Yellow Blue Tibia

Adam Robert's Yellow Blue Tibia is the record of the attempted alien invasion of the Soviet Union in 1986, told by science fiction writer Konstantin Skvorecky as he pieces together the disparate elements that make up the story. It's a good enough device, to write as a writer who is prone to flights of imagination and prides himself on his command of language. It's also a good plan to set the novel in the USSR and play some games with language and translation. Fortuitously enough, our hero can speak English so communication with American scientologists provides no problems.


But unfortunately, despite the obvious attention paid to narrative devices and structure, the novel falls flat for two main reasons:

1. It struck me as rather pat, rather trite, how elements combined to bring about the hero's death, the failed invasion. What felt as though it was building to a massive climax ended instead in a feeling of disappointment. If that was the intention of the author, as I hope it might have been, sadly he failed to pull it off in any meaningful or rewarding way. Instead, I was left deflated, and not because I felt that was the intended response of a reader, but because the finale had missed the point.
2. The setting and characters are by and large Russian. But Robert's experience of Russia, if he has any, is not in evidence in the writing. That in itself is not essential; what is, however, is that we aren't provided with mere caricatures of what a Soviet man might be like in the 80s. Yet there is something horribly garish about the jesting with 'yellow blue tibia', an attempt at rendering in English ya lublyu tibya, the Russian for 'I love you'. There's something garish about the pastiche of omnipresent KGB officers, about how everyone is an alcoholic bar Skvorecky. There's even something a little disappointing that the book's jacket has to include that silly attempt at mock-Russian styling in using letters from Cyrillic as though they made sense in English. They don't. It just looks ill-considered.

The premise is good enough, and Roberts' clearly knows how to manipulate elements of a novel to great effect. But there needs to be some kind of passion behind such a manipulation. Otherwise, we are reading an exercise in novel writing, not a novel itself.

~~~

2009

Adam Roberts

Orion Books