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A review of Geoff Ryman's 253
While surveying the ranks of financially successful literature, it's worth considering
gimmickry one of the master tropes. Last year Geoff Ryman, author of Was (1992), a
parody of The Wizard of Oz, offered us a fine piece of gimmickry: the ‘print remix’ of his
hypertext novel, 253. The acclaim this work has received is greatly unwarranted, but in a
world of surfaces perhaps only the façade is worth critiquing. Delving deeper into the book
reveals the grim nature of the gimmick. Ryman’s novel’s renown is rooted in a combination of
plucky humor, cheap experimentalism and our own fetish for technology.
The novel announces itself as ‘reader-friendly,’ as ‘an EZI-Access novel.’ Following
this sort of disclaimer, the author explains how to ‘use’ his novel. His novel is the catalog
of 253 passengers on the Bakerloo Line of London’s underground system - seven cars, thirty-six
seats, and the driver. The event (yes, the one, singular event of the book) takes place on the
eleventh of January 1995, between 8:35am and 8:42am. Not exactly the scope of Faulkner or
Scott, eh? The event itself is something that might have been the plot of a rejected script
for one of those natural disaster films spawned in Hollywood’s recent past (a gimmick borrowed
from that genre?). Character number 001, Tashin Cileckbileckli, the driver, falls asleep at
the helm and the train careens out of control. Dozens die and survivors are metted a good
dosage of violence and gore.
Now all this would be amusing and mildly more than melodramatic if the book followed a
linear narrative structure. Ryman won’t even grant us cheap melodrama and network television
tragedy. He has to be experimental. I should mention that that violence (‘All at once, the
car collapses from one end, squeezed flat like a toothpaste tube someone has stepped on’), the
event of the novel, only occupies a minor percentage of 253, a total of six pages, to be certain.
The actual novel is contained in six pages of a 367-page book!
Occupying three hundred odd pages of the rest of the book are 253 mechanistic, 253-word
descriptions of the passengers on the train. Ryman reduces his characters into three layers
of data: ‘Outward Appearance,’ ‘Inside Information,’ and finally ‘What He or She is Thinking’.
The first category details what the individual looks like in regards to clothing, physical
features, etc. Inside Information provides, well, duh, background of the character's job,
background and personality. The final category or layer of knowledge is the canned and sealed
interior monologue of the character filtered through a clean and conventional third person. A
person - a life - is suddenly something worthy of only 253 words.
So Ryman stacks character after character atop one another. He even maps out each tube
carriage's seating arrangement in a union: "For your reading ease and comfort, Passenger Map,
Car No. 5." Some of the characters are directly related to one another by occupation, friendship,
or by melodrama. Milton Richards is out to kill his stepdaughter Eveleen Doyce because Jesus
told him to do so. Others are indirectly conjured up in the minds of their fellow passengers
through speculation, voyeurism, and even good old lustful male gazing. If you're reading 253
for connective tissues, Ryman will oblige you with an index of topics of thoughts, conversation,
and general subject matter mentioned in each character sketch. This book sounds encyclopedic?
The accumulated data about the 253 is bleak and uninspiring. Justin Holmes is homeless,
girlfriendless, and trying to hack out an article on London's homeless that just won't come
to him. Bob "the Knob" Hall is looking for a good place to jack off. Major Edwin Grives's son
spilled sewage in the back of his BMW earlier in the morning. Mrs. Mary Al-Masud is not all
there after her family's house was firebombed. Occasionally there's a bright spirit on the
Bakerloo train. Deidre Hidelerly, for example, is overjoyed that her synaesthesia has not
left her. But the mundane and the melancholy prevail amongst the ranks of character - just
like the real world. And with each sad sheet of data added, the less the reader cares. Ryman
seems less playful than sinister.
Label, can contents. Plop! Behold the Man! Behold the Woman! In attempting to capture
a diversity of cultures, classes, and personalities, Ryman instead demonstrates how similar
people can be. It's either shadows or cadavers. His content is melancholy and the formalized
presentation - the canning - of his characters invokes a systemic sadness, a pity for the human
species. We've been reduced to data unworthy of more than 253 words.
The amusing elements of the novel do wing along the perimeter of this main body, hide in
the cracks between sections, and tag along as footnotes. These interstitial texts, which hide
behind the façade of the label "advertisement," joke about the narrative technique of 253 and
experimental writing in general. "Become a writer in your spare time!" begins one advertisement.
It goes on to suggest that by taking the first word of every character in 253, one can create
an entirely new character in the tradition of Ryman's novel. "That is all writers do!" In
trying to show how literature can be playful, the author reveals a degree of ignorance of
what experimental writing is all about. Ryman is infatuated with the superficial.
His insistence on a technophilic surface, a gimmick of a structure, conveys a dismal
conception of the human while his neat, canned characters flash in and out of focus
concretizing this view. Two-hundred and fifty words build Anthony Auldgirth and spark
interest, but then he's gone until he reappears for a few sentences at the end of the novel
when his death is described by the narrator's chilly voiceover. By studying the gimmick, we
can see that the novel is something more than an abortion. Ryman is nothing of a Barth or
Joyce or even a mild Cortazar, and his ineptitude presents the reader with an intolerable idea
of humankind that is wholly unliterary.
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