The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (hereafter PH&C) is the story of two characters, one called “the boy” and the other “the woman”. Both were previously members of the their ship's Hold, a place where people are kept incarcerated, chained to walls. At some time in the past, the woman was released from the Hold and moved higher in the ship to do research at a university. She still wears, however, a security anklet, an anklet that her university overseers can use, if they desire, to take physical control of her body. The woman is doing research on the behaviors and social practices of child's play in the Hold when she receives a welcome gift: the boy as a research subject. Unlocking things inside herself she never knew possible, the lives of the boy and the woman take on new trajectories in the aftermath.
If
it wasn't wasn't clear, the primary themes of PH&C
revolve around incarceration,
slavery, and other forms of oppression. The root of this oppression
is clearly identified as capitalism. The people are in the Hold due
to the vagaries of Adam Smith. I vehemently disagree with this
notion (it's difficult to imagine socialism, for example, being less
exploitative than capitalism, but I digress). But let's take this
review forward, regardless.
The house of PH&C is
built upon two pillars: first is the boy's experience as he moves
from the Hold into ankleted-freedom. Samatar handles the psychology
of this wonderfully well—or at least as well as my non-enslaved
brain can imagine it. The boy's aim is to take the perennial wisdom
learned from elders in the Hold into the “free world”—to find
the titular “Practice”, which rings sympathetic.
The second pillar, the woman's story, primarily holds her research as well as stream-of-consciousness as ideas occur to her or are inspired by her experiences with the boy. These sections of story ring significantly unsympathetic—not from the character's perspective, rather from the reader's. The sections too often read like pseudo-academia—social studies that bend and twist according to feelings and opinion rather than empirical science. The reader can see Samatar squeezing in the juicy ideas she read in “non-fiction”. Even if the reader agrees with Samatar's politics, it's unengaging writing, almost fourth-wall breaking.
A note should be made on the the style of PH&C. Samatar consciously produces lengthy, run-on sentences. A high school English teacher would run out of red ink if Samatar were at that age; the first sentence of the story is a paragraph-length sentence. But the intention is clear: to create a flow state, a medium in which one idea leads into another which leads to... And the effect is positive. Samatar's style prevents the pseudo-academia from being black-and-white dry and allows the climactic scenes to move liquidly.
In the end, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain is a novella that will likely be enjoyed by readers looking for social justice as a primary theme. From the non-fiction books Samatar cites as inspiration, it's clearly fiction for the left, no bones about it. I strongly disagree with Samatar's base assumptions about capitalism, but I would say that if the lens through which I viewed life were the same as Samatar's story, things follow logically. I would laud her for steering the story away from an (ironically) Orwellian setting by giving her “slaves” relative freedom. I would also giver her credit for avoiding direct mention of race; oppression in the story is based on the economic model not skin color...
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