The Windup Girl is pretty, smooth and polished like the front panel of a Jaguar. Like a mahogany piece of furniture of industrial facture. Move your hand on its beautiful surface and you will feel only perfection.
This is not to say that the novel does not have limitations. Its postulates are not completely explored. The energy situation, for example, could have been delved into in more depth. We are given to understand that, on this future Earth, fossil energy is exhausted. But what about hydro-electricity, what about nuclear energy, what about solar panels and wind farms? Bacigalupi leaves these questions aside. However, it is hard to see it as a fault. If anything, it feels that a decision has been made to give the novel a narrower scope so as to strengthen its focus.
If the above sounds like project management more than book review, it is no coincidence. The Windup Girl is a very professionally conducted piece of work. All its characters have this precisely measured balance of good and bad. Anderson Lake, the corporate spy, shows empathy towards Emiko the Windup Girl. Emiko, the story’s victim, owes her fate to her genetic configuration – but for a victim she is a cringing one: we pity her as well as we despise her. “Tiger” Jaidee, the figure of the white knight, the unflinching Galahad, has the moral ambiguity of those living by and advocating Purity. He has the double face of the fearless hero and of the pitiless assassin. The terrifying figure of the Dung Lord takes advantage of the very people he pretends to protect. Hock Seng, survivor of two ethnic cleansings, is as oppressed, courageous and unlucky as he is servile, selfish and mean.
Science-fiction’s old guidelines kept a clear, Manichean separation between good and evil. But the influence of the thriller changed the rules. Nowadays it cultivates characters ambiguity. Bacigalupi follows these modern guidelines faithfully. He writes by the book. He is an implementer of ideas into fiction. For that, he abides to strict popular literature methodology.
That same methodology demands that each character be motivated by an inner desire. Emiko wants to go to the northern regions where, rumour has it, her kind lives freely. Anderson Lake’s corporate agenda is to gain access to the Thai seed bank. Gibbons, the genius geneticist, is a cynical doctor Frankenstein who only cares about bringing to life a creature as perfect as possible, regardless of the consequences. Jaidee the Tiger is fuelled by his refusal to bend.
In the whole characters cast only Kanya stands out. This strange, never-smiling woman swims in the surrounding sea of moral ambiguity. She tries to make sense of it, cannot pick a side and despises herself because of her indecision. In Bacigalupi’s well-rehearsed puppet theatre she is the only literary anchor – but her voice is soon drowned under the perfect mechanics of the author’s industrial plot.
So what can one retain of such a standardised product? After closing the book, the long lasting taste I had of it was the depiction of East-West relationships. This, I thought, might be Bacigalupi’s novel’s best achievement. This was before I read through Goodreads readers’ reviews.
This is something I often do. I usually pay them little heed. This time, I found most of the reviews to the point. One particular reader drew my attention. He is from Malaysia – and he is furious. Bacigalupi, he yells, has made an unforgivable mistake: he calls Malaysia Malaya. Malaysia is not called Malaya. Malaya is what Malaysia used to be called before 1963, before it managed to shake off the British control. I would have considered the detail unimportant had The Windup Girl not left in me this particular aftertaste. The whole plot is based on the confrontation between Asia’s oldest civilisations and the colonizing power of Western money. The detail, our reader claims, would not even have been an issue if Bacigalupi had contained it to the vocabulary of his Western character Anderson Lake. But, as it appears, the misnaming of Malaysia is not a small negligence, nor is it a deliberate character building strategy. It is an unfortunate, blatant mistake about one of the novel central themes.
For this is where Bacigalupi’s voice resonates with the most authority: the way a Western writer imagines Asia’s inner sense of identity. Apart from this, this faultless novel, with all its merits, with its impeccable language capable of painting urban landscapes as well as animating action scenes, stays too close to the format of the American science-fiction industry. Its generous and optimistic transhumanism is not enough to provide it with the soul it needs. Its characters are cold blooded creatures. They lack the warmth that would make us care for them.
I must be fair. There are moments where the characters spring to life, full of fear and rage and love and desires. The scene when Anderson, having found a wounded and terrified Emiko by his apartment door, risks everything to protect her, sent my heart racing. When Hock Seng scuttles through the ravaged streets of Bangkok, trying to escape from the fury of the armed invasion, I could hear the deafening noise, smell the billows of smoke from the rain of explosions. The final flinching moments when Kanya chooses her fate have the tone and feeling of Chandler's dark monologues. These few pages where Bacigalupi's voice pierces through are good omens for his work to come.
For, all being said, I shall acknowledge The Windup Girl for what it is: a first novel. It might not deserve all the awards it received, but its failures are small in regards to its achievements. Before it, I had read the author’s collection of short stories. It is beyond doubt to me that Bacigalupi has the talent to become a great novelist. A novelist technique always improves over time. Bacigalupi has all the technique he needs already. He must now learn to let his soul shine through.
