They call me Downspout, and I am not as a Kang should be. I am brave and bold, and if you think I am untruthing, any Kang will tell you Downspout was the Kang who got within fifteen footsteps of the Blue Kang brainquarters, and took a hotcross bow in the shoulder on the Day the Red Kang Cried Wolf. The Kang that fired it had more frit than me, thinking they’d aimed close enough to my brainbox to send me turn-tail away. She cried more as the arrow misflew to my shoulder than I did when Switchroom B pulled it out again. The Kangs all said they thought they would be all hailing me that day, but I did not game over. There is a red pucker sore where the arrow was now. Sometimes it aches when the cold breath blows through the ventegrande grills.
to be perfectly frank, my expectations for Dale Smith’s As a Kang Should Be were set extremely low: the novel’s title page includes the note “Based on PARADISE TOWERS by Stephen Wyatt / as seen in the BBC TV series Doctor Who”, and I thought, “oh, boy.”
looking up the serial in question suggests that this was not an altogether unwarranted response — I gather “Paradise Towers” is not especially highly regarded. it seems, however, that As a Kang Should Be is the product of Smith saying, essentially, “this is an interesting premise but I can do it better without the Doctor”. and you know what? he was right. by god, he was right.
As a Kang Should Be moves back and forth between two perspectives. the first is an unnamed Caretaker — known only by his registration number, “835 stroke 34 subsection 12” — who during an unrelated investigation stumbles upon a shocking fact: his grandson is present in the facility known as Paradise Towers. this is a shocking discovery: Paradise Towers is an enormous residential complex, originally developed to be a luxury resort but repurposed when a war broke out between its builders’ homeworld and some unnamed Enemy. all men and boys, save a few elderly men (mostly with previous law enforcement experience) deemed unfit for military service, were sent off on a ship to fight in the space war; all women and girls, with the military-unfit elderly men commissioned as “Caretakers” (cops), were sent to Paradise Towers.
it quickly becomes apparent that the Caretaker’s grandson is trans: having announced his preferred gender in young childhood, he was, it seems, detransitioned by his parents in order to smuggle him to safety with the women and girls. in the years since their arrival at Paradise Towers, however, social systems have broken down: while there was a short-lived effort to continue the girls’ education, it mostly fell apart, and they have divided into wild gangs — the Kangs, color-coded (at least Red, Yellow, and Blue) — who are feared by the women who were adults on arrival (residents, or “Rezzies”) and vaguely policed by the Caretakers. the Kangs have developed a complex, idiosyncratic manner of speech, marked by rebracketings, misunderstood and fossilized idioms, neologisms, and strange extrapolations.
this is important because while Caretaker 835 stroke 34 subsection 12 sets out to find his grandson, the other perspective is his grandson, now a Yellow Kang known as Downspout (the Kangs’ names all appear to derive from signage: “Switchroom A” and her twin sister “Switchroom B”, “No Smoking”; and so on). where the Caretaker’s narration is formal and past-tense, an official debriefing-cum-interrogation, Downspout’s is a free-flowing present tense in the Kang dialect (or “Kanguage”). this is easily the novel’s greatest achievement, because despite Kang speech having a lot of things that could end up being cutesy (“sneaki-sneak”; “kissy-kissy”) or grating, by taking it entirely seriously Smith forces readers to take it seriously as well. I suspect that some of the Kang language — its general vibe, if not its specific content — is taken from the serial, but there are enough post-1987 references (the lexicalization of “acab”, “mos def”, and plenty of others) that I think the execution of it here is first and foremost Smith’s innovation, and it really, really works. Downspout’s language may at times seem childish, but the narration is grappling with a sophisticated range of questions, particularly focused on gender.
As a Kang Should Be is not a novel about gender abolition, per se. it is, however, a novel where “gender” as such is basically irrelevant: the only men in Paradise Towers are the Caretakers, and one adult trans man named Pex, who briefly crosses paths with Downspout and opens up new possibilities for how Downspout might think of himself. given this, Downspout, who has forgotten everything from his early childhood, has no frame of reference for “man” — he certainly doesn’t want to be a Caretaker! if this is not exactly a post-gender future, then, it is a future where gender is basically irrelevant simply because of the supersession of gender by other systems (the class/power divide between Caretakers and Residents). and yet: Smith makes it clear that even in such a context there will, inevitably, still be people who, for whatever reason, want to alter their bodies, their choice of language, and the ways others perceive them. Downspout is dysphoric, in the sense that he wants to alter his body (in particular he’s worn a binder of some kind since the beginning of puberty), not as a product of the weight of cisnormative gendered expectations but simply because there will always be people who want to change themselves.
the tones of the Caretaker’s story and Downspout’s story are diametrically opposed, and this, too, is part of what makes the novel work so well. the Caretaker’s is a basically dystopian story about a man in a profoundly paranoid society obsessed with propriety and rules, descending slowly into obsession, paranoia, implied murder, and grim resignation as he tries to get the people around him to see something that they refuse to accept as real — his grandson’s erroneous presence in Paradise Towers — because it would inconvenience them. the darkness of this is balanced, however, by Downspout’s story, which begins when he is kicked out of the Yellow Kangs’ home because a Caretaker (his grandfather, unbeknownst to any of them) is looking for him. after a brief, tense sojourn with a group of street people (two ex-Caretakers, another ex-Kang, and a homeless resident), Downspout sets out on his own, descending to the depths of the Towers and finding, unexpectedly, a new, bright world, a world he hopes to lead others (not least his girlfriend, Switchroom A) into. if the Caretaker’s story has echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Downspout’s reminded me first and foremost of Jeanne DuPrau’s The City of Ember and Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop (aka Starship), with the bittersweetness of both. I think if this book were just the Caretaker’s story or just Downspout’s it wouldn’t work — it’s the formal/stylistic and tonal contrast and tension between the two that keeps the novel moving forward.
I did find the book quite slow, but not in a slogging way — it just takes its time. and I do genuinely think that even if I hadn’t gone into it with “this is Doctor Who fanfiction” setting my expectations I still would have been blown away by this book. really compelling; highly recommend.
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