Review: Mirrors
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 24, 2013
Where do I begin? I've been staring at my reflection in the blank screen of my computer for close to half an hour, and still nothing. Because there is nothing to say on Michael Bunker's "Resist"? Quite the opposite. Because there's so much and I don't know where to start. You know what I like about reading on a Kindle app? The way you can highlight the passages you like? You can even choose the colour. Well, there are very few pages I left white on this one.And yet I'm at a loss for words. When words are the central element of the Archipelago Series, its main focus. Michael Bunker brilliantly entered the silo world and created an essay on literature, disguised as science-fiction. Consider that for a second: he's an independent writer, an "underground writer", so to speak, following in the footsteps of another "underground writer" (Hugh Howey), writing about writers in an underground world. It's enough to make you dizzy, just like Leah at some point in the story:"The mind reels when it discovers that there are other minds and other lives out there"Read Refuse and Resist and remember, reader, that the writer's real meaning remains to be reached by reading between the lines. Wool fanfiction works this way, and its authors, Bunker included, aren't just spinning a yarn to pass the time. They're like a brotherhood now, "united in a love for literature, and a love for the truth", like the members of Samizdat.The game of mirrors and echoes is constant throughout Resist: the narrative echoes books and authors and either quotes or mentions them (Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd,  Solzhenitsyn, Descartes, Thoreau...). Onomastics plays a role as well, when some characters' names ring a bell (Mann...). The short story's whole structure is an echo in itself, a mise en abyme featuring book extracts, letters, stories within stories that characters tell one another or read to one another...On a deeper level, the whole atmosphere is reminiscent of the darkest hours of our History, and all the episodes during which the downtrodden had to "resist" violence from the power in place. It can call to mind, but not only, the second world war and the Resistance in France during the Occupation, when propaganda and constant control of every freedom ruled the masses.Even action scenes mirror the characters' inner turmoil. When Leah is hanging down a rope, risking her life, she is symbolically confronted to gravity, and the need every human has to "resist" it every second of their lives. Avoiding a fall - sometimes resisting the appeal of it - becomes a meaningful parallel. The thought is repeated - echoed - later on when she goes down the stairs, a movement giving her "a philosophical grasp on gravity".Even characters are echoes. Isn't Tink the author himself? "A burly man, not tall, but fully twice the size - in almost every other respect - than a normal man. His head was huge, like a museum piece, and his full, gray-mottled beard made him look as if he was a hundred years old. Only his youthful voice, and his granite strength, made Leah think that he was only in his mid-thirties..."Whether Tink is a mirror of Bunker or not, his doppelganger (I can't risk spoiling it too much here, but there are two "doubles" in the story, two mirrors of other characters), Resist is a piece of work that will make you reflect. As George Bernard Shaw phrased it:“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul”