Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison

My last read was a devastating and serious book, the sublime and arguably flawless masterpiece that is Wuthering Heights. I decided, next, to go for something a little less demanding, a little less impactful and, ultimately, a LOT more frivolous.

I’m talking about Make Room! Make Room!, Harry Harrison’s 1966 pulpy dystopian novel that was the basis of the famous film from the 1970s about unwitting cannibalism, Soylent Green. I’ve never seen that film, but the one thing I know about it is probably the one thing that most people who haven’t seen it know about it: Soylent Green is food made from humans that people eat.

This source novel, then, introduces “soylent” as a food product pretty early on in the novel, and so I presumed this was going to quickly (or slowly!) be revealed to be a human-derived foodstuff, despite it being directly stated in the text that it was made of a combination of soy and lentil (hence the name). However, this never happens. Within the context of this novel, “soylent” is only ever what it claims to be – a mix of soy and lentil. There is no cannibalism, no reveal about mechanised fake meat made from reconstituted human corpses, nothing like this at all.

There’s something quite disconcerting, actually, about reading a novel where you’re 100% certain you know the details of a forthcoming narrative twist that then never arrives. Because it doesn’t. Because that twist, that detail, is a device within the film (which is set in the distant future of 2022 rather than the novel’s distant future of 1999 (alright, Prince)), and though it ultimately could be a believable detail within the world created by Harrison here, it isn’t one. And so I spent most of this novel convincing myself that a surprise was coming that wouldn’t surprise me, and – this is also surprising – it didn’t make me enjoy the text any less.

–///–

Make Room! Make Room! is a lovely little mash-up of a couple of different genres.

It may be famous as a dystopia, set in an over-populated New York City where food and water and privacy is scarce and organised criminals who are better able than the state to source those things are all doing very very well, but Make Room! Make Room! ultimately uses this only as background, to tell what is, in many ways, a traditionally structured detective novel, one where the detective is solving a mystery that the reader knows the solution to from the beginning.

An opportunistic petty criminal botches a burglary and kills a man who surprises him while he’s leaving, then drops all the loot he had collected as he flees. It turns out, however, that the man he killed is very connected in the black market meat and booze industry, and the lack of any missing items makes it look like a potential assassination. High ups in the police department demand answers, and a lowly detective – divorced, depressed, in the classic mode of fictional detectives – is put on the case, around other duties (generally suppressing riots as and when water, food and electricity supplies get rationed below socially acceptable levels).

And that’s the novel. The detective, in the true style of Philip Marlowe, hooks up with the gangster’s gorgeous and desperate moll, while he follows a breadcrumb like trail, ordered from above to pin this killing on someone, trying to work out whether it signifies a forthcoming gangland tussle, or if it’s something a little more prosaic. As I mentioned, the reader already knows it’s the latter. And yet, knowing that – and believing I knew about a significant second twist, the one about cannibalism – this pulpy novel managed to hold my attention.

Something like this – a crime in a dystopia at the less literary end of the spectrum – can often fail when the plot isn’t strong. Often, narrative tension is the only thing that holds attention with underwritten fiction. We read on because we want to know who did the murder, we read on because we want to know what “soylent” is made of, etc., but here the second of these is not present in the novel as if a mystery, because it isn’t, and the first isn’t a pounding narrative need because Harrison dramatises the botched burglary before it becomes clear that anyone even cares about it…

The characterisation is generally very weak, too, as no one is really anything other than an archetype (the sexy lady who sleeps with men who offer her protection… the sleazebag, over-worked, under-paid detective whose personal life is a mess… the underclass criminal who’ll do anything for money other than honest work), but somehow the book works.

Harrison’s over-burdened and collapsed/collapsing USA feels very real.

Details align and cohere and the way in which the promise of the 20th century has failed to be realised is engaging. There is misogyny and ignorance and anti-science, Christian fundamentalist ideologies embraced and enforced by the state and causing more problems than the high population itself, there is the loss of transport and travel due to a failure to have switched to renewable energies before oil ran out… There is a lot of stuff that pre-figures problems we have in the present day, and problems, too, that would appear in later dystopias written by other people and focusing on other things…

Is it a serious piece of literature worthy of attention and significant reflection? Not really, no. But it’s solid world-building, it’s tight detective fiction set in a fictionalised world, and it’s doing a lot of things well that many other novels continue to try to do.

I enjoyed it. And though I wouldn’t go out of my way to read something else by Harry Harrison and I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch Soylent Green, if either fell into my lap, well, I wouldn’t push them out again.

Good enough, yes. Good enough.

Thank you so much for reading TriumphoftheNow.com! If you like what you’ve read, please subscribe, share and order one of my books. If you love what you’ve read, why not order me something frivolous and noisy from this Amazon wishlist or make a quick donation via my ko-fi page?

I’m currently focusing on parenting and creative practice, so small donations are appreciated now more than ever!

DONATE 0.5GBP per MONTH TO TRIUMPHOFTHENOW.COM!

scott manley hadley aka SOLID BALD live

Here’s a video of me recently performing at the prestigious (it has a Wikipedia page) comedy night, Quantum Leopard. Listen to how much fun the crowd is having. You could have that much fun, too!