Chasing the Stars by Malorie Blackman - review
Upon his death the playwright Ben Johnson declared that his friend, William Shakespeare, was not “of an age, but for all time”, a phrase which was inscribed in the First Folio of the Bard’s works. You need look no further than Michael Fassbender’s PTSD-plagued Macbeth; Russel T Davies’ recent joyous and subversive retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Lion King or 10 Things I Hate About You to garner a sense of the playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon’s longevity. On the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Malorie Blackman has published Chasing the Stars.
This is, first and foremost, an epic love story, set against that most epic of backdrops, outer space. Malorie Blackman populates this with worlds such as ‘Barros 5’, ‘Mendela Prime’ and stranger entities including the ‘Zandari ion storm’, which would not be out of place a long time ago and in a certain galaxy far, far away. A reference on the very first page – “Pressing a make-believe switch to activate my imaginary lightsabre” (apparently in the year ‘AD 2164’, when spaceships can tunnel vast intergalactic distances through ‘wormholes’, the Star Wars franchise is still a going concern) – introduces a whole host of sly nods and winks. There is even a ‘Resistance’, fighting an apparently doomed struggle against a powerful ‘Authority’, which is largely played out in the story’s background. You get the sense Malorie Blackman enjoyed smuggling these in; as a reader I certainly enjoyed being on the look-out for them.
As the novel opens Vee and her brother, Aidan, are the only survivors after an incurable virus wreaked havoc on their Earth research vessel, leaving their parents dead. They are trying to reach Earth, their grandparents, the familiar, when Vee as acting captain makes a split-second decision to rescue human settlers who are being hounded out of Barros 5 by the terrifying, xenophobic, Mazon.
Initially, it seems as though the Mazon will be a generic, uniformly ruthless alien race, but a much more nuanced picture is gradually teased out (Malorie Blackman couldn’t even leave the Daleks unremittingly evil in her 2013 Doctor Who short story, so perhaps this isn’t too surprising). The consequences of this split-second decision, as well as a number of other haunting, past and future decisions, all of which are subject (what human decisions aren’t?) to pressure, emotion and prejudices, unravel over the course of the novel.
Vee meets and falls in love almost instantaneously with Nathan, one of the survivors from Barros 5. Chasing the Stars is told entirely from the first person perspective (which can, inevitably, undermine moments of high tension, as it is being told in the past tense) which shuttles rapidly back and forth between Vee and Nathan. The rapidity of the shift in perspectives gives the novel an unrelenting pace – even in the tenderest moments between the young lovers, it is hard to forget the atmosphere of threats surrounding them – and allows Malorie Blackman to deploy dramatic irony to maximum effect, as Vee and Nathan desperately try to second-guess each other’s innermost feelings, hopes and suspicions, to which the reader gains instant access.
The essential storyline derives from Othello; anyone familiar with at least a hazy outline of the play’s plot knows Vee and Nathan’s love story will be rocky, to say the least. The invisible barrier dividing Vee and Nathan, given less limelight than in Noughts and Crosses, is that Nathan is a “drone”, an under-caste of menial workers whom the Authority deploys to do the most physically and emotionally degrading work (robots being comparatively expensive to manufacture). Inequality remains a pertinent theme, but in this novel Malorie Blackman sharpens the focus on the ‘undeserving poor’ and the desperate rather than race. One cannot escape ‘drone’ status without desperately scrabbling enough ‘credits’ – a Sisyphean task.
This gives Chasing the Stars a timely resonance. I found it hard to read the passages where the Mazon indiscriminately fire on the settlers – men, women, children, doctors – without thinking of harrowing images from the Syrian civil war. Malorie Blackman does her utmost to keep this current, moral crisis in the uppermost of the reader’s mind, repeatedly referring to the survivors as “refugees” (which is of course what they are). At a time when the very word refugee has all too often become something disturbing, this simple, accurate use of the noun can feel (sadly) shocking and provocative. I was reminded of the way John Steinbeck repeats the phrase “the migrant people” in The Grapes of Wrath so that what starts as an accurate term descends into the fear and loathing-drenched phrase used by people who are terrified by what the migrants represent. Chasing the Stars poses a number of moral dilemmas for Vee which make human and manageable the vast questions echoing in the minds of Europe’s leaders, but also its citizens and civil society right, now. The reaction of Aidan, Vee’s brother, also suggests that a fear of refugees can be due to prejudice but also a sense of alienation for which someone is not entirely responsible. Chasing the Stars offers no easy solutions.
The loss of humanity is a theme pervading the novel. When Nathan first introduces himself as a drone, Vee dismisses it as a joke: ‘They’re just sub-intellect labourers doing all the…work that’s too filthy or hazardous for normal people to do’. Later, another character appeals to Vee’s ‘love of literature and films and music and art, all the things that separate us from beasts and drones’.
The theme is also developed in more unexpected, yet still poignant, ways. From the beginning of the novel, when there is an unexpected, disorientating, shift in time, the plot of Chasing the Stars never leaves the reader feeling entirely secure. Both Vee and Nathan are unreliable first-person narrators who withhold crucial information, allowing the reader to share other characters’ sense of shock when revelations break through. Like some of the deep ethical, intellectual and even metaphysical questions posed by the novel (intelligent science-fiction fits cosily into the adrenaline-doused battle sequences and emergency ship manoeuvres) these twists occasionally seem to come too late in the novel to unleash their full impact. Furthermore, the ‘mystery’ element can seem somewhat bolted on, and its resolution is a tad obvious if you know the story of Othello.
Nevertheless, this is a thoughtful, entertaining novel built around a heartrending love story. (Its more ‘soppy’ moments are always humorously undercut by Nathan and Vee’s own awareness of the cheesiness of their relationship – hinted at by the title itself.) There is a sense of timelessness about it, but a searing relevance for 2016. The novel does make demands of the reader, and the questions it poses return to nag. The very casualness with which Malorie Blackman introduces a multi-racial crew of characters and same-sex relationships is refreshing and offers hope they do not have to be tackled in ‘issues’ novels – surely a sign of progress in itself. Chasing the Stars does deliver a conclusion which is both satisfying in terms of the plot and emotionally; it feels like a proper ending, although I’m sure if Malorie Blackman wanted to return to this universe she’s left herself plenty of scope to do so.
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