Dying isn't difficult. Even a baby kitten can do it. (382)
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls was my first encounter with Heinlein's future history, the summer after high school graduation (makes this post somewhat appropriate, as I now re-read—albeit not for the first time—in the summer after undergraduate convocation). My dad, an avid reader, had recommended his work several years earlier, but I chose literature as my site of teenage rebellion and refused to read any of "that science fiction crap." I was a fantasy girl, with a(n un)healthy dose of the classics and children's lit, and would not submit to my father's erratic taste.
In retrospect, this may have been ever so slightly ridiculous. But hey, I wasn't spray-painting old growth forests, burning down public monuments, or some inverted version thereof.
So this, like the Robinson post, will travel—space suit notwithstanding—and like the story itself, will muddle with the concept of time, as my imagination carries rather more immediacy to the hammock in my backyard, long since disintegrated, where I first met Richard Colin Ames Campbell, protagonist and narrator:
It was a gay ending to a happy evening. There was still the matter of the stranger who had had the bad taste to get himself killed at my table. But, since Gwen seemed not to be aware of the unpleasant incident, I had tabled it in my mind, to be dealt with later. To be sure I was ready any moment for that tap on the shoulder...but in the meantime I enjoyed good food, good wine, good company. Life is filled with tragedy; if you let it overwhelm you, you cannot enjoy life's innocent pleasures. (6)
So begins the "rollicking" action described in the New York Times review (excerpted on the back cover); within a few scant pages, Richard and Gwen are engaged, married, and exiled from several planets. Then the story gets interesting.
But what I particularly like about this novel (and did on the hammock), is/was/will be not so much the plot, which purposely ignores gaping questions and careens through the laws of probability and believable storylines,2 but the characters subjected to it. I remember the intense early summer green of the backyard cherry trees from which I was suspended as I imagined myself into the role of Gwen/Hazel Nowak/Stone/Long/etc. Apart from an intellectual attraction to Ames/Campbell, Gwen/Hazel's role appealed to me at the time as an ideal lady, smart, sexy, savvy, and comfortable in command:
But it was Gwen who brought down the house when Auntie finished her highly-coloured [sic] account. Gwen did it with pictures.
Listen carefully. Gwen had used all her ammo, six rounds, then—neat as always—she had put her Miyako back into her purse. And pulled out her Mini Helvetia, snapped two frames.
She had tilted her camera down a bit, for it showed not only both bandit vehicles but also three casualties on the ground and one bandit up and moving. The second shot showed four on the ground and the superdoughnut turned away.
I can't figure an exact time line on this but there must have been at least four seconds from the time she ran out of ammo to the time the giant wheel turned away. With a fast camera it takes about as long to shoot one frame as it does to fire one shot with a semi-automatic slug gun.
So the question is: What did she do with the other two seconds? Just waste them? (177-78)
Upon revisiting the story, I note to my slight dismay the idealized nature of her character; rather like Lizzy Bennet with Mr. Darcy, I wonder at the creature of Heinlein's vivid imagination and the implications of her impossible polish. But the narrative is playful and self-deprecating, and continually conscious of its profound SFicity. In the end, I appreciate the fact that her pedestal, while not as wobbly as my hammock, includes feist and personality; she's perhaps made even less attainable, but at least thereby functions as a confirmation of genre—and is neither distressed damsel nor femme fatale.
This was the first book I intentionally dogeared, the first I was bold enough to underline (though in pencil; belt and suspenders!), and the first that described cats, to my mind, satisfactorily. Indeed, I will likely use it for an intended future project on the depiction of felis domesticus in literature as an example of the potential for delicate treatment of the cat as individual rather than composite cliche. When I crack its spine, I can smell the sultry, almost stifling aroma of dusty oiled cedar walls marinating in second-floor heat—my childhood bedroom—and taste the sticky sweetness of the tiny backyard cherries (as opposed to the huge, pale Queen Annes wrapped around the front of the house).
At the same time, my current and past selves grapple with atmosphereless Luna and the sybaritic Tertius, communities of the distant imagined future in an almost-parallel universe where lifespans are dictated only by accident and there is space enough, and time. So even as this rereading takes/has taken/will forever be taking place at home in Victoria's Fernwood neighbourhood, in another ficton (which concept will be expanded and featured in my next post, I promise), a young(er) girl who feels impossibly old is discovering adult Heinlein for the first time as she nibbles on baby carrots from the family garden.
1A note on the latter: Heinlein has been accused of misogyny, which accusation was rebutted by Spider Robinson in favour of "Bob" as a champion for women. I find myself toeing the line between these extremes; Heinlein writes some of the most interesting women I have yet to encounter in any sort of literature, but they tend toward the superhuman, such as in the case of Gwen Nowak. His occasional adherence to prescribed gender roles I find myself forgiving when I remember to look at publication dates (and biographical information, as much as I would hate to admit this most of the time) and consider the leaps in sexual politics and gender relations that he does male—wow, Freudian slip—make.
2"My most outlandish tales are the ones most likely to be true—as that is the literal truth. No storyteller has ever been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad Universe" (Time Enough For Love 31, another Heinlein I'll be chatting up in a few posts).
