Winner of the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award in 1991, this novella has been on my to-read list for a while now. I am a fan of Joe’s work, but this one I’ve kept putting back on the pile.
I’m never quite sure why, but I think the main reason is that I’ve always assumed that the story will work best with a knowledge of Ernest Hemingway, something I don’t have. (A basic working knowledge, sure, but little more.) As a result, I’ve always felt that I probably wouldn’t ‘get it’.
Well, the good news is that I think I got most of it. But I’m still not entirely convinced it worked for me.
The Hemingway Hoax is a time travel tale from Joe. Set initially in 1996, it tells of John Baird, a Hemingway scholar with an eidetic memory, who is persuaded by a low-life, Sylvester “Castle” Castlemaine, to create a fake Hemingway manuscript based on the so-called ‘lost stories’ of 1921. (In that year, Hemingway’s writing career suffered a setback when his first wife, Hadley, lost a bag containing the manuscript and all the carbon copies of his first novel on a Parisian train. Since that time there has been speculation about the nature of the novel and whether the manuscript survived and may turn up one day.)
The story becomes sf-nal when we discover that there are wider issues at stake. Somewhere, or somewhen, there are entities who control the paths of destiny in the multiple parallel versions of our world that exist. Hemingway appears to be a nexus point and therefore anything that affects the cultural influence of Hemingway is a threat to them.
Baird becomes aware of this himself when one of the entities appears to him in the form of Hemingway on a train travelling from Boston to Florida, and warns him to give up on the scheme. We then have a succession of deaths with Baird reappearing as himself, but different. He seems to be appearing in different places to show him what the consequences of his actions might / might not be.
Back in Florida, in 1996, life continues roughly as before, though with a rather ‘film-noir’ twist. As in the best traditions of the genre, Castle arranges for Pansy, an ex-call girl, to seduce Baird whilst Castle has an affair with Baird’s wife Lena, so that Baird can then be blackmailed by Lena and Castle into continuing with the hoax.
This is initially unknown to Baird who, through multiple encounters with the Hemingway entity, and multiple deaths, stays with the plan, as much to annoy the mysterious alien as anything else. Increasingly desperate to get Baird to change his mind, the alien-that-is-like-Hemingway offers to show Baird what happened to Hadley’s bag, if he would give up on the hoax.
Travelling back in time, they see the thief – SPOILER ALERT!!!! (it is Hemingway himself) END OF SPOILER ALERT!! – who speaks to Baird and the entity before vanishing.
The last part of the novella is where things become complex and appropriately fractured. Baird experiences Hemingway’s memories, backwards from the end. He reaches the point where the young Hemingway, contemplates his future, but then Baird’s awareness separates and comes to consciousness of his abilities. He moves back in time, steals Hadley’s bag, allowing himself to be seen doing it in the person of Hemingway. He drops it off for himself to find in the present, before abandoning time for the spaces between. Thus, this new “Baird entity” creates himself out of Hemingway’s psychic trauma, and it is implied that he actually creates all the other entities we have encountered in the story.
As that summary suggests, there’s a lot packed into a fairly short tale here and Haldeman uses lots of skill to combine lots of writerly tricks. (At the end of the novella, in his Afterword, Joe says that he has been a student of Hemingway’s writing and life for about twenty-five years.) We have Haldeman writing snippets of prose in a Hemingway style, fairly complex temporal gymnastics, and what begins as a lighter, decidedly caper-esque tone turns into a much darker, more extreme film-noir gangster tale. At this point I guess I should warn some readers that there’s a lot of very bloody and violent death here, as well as a lot of sex that may not be for everyone.
For me it was a tale that made you think, that I enjoyed, but in the end I felt that I wasn’t getting the full picture without knowing more of the real Hemingway himself. The ending was clever, but I can’t say that I loved it, feeling it was perhaps a little more style than substance. Very well done, but rather a disappointment.
In summary then, The Hemingway Hoax is a good read, and a clever read, but one that I liked rather than loved. Whilst I can see why it’s been on my virtual shelf for a while, it was worth a look. But I suspect that it may be one for literary buffs wanting to dabble in SF rather than the other way around.
The Hemingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman
147 pages
ISBN: B00AFZ69CI
Originally published April 1990 in Isaac Asimov’s Magazine.
Review from the Gateway SF ebook by Gollancz (UK), published December 2012.
