Normal
by Warren Ellis
Warren Ellis is probably more famous for his work as a comic book writer than a novelist, though in the last few years his transgressive approach to genre fiction has been getting more and more attention. I particularly liked his 2013 crime novel Gun Machine and so when I saw he had a new book on the way I was quite pleased. I was hoping for a novel, and was a bit disappointed that Normal was only a novella, coming in at around 150 pages. Nevertheless a managed to get my hands on a reading copy and curled up with it to see what Ellis had in store for me this time. At its core Normal is a fairly standard locked room mystery. The clever part is that it’s the setting that is the important part and the story is something that happens there to justify the reader’s attention. And that brings us to Normal Head, a secret and secluded medical facility that deals with a very particular sort of patient. Here are the minds broken on the rack of the twenty-first century. The average citizen dips their proverbial toe into the sea of the information available to them and will often come away miserable or despondent. But what of the professional analysts, the foresight strategists and futurists? Those who have to find the darkest and most disturbing truths and understand them, to better allow their employers to better exploit, dissemble or in rare cases avert coming crises or disasters. The truth is that they break, and spectacularly. Those in the know call the syndrome ‘Abyss Gaze’ in reference to an old Nietzsche quote*. The afflicted, too important to be abandoned and who know too much to be left in the hands of just any doctor will end up in Normal Head and entirely isolated from the world. Adam Dearden is the newest patient and remembers very little of what brought him here. Hindering his recovery is the fact that a day after he arrives, one of the other patients goes missing from a locked room leaving only a huge pile of insects. On some level Adam knows that he needs to solve this mystery and fast, but the clue he needs is locked up with the events that broke his mind in the first place.
This is an interesting read, though as I said it’s very short. There are a lot of subjects raised and questions asked about now and the future, but very few answers. Then again, if there were easy answers to those sorts of questions there wouldn’t be so much fear, uncertainty and doubt. By then end of the book, you’ve got a solution to the case of the missing patient, but no good answers for the ones still there. In some ways this is a defence of the ‘Experts’ who are so often maligned of late. They are expected immerse themselves into things the rest of us have the luxury to selectively ignore, and we never wonder what it might cost them.
*”He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”