The Fictional Man by Al Ewing

 


The Fictional Man by Al Ewing - a provocative novel, an entertaining novel, and, what might come as a bit of a surprise, a deeply philosophical novel.

Unlike a novel by Philip K. Dick where an entire lineup of science fiction oddities usually appear, in The Fictional Man, Al Ewing limits himself to one and only one: the creation of Fictionals.

What is a Fictional? As we quickly learn on the opening pages, a Fictional is someone created to star in a specific television show and/or film. More specifically, a Fictional comes not from a human womb but from a laboratory test tube or what's referred to as a “translation tube”.  A Fictional is born as a fully mature adult, lives about eight years and then, as if a light bulb suddenly switched off, dies.

As main character Niles Golan tells us, by 1990 there were over four hundred Fictionals modeled on fictional characters from a novel or play or created especially for TV and movies. And by the year 2000, the number of Fictionals in Los Angeles has reached between forty and fifty thousand. That's a lot of Fictionals!

Fictionals having sex is a rarity since Fictionals were carefully designed to sublimate sexual desires into their roles in front of the camera. A Fictional man or woman would occasionally fall in love with a Fictional of the opposite sex (Hollywood, forever conservative, only created straight Fictionals) but a Fictional falling in love or having sex with a real person has always been completely unacceptable and any violation would ruin the career of both parties.

According to a landmark legal ruling, duplication of a Fictional is perfectly fine as long as there are clear physical and psychological differences between the different versions. For example: there are a good number of Sherlock Holmes Fictionals.

Does all this sound completely bonkers? It surely is. Al Ewing has written a very funny book where Niles Golan, a transplanted Brit novelist, author of nineteen Kurt Power private eye novels, sees a Fictional therapist and has a Fictional as his best friend. And Niles dreams of the day one of his Kurt Power novels will be turned into a blockbuster film starring a Fictional as Kurt Power.

For the entertainment industry there have always been those irksome philosophical issues: Are Fictionals real humans? Should they be granted the same rights as humans born the natural way, from a human womb? Many women and men, similar to Niles, judge Fictionals as different, maybe not inferior, but certainly different. And some even claim, as Niles himself does, Fictionals are not “real” since, after all, to be human one must have a mother, live through childhood and adolescence and experience what it means to gradually grow old year after year – quite unlike Fictionals who are the same exact person until the day their biological switch is turned off and they are no more.

But wait, let's take a more careful look. We come to understand, primarily through Bob Benton, Niles' best friend, that a Fictional possesses the entire range of human desires and human emotions. By this standard, Fictionals are most certainly real, as real as anyone reading this review.

And there's the whole ethical issue. Does the entertainment industry have the right to create Fictionals for the sole purpose of profit? After all, once a TV series fizzles out and a Fictional is no longer needed, the studio simply tosses them out like garbage. Fictionals have committed suicide.

Al Ewing also plays with the crossover between “real” humans and fiction. One woman Niles encounters yearns to become nothing more than an actress in an author or screenwriter's script. When Niles comes out and asks her if she herself is a Fictional, she's flattered, the high point of her life. Also, Al Ewing has Niles continually insert running fictional commentary in all his interactions, as when Niles is asked a penetrating question from his therapist Ralph Cutner: The author stared Ralph Cutner right in the eye as his ridiculous eyebrows waggled like caterpillars. With one insouciant glare, he dared the man to make his accusation and be done. Instead, the Fictional crumbled, utterly defeated.

Al Ewing addresses another aspect of being human: living with a very real, full past. This is highlighted by the life of one Henry Dalrymple of Boston who, as a twenty-six-year-old bank clerk and aspiring author of the great American novel, wishing to serve the country he loved, enlists in the Army. Henry Dalrymple, a smiling, elfin young man engaged to be married to the girl of his dreams is sent to Burma and winds up in a Japanese POW camp. The experience proves shattering for Henry Dalrymple. Niles reads the one and only short-story Henry wrote – unpublished and unpublishable – a ghastly, twisted tale entitled The Doll-Party, or, The Life and Death of a Doll. Henry's entire story is included as part of The Fictional Man. Reading this short-story, we're given glimpses of the trauma, the devastation wrought on the humanity of poor Henry who spend time as a prisoner of war.

Henry's case is extreme but as we follow Niles in his California odyssey it becomes clear one way we humans deal with our suffering and traumas is to create stories for ourselves, fictions – the fiction can range from an occasional or ongoing narrative to a full-blown alternative reality. But whatever form it takes, on some level, we're all part of a fiction.


British author Al Ewing, born 1977