This interior working is the true quest of the story, the narrative momentum.Īs the narrator studies the aliens’ language, she begins to grasp their way of thinking.
Her mind grasps at memories and questions: how her daughter could grow up so fast how parenting could cause such anxiety and wonder how the narrator’s own life could extend beyond the beginning and the end of her child’s. The other puzzle is less easy to solve – the phenomenon of the narrator’s loss. One puzzle is literal – the intellectual task of figuring out the aliens’ language. There’s a searching emotion, a sense of puzzlement. Still, something kept me reading – a sense of exploration, in themes of time, development and change. Indeed, for some readers it might veer perilously close to the navel-gazing kind of literary story where nothing appears to happen. While the aliens and humans evaluate each other, the narrator is retracing the times with her daughter. The story’s interest is smaller scale, an unravelling process of study. We’re not directed to wonder what the aliens want and there aren’t any secrets to learn about the daughter and her fate. The focus isn’t on revelations or startling events. One moment we see her as an infant the next, her mother is travelling to identify her dead body. The other, the story of the daughter, has a more haphazard order. One of the narrative threads is linear – the process of decoding the language. This narrative is intercut with another story – a letter to her daughter, who, we soon learn, has died. The narrator is a language expert who is called in to help establish contact. They seem to be windows into a spacecraft. Story of Your Life opens as alien artefacts appear on Earth.
Spoilers follow if that’s a problem, toodle-pip and see you next time. I haven’t yet seen the movie – but before I do, I want to post about the prose story because it pulls off a trick that seems impossible in the literal and external medium of film. Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang is probably better known as its movie adaptation, Arrival.
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