Ostensibly, Stamping Butterflies is three independent tales. The first is of a street rat named Moz growing up in Marrakesh in the 70s. And while French colonial rule is fading, its impact remains in the lives of Moz, his friends and enemies on the streets, and his family. The second is of a strange, zombie-esque man who gets it into his head that he needs to take an old rifle and assassinate the President of the United States. Captured, he becomes Prisoner Zero, and the weight of American intelligence services is unleashed against him to get to the bottom of his actions. The third storyline, and the one most divorced from the other two, is set far in the future in a planetary system populated by hundreds of billions of people ruled by one person, the emperor Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu the only mortal, the hundreds of billions he rules are virtual people, while he suffers the cycle of life all animals do. The latest Chuang Tzu more than upset with this fate, little does he know help is on the way in the form of an assassin.
Jumping forward in time and backward in time, even within the individual plot threads themselves, coupled with Grimwood's lucid and at times indirect prose, Stamping Butterflies requires attention. But as the pieces snowball, momentum builds, and things start clicking into place. The conclusion, however, is not a climatic splash of sf action which brings the three threads into a fireworks show, rather it's a psychological and ideological explosion, one which sends ripples back through the entire novel.
Stamping Butterflies is at heart the deeply personal story of Moz. While the novel is refracted through a neon-future lens and a semi-present day, post-colonial setting, it remains Moz's tale. His loss of innocence and reckoning with it forms the novel's core, but to describe in detail is to spoil, so I will refrain. I would only say that the colorfully imaginative way in which Grimwood presents this transition is what sometimes gives speculative fiction the edge over realist fiction—sometimes. The positive power of possibility is just the cherry on top.
Moving from the personal to the political (yes, it's possible), Stamping Butterflies is a look at the post-colonial Middle East. Context provided, Grimwood deftly delivers a view to French power in North Africa circa mid-20th century and what has become of it since on the global scale. By no means taking sides or pointing fingers of blame, Grimwood simply uses relevant scenes to portray the effect on the locals, or more specifically, Moz and the people closest to him, all of whom occupy the spectrum of morality.
Given how the three narratives eventually lose the “ostensibly” descriptor and gain “interlinked”, there may be some interest on the reader's part to assign certain aspects of the novel as metaphors or symbols of things happening in the “real” narrative. And while this is entirely possible to do, the true genius of the novel is that these aspects can be read as non-refracted entities unto themselves, and yet still form a cohesive whole in other ways. Grimwood pulls off some true literary tricks to make this happen, giving the novel real dimension.
With the author's accurate, minimalist prose, even secondary characters come across as fleshed out. But if I had to complain, I would say too many get stage time. Some characters feel wholly at home in the narrative, particularly the present day section of Prisoner Zero and the West's attempt to balance outright torture with more humane methods of info extraction. But several characters in the far future feel redundant, unnecessary to the primary thrust of that section. Reducing some of the content in the far future would have reduced the burden on readers, in turn allowing its colors to pop better.
In the end, Stamping Butterflies is a book still worthy of discussion today. A most fascinating prism, it is capable of being viewed from several perspectives, perspectives which enhance and contrast one another depending on the angle. It cannot automatically be boiled down to one reading, one interpretation. I'm gushing, I know, so will close by saying the book represents the power of science fiction to be a contributing voice to Literature. Read it if you like such books.
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