Most of us experience a psychological disconnect between “time’s arrow”; the accepted construct that time is moving ever forward in a neat continuous stream (the basis for most of our routines, our calendars, and our plans), and the way we experience time. Everyone knows that time goes faster when you’re having fun; faster for adults than it does for children; faster when you’ve got children than when you don’t. In his latest novel, Geoff Nelder takes that disconnect one step further, and plays with the notion that time discoherence may be the norm, while our sense of a smooth, calendar driven arrow, is one that is artificially created and able to be removed. His science is superb, and like all good sci-fi, he builds his plot on scientific principles that are absolutely believable, mirrored as they are to what we already understand; even when aliens are involved.The story takes, primarily, the point of view of Kallandra, a NASA scientist who is about to go on the first manned mission to Mars with her fiancé Derek. Their plans are interrupted when, while relaxing pre-flight at the Glastonbury Festival, the Tor begins to rise up, and disintegrate, revealing a large vibrating metal sphere. Kallandra’s natural curiosity is piqued, and from that point on, the spheres become her focus as she tries to determine what they are, how to communicate with them, and above all, how to stop them from destroying the Earth by leaving and taking ‘time’s arrow’ with them. There are many theories about the spheres posited in this book: that they have kept time stable, that they are harvesting time, and that they are both agents of good and evil. The way in which the appearance of the spheres brings out both the positive and negative in the characters is part of what works well in this story. Kallandra herself is a believable character, full of energy, erotic and intelligent. Derek too progresses in the story, from an earwax picking nerd to someone with enough foresight to move beyond jealousy and work against the system he has believed in. Other characters such as the handsome playboy Claude and Tabatha and the conniving journalist, are less believable, though they progress the plot effectively. Although Exit, Pursued by a Bee is primarily a character driven story, some of the most poignant parts of the book are in observation of setting. Nelder clearly loves the space his characters inhabit, and passages tend towards the lyrical and evocative.An interesting side story involves Derek’s cousin Blake, who takes a trip back in time to meet a Paleolithic caveman named Oqmar, 20,000 years before present. But by now time has become a clear illusion, with both Oqmar's Paleolithic world and Blake's 21st Century being more or less concurrent as they watch the same spheres rise from the Earth.Nelder shakes our entire notion of what ‘present’ means, and in so doing, also what death and life mean. Characters die but sometimes they don’t really. If we aren’t moving forward, then maybe even the notion of change is an illusion. The most interesting thing about Exit, Pursued by a Bee , is not the myriad unanswered questions it raises about the spheres, or whether Kallandra was meant to be with Claude or Derek, or even whether Kallandra saves the world or not. By undermining, in the most quantum of ways, the way we perceive the notion of time, it raises the whole question about what life is and who we are. In the end, the one thing we’re left with is a kind of constant throughout the novel: Kallandra’s tactile sensations. When time is no longer the backbone of our lives, and everything we perceive about ourselves disappears, those sensations remain. Nelder has created a novel that will both satisfy readers at a deep level, and at the same time raise unsettling questions about the very fabric of who we are.

I googled Geoff Nelder's book title when I was first looking for information about this book and was surprised to find that the title is an homage to a stage direction in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: Exit, pursued by a bear. However, it wasn't until I finished reading the book that I realized how much Nelder's novel shares themes with the play.

Nelder's book is not a "festive romantic comedy" like Shakespeare's play, but both mess with our sense of time, upending everything we thought we knew -- on a very basic level -- about how time flows. What could be more elementary to human experience? And what could have greater potential to destroy human existence than when time shifts erratically, contrary to the predictable linear flow upon which we have based our lives? By the end of his play, Shakespeare's character invites the audience to think of the play as just a four-night dream should they have found it offensive; by the end of his novel, Nelder's character and the reader wake as if from a weeks-long dream -- only it turns out that none of it was imaginary in the characters' world: the evidence is inscribed on the main character's body, and while she may not ever be able to interpret the marks, the reader certainly can.

Nelder's writing is lyrical at times and reminiscent of the bard's expressiveness. In the first appearance of his Paleolithic character, Nelder says: "His shadow-self hid under his bare feet." (p. 41) because the character is walking outdoors at midday. And: "We are not permitted to touch the moon’s daughter." (p.47) because the character tries and fails to touch the shiny alien sphere emerging from the ground before him.

In a Descartian way Nelder asks, What is real? What if everything we have known as real since the dawn of the age of humankind was artificially contrived, and reality comes crashing on the human race when the engineers of those unreal circumstances decide to leave? Those "engineers" aren't human at all: they're aliens who have been buried in the Earth's crust, and humans only discover their existence when those aliens prepare to depart. I like that Nelder's aliens are truly alien. They're not humanoids who descend from their ships with one hand raised, declaring, "We come in peace." (Actually, they're not even "coming," they're leaving!) They are incomprehensible, even though finding a way to communicate with them is crucial to convincing them to return and make our timestream artificially regulated again so we can function in our world.

Kal is the main character, a test pilot for NASA in training with other astronauts for the first manned mission to Mars. She is a "lateral thinker," i.e. her habits of reasoning enable her to take risks and rapidly perceive solutions hidden from others. What a strong character! She is young, beautiful, and brilliant -- at first I liked her immensely, probably because of her great comebacks and wit, but that eventually faded. She's the kind of person to whom I would naturally be drawn, but she is intimidating. How could I ever keep up with such a person? She thinks faster than I do, and in directions I would struggle to follow (unfortunately, I am not a lateral thinker). I like to think that I could match her wit though I'd probably reach the point where I'm too afraid to fail to do so, thereby exposing my inferiority.

But Kal changes in the course of the novel. She becomes more vulnerable and faces the possibility of failure. Denial of that possibility had been the steel that stiffened her backbone and freed her mind from fears that could prove fatal; denial leads her to shout to a helicopter pilot "Don't worry" (p. 62) moments before he falls to his death. She'd instinctively used a tactic with the pilot that had served her well before: denial of potentially-crippling emotions. "As a test pilot she’d cheated death more times than she’d want to forget […]She reflected that all lives were short, too damn short, and that kept her alive in dangerous situations. […]
But the death of their duty pilot bothered her, especially one she’d engaged with in friendly banter, and then in the face of catastrophe, told him not to worry." (p. 62)

That was the first step but not the last in her transformation. She argues to no avail with a US General who wants to assert human authority over the aliens by destroying one with a nuclear device and then command them to fix time on Earth. She had trained herself to rely on her intelligence and capabilities -- earning the nickname "bird-girl" from the local fire department while growing up for her many unsuccessful attempts to fly and diving into thorny bushes to escape a dirt avalanche though her fiancé had told her to outrun it -- but her lateral thinking skills turn out to be her (nearly) fatal flaw: they are her unique strength and the characteristic she must overcome to balance it with emotional strength, facing loss, despair and the possibility of failure in order to make those final intuitive leaps that had eluded her before. Trial after trial demands that she finally accept that her fate is not wholly in her hands, an acceptance that, ironically, serves to put her back in control of her fate.

In contrast, her fiancé Derek, an aerospace engineer for NASA, is emotive. Not surprisingly, he is also young and brilliant, a "lateral thinker" in the matter of designing revolutionary equipment for the spacecraft that will take him and other astronauts to Mars on a years-long journey. He worries; he has an acute awareness of dire consequences and constantly seeks ways to lower the risks. I imagine this is an invaluable outlook in a man responsible for the survival of so many lives -- while Kal was accustomed to having responsibility solely for herself, Derek had to think of myriad others. Accordingly, his trials take a different turn: for one thing he learns to worry about himself, and he learns to ask for help from others. Further, in dealing with the same nuke-happy General who continually overrides Kal's arguments, Derek works through game theory. It had been his hobby to assess famous conflicts from ancient to modern times, but the improbable reality of time distortion and aliens is not a game. "Derek’s face looked like a weasel’s. A physiognomy narrowed, it seemed, into a nose-led cone of concentration as he tapped on his iPaq before announcing the results of his game theory analysis." (p. 147) In a rare reversal, Kal is the impassioned one, pushing Derek to reach a conclusion in his application of game theory that would agree with her desires, but Derek is logical and even-headed, not at all paralyzed by worry or fear.

That was easy, but his trials become more difficult when he becomes separated from Kal. Still advising her from afar, he cannot allow himself to become paralyzed by worry. He also must accept that others' fates (particularly Kal's) are not in his hands. Out of necessity, his urge to play things safe melds with Kal's urge to do and finds a respectful balance, leading him to act on his own for the sake of her survival. He discovers that anger and calculated response truly work together, as the best of game theory shows.

In such a long novel, there is a full cast of characters and an occasional mix of PoVs from one chapter to another. Yet I felt that Kal and Derek are the only characters whose inner struggles I could engage with -- I caught hints of the struggles within Derek's nephew, the NASA psychologist, the NASA geologist, and the unscrupulous journalist, but not to nearly the same extent as Kal's and Derek's character development showed me. In fact, the journalist Tabitha's turnabout came as a surprise to me since I didn't feel privy to the forces causing it, while the psychologist Rob's conversion seemed arrested at some point. I regret that the General came across as caricatured and poorly developed, but he truly is just a minor character. I didn't need to understand complex motivations for him in order to appreciate the catalytic role he played in Kal's and Derek's lives.

In sum, I enjoyed this book as much for the character development as for the suspense Nelder generated with this hard-core sci-fi novel. I especially appreciate that he gives his readers credit for being able to put together the clues he has put forth and figure out what happened. Nelder avoided the Shakespearean-style denouement and the annoying habit of Star Trek episodes to reserve the last five minutes of the show for a completely deflating explanation of "exactly what happened." Actually, I know exactly what happened -- Nelder provided enough information about the science behind the story in simple enough (but not insultingly low-brow) explanations that I have absolutely no doubts as to what happened.

(And if I'm wrong, please don't tell me; I'm rather fond of my own explanation.)

~bint ( )

erm, I wrote it, and I'm pretty well damn pleased with the way it turned out. ( )