Getting By In Tligolian by Roppotucha Greenberg

Arachne Press, 2023

This brief novella (a recent publication from British indie Arachne Press) is an engaging and enveloping fantasy/sci-fi-ish text set in a fictional European city that has a unique feature – it is constantly riven by timeslips, with people passing from the past to the future and back again, and at some point in its history these apertures were tamed and exploited and folded into a public transport system, so that one may travel freely and easily between various points in time (only within the city limits) by catching a train. It’s considered very gauche to do this, though, deeply unchic, so although people in the city do conduct relationships or work jobs or raise kids in times different to their native historical location, most of the time the trains are just for tourists, who pass though the city on their travels around the rest of the continent, treating these time-trains as a tourist treats the canals of Venice, the hanging train of Wuppertal, the Paris metro, the Wolverhampton to Birmingham tram, etc…

There’s also a giant who may or may not be the head of government, who can mainly be found compulsively fishing in the river on the edges of the city, often being trailed by children and tourists as another unique feature of this spot on the modern Grand Tour…

Oh, and the city (Tligol) is run by an authoritarian government who don’t allow natives to ever legally leave the country, who discourage travelling through time (yet maintain the systems that permit this), organise regular public executions and maintain firm and strict laws about freedom of expression and of communication, and heavily limit personal freedoms…

The set-up takes most of the book’s 100ish pages to establish, tbh, but that’s not necessarily a problem, as despite all of this lore and all of these laws (both criminal and metaphysical), Roppotucha Greenberg‘s prose never feels tired or like mere exposition…

Her protagonist is an outsider, too (like the reader, I mean) so her discovery of the intricacies and realities of Tligol forms the plot.

The novel opens with her – recently finished studying in her home country and basically backpacking as a permanent choice – working a job in a hotel kitchen in this strange city while trying to scrub up on the verb conjugations of the local language, when a colleague invites her to a public execution, which is a normal thing to do there. The executee is so damn fine, though, that she decides to jump on a train and go meet the dissident in the past, before he was arrested.

This, then (well, before) she does, building a life and a relationship in the past, getting involved in the freedom struggle, losing weeks and hours and days getting lost in the timeslips that still happen, without control, when off the trains and not paying enough attention.

There are classic time travel tropes (e.g. is person x/y/z secretly an older/younger version of person a/b/c? (Yes) is there anything that can be done to help the hunky boyfriend escape the inevitable execution she has already seen? (No) And can she live happily in the time they have left with the knowledge of her boyfriend’s time of death? (Also no), but enough freshness for it to never feel too indebted to any other text…

Getting By In Tligolian is a deeply satisfying read, though a disconcerting one.

There are no simple resolutions and there is no blunt happy ending. There is no revolution, no clear escape, no clear route for the protagonist to a satisfying life… I feel like I could have read this text at thrice its length, and I think Greenberg’s brevity (I basically mean her choice for this to remain a novella when there is probably enough narrative and world-building for a much longer text) is commendable…

It’s-

Intense, serious, short… Funny, articulate, playful… Political, discursive, thought-provoking.

Comparisons to China Mieville throughout the blurbs, but I found this far more emotive and human than the Mieville I’ve read, but I know he’s someone people love, so it is definitely meant as a compliment.

Thank you!

Read more and purchase via the publisher here