The Hope

Achieving a simple chronology such as the publishing history of this novel required reference to two or three sources, while identifying the internal chronology of THE HOPE is far more complex; mainly because THE HOPE is a series of linked short stories, not a continuous narrative.

The stories, each set on the giant ocean liner The Hope, are linked by the (usually minor) re-appearance of a character or sometimes a locality. In a couple of instances, the actions of characters in one story indirectly cause the events of another. However, as the stories are not in chronological order, it is difficult to identify the paths of causality. A contents page would have been worth reading in its own right, just to see titles such "A Bath of Blood", "Carnal Appetite" "Lonely the Rat" and "Friend Ship" listed with their abbreviated poetry but to my frustration I found no such list and I was reduced to using the back of the publisher's flyer to itemise stories, characters and cross-references. Since THE HOPE and DAYS (set in a giant department store), Lovegrove has tended to hang all his works on a skeleton - a previous work. The recent FOREIGNERS was an SF re-working of Ibsen's ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, while his collaboration with Pete Crowther, ESCARDY GAP, was a metafictionalised version of Ray Bradbury's SOMETHING WICKED. His novella from PS Publishing, "How the Other Half Lives", has a Faustian theme. One reviewer compared DAYS to J G Ballard's HIGH-RISE. If THE HOPE has such a skeleton it is the film VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED (which was based on the cruise ships hired by would-be German Jewish refugees trying to escape to Latin America before World War II). "The Damned" found themselves unaccepted and forced to return to their future hell. The voyagers on The Hope have found that land has disappeared and they are condemned to sail on to nowhere, though they might be sailing in circles. Meanwhile the ship's infrastructure breaks down, social order breaks down, and the strange new world of make do and mend brings new rewards and sufferings to the million passengers.

The first story, or chapter, "A Bath of Blood" brings both reward and its subsequent suffering as a mother discovers that just for once she will be able to feed her children, and then watches them all die before she too is taken by the botulism they have unknowingly ingested. In a later story we will discover the source of the food found by Mary Shitshoes, though we will never meet the husband who has deserted her. The second story, though, changes. Changes in a number of ways - the third person omnipotent narrator of "A Bath of Blood" disappears, and "No Man's Land" is told in the first person - a seaman's yarn it might be. Between the bulkheads, where nineteenth century riveters we remember were allegedly once forgotten and left to die in the dockyards, there are pathways wide enough for rats. What sort of rat-holes would these make in the steel equivalent of wainscotting, our yarning sea-man points out. But more sfnal, and worse, what could make the rats disappear? In "No Man's Land" a journey into the spaces between the ship reveals the horror growing down there in what someone might call the Lair of the White Worm.

"Reading Habits" has characters from classic literature coming alive between the library bookcases, "The Rain Man" has a sort of naiad walking the decks, "The Last Waltz" is a conte cruel for those who cannot distinguish between screaming and badly played music. Nearly every chapter has a different style, as these exemplify. Each carries echoes of earlier works (Lem's SOLARIS for "Reading Habits", many works of Arthur Machen or Lord Dunsany for "The Rain Man", say), yet they are all part of the greater whole: "The Rain Man" is narrated by a run-away cook, who believes he has caused the death of a promenade deck passenger. That passenger's room has been inherited by his young relatives who become the victims of "The Last Waltz". The conductor of "The Last Waltz" has visited the library in "Reading Habits". The relatives in clearing the junk from their new room have thrown away the food found by Mary Shitshoes. Later stories reveal that the conductor and his wife have expelled their son from their room so that he falls into the teenage gang life that fights in drained swimming pools. All of the twelve chapters have this sort of narrative inter-dependence while having different voices.

Arthur Schnitzler's LA RONDE (recently re-adapted on the stage as THE BLUE ROOM) was perhaps one of the first literary works which used this idea of sequence and inter-dependence, though its sequences are much more direct. Asking why Schitzler should recount the story of assignation after assignation can be answered by looking to his principle career as a doctor - LA RONDE, then, is an allegory of the transmission of venereal disease. It is less clear what THE HOPE might symbolise. It is not "hope" - there is none. There is no understanding - in fact, understanding is breaking down - the ship's only doctor acquired his position by chance, the librarian vacates his job, the priest is a sadistic hypocrite. Only the ship's officers seem to be keeping up their job and that scarcely involves the passengers, while the current passenger manifest is a near condemnation of man's inhumanity to man. That inhumanity, though, is expressed directly and physically. It is difficult to relate metaphysical creations such as The Rain Man to a world of garbage, barter and rotten food. Similarly, within the story "No Man's Land" the idea of the white worms comes over very strongly, but there is no later suggestion that these creatures are emerging to threaten the humans who seem to be wounding each other disastrously enough without needing a near-supernatural assistance. In the first two thirds of the novel all of the characters could have entered the main rooms of the vessel, but not those in the final stories. Lovegrove in his end-note does not say in what order he wrote the twelve stories, but the last third, where attention moves to the youth gangs, feels less satisfying, as if he had run out of ideas on the central subject - the moral weakness and degeneration of the respectable classes. Perhaps, though, there is no chance for melioration as we see that no improvement can arise from the coming generations. The irony of THE HOPE, then, would be that there is no hope.

Alternatively, Lovegrove did not want to symbolise or epitomise anything - he gathered a group of people in a closed environment and then made them hurt each other. An author can do that.