Lavie Tidhar - Central Station

Somewhere about a third of the way through Lavie Tidhar's Central Station I realised that I had been missing a crucial aspect to the novel. The story was not slow in starting, it wasn't actually going to arrive. There isn't really a plot to speak of. Once I'd got my head out of my somewhat traditionalist approach I was able to open up to a fantastic depiction of a rather more hopeful future than we might currently predict.

The titular Central Station is the massive gateway to the world that dominates a future Tel Aviv. This is a Tel Aviv were the Israeli-Arab conflict has been solved in some unexplained way - Arabs, Jews and a plethora of others live side by side, in relative harmony. In fact, the city has become both point of intersection between Earth and space, and a place were people come from across the world in search of wealth, work... or any one of many other options. In one sense Central Station is a liberal fantasy of a multicultural future city, where people live happily together and technology has solved so many woes:

Central Station in spring, when the smell in the air truly is intoxicating. It is a smell of the sea, and of the sweat of so many bodies, their heat and their warmth, and it is the smell of humanity's spices and the cool scent of its many machines; and it is the scent of the resin or sap that sometimes drops from a cut in the eternally renewing adaptoplant neighbourhoods, and of ancient asphalt heating in the sun, and of vanished oranges, and of freshly cut lemongrass: it is the smell of Humanity Prime, that richest and most concentrated of smells; there is nothing like it in the outer worlds.

Ironically, given the setting, it seems that there are no longer any structural problems other than those of personal antagonism and history. Even the "question of Who Is a Jew had been asked not just about the Chong family, but of the robots too, and was settled long ago."

But things aren't perfect. Old robots, their technology and usefulness outdated, beg for spare parts from passers-by, and things feel frayed and dusty. Technology seems magnificent, yet collectors search desperately for old books to add to their collections. Workers fly through virtual reality in a fantastic cyber version of the Elite game, earning real money and fame to take back to the outside world. And a vampire comes. Not a blood sucking Dracula figure, but someone hungry for data, infected on board an interplanetary ship who makes it through quarantine onto Earth.

The chapters are like this, a semi-linked network of individual stories that weave in and out of each other, making a tapestry of a world, a future, but not really going anywhere. Take the kafetaria that Boris Chong drinks in, run by a former lover. It isn't any different to a thousand bars that we might visit today in the 2010s. But that's not the point, this is the future. Things are different, yet they are the same. But for Tidhar, the type of future is important, it is where we might go if we only solve the problems we have today. Take the author's beautifully evoked dream of a day at the beach:

They had gone to the beach that day, it was a summer's day and in Menashiya, Jews and Arabs and Filipinos all mingled together, the Muslim women in their long dark clothes and the children running shrieking in their underwear; Tel Aviv girls in tiny bikinis, sunbathing placidly; someone smoking a joint, and the strong smell of it wafting in the sea air... the life guard in his tower calling out trilingual instructions - 'Keep to the marked areas! Did anyone lose a child? Please come to the lifeguards now! You with the boat, head towards the Tel Aviv harbour and away from the swimming area!' - the words getting lost in the chatter, someone had parked their car and was blaring out beats from the stereo, Somali refugees were cooking a barbecue on the promenade;s grassy part...

Its a beautiful future precisely because it seems so impossible if we look at the reality of Zionism today, the oppression of the Palestinians and racism in Israel. Yet it is a future, and Lavie Tidhar wants it to be real. Something as mundane as a multicultural day at the beach seems impossibly Utopian in today's context, and thus becomes a futuristic fantasy.

Lavie Tidhar's brilliance is partly to do with his ability to describe this future. Both the mundane and the weird. There are some amazing scenes (the part with the suicide clinc is genius for instance). But he also depicts a future so real and possible, yet unreal and impossible too. It certainly is a world worth fighting for, and that's the importance of the book; not the story or what happens to the characters, but the world they live in and what it says about the one we inhabit.