that Dorley Hall is helping closetted women transition, enough to mention it to someone who lives there in the first chapter. Because, he's also pretty sure that that isn't happening to him once it pretty clearly is to the reader.

This story is good cliff-hanging, incidentally!

Dorley as a Psych Lab

Back to the lab, it's a neat bit of irony that the old Psych building is a luxury dormitory, and that Stefan convinces himself that Dorley Hall is an experimental Psych lab in the middle of this chapter. That kind of plays into this theme of wanting, I suppose. Stef wants to change, but is horrified by the changes that his body makes to itself without his willing it.

Call it "the horror of being the cause" I guess.

I'm kind of stuck on this detail. The lab/dorm confusion could, I guess, be an inversion of a place of rest to a place of discovery, or an intentional conflation of rest and discovery?

Maybe Stefan is reluctant to accept his (?) initial theory because of the setting. The cell is inhospitable. It's medical and carceral. Mistrustful wardens are in control of Stefan's food, medical care, clothing etc.

I guess, I see 2 parallels that might be relevant?

• Anyone in need of a bunch of medical stuff operates under the threat of deprivation and violence?
• Stefan's imprisoned but the prison is being a dude?

Like, we know that Stef's body is an insult to him, and a kind of unwillful prison (side note: I feel like it'd be cheap to use they/them pronouns for Stef because he's so concerned with his being a boy and not liking it? And they/them kind of just replaces the fixed unhappiness of "being a boy" with a little bit of ambiguous cop-out?).

Going back to the text we have this nugget:

they’ve still done nothing verifiable but steal his clothes and isolate him

That seems like support for this as a metphor that "acting like a young man is being rendered into a blacksite". In Stefan's framing from chapter 1, a person can need to be "helped" to be a woman. And his body itself is doing the "cave man" thing to him, not "them" (The State, The Church, Society, whoever.) So pigeonholing him as a certain kind of person (in this case a boy) is in his mind just a matter of clothes and social association.

Stray Thoughts

This is all kind of Rooney-ish

The opening exchanges are punctuated in a pretty standard/contemporary format, but the dialogue's presentation still kind of trips my Sally Rooney sense. That might just be because of all the calendar jumps in the first chapter, which I miss a little bit.

I liked how Stef drifted through the first chapter, and I wouldn't mind that coming back, but I don't expect it will; that kind of montage did a lot of very tight exposition for me.

Hold Music

This quote stood out to me:

The voice is crackly and distant, like the hold music when you call a big company over a bad connection.

I think that cues the reader to associate the banality of hold music, which in my mind is basically for the pharmacy or the doctor, with the reality of being rendered into a cell. I liked it, good trick.

On Show

This is funny:

He’s not on show, is he? A quick check: no. The smock is making his genitals feel just as vaguely uncomfortable as the rest of him, but at least he’s not flashing the girl.

Maybe the people in Dorley Hall (are they the titular Sisters of Dorley?) don't know his deal, but I kind of assume that they do. And if so, Stefan is like, hyperliterally on show to these folks.