Getting By In Tligolian is a travel guide, language course, diary, philosophical treatise and dream sequence all rolled into one. It is also a thoroughly entertaining novella in flash.
Through a patchwork of pithy stories, we follow Jennifer, an unreliable narrator, around a time-twisting dystopia. In Tligol, time is not linear, death is not the end… and getting out is close to impossible.
Serendipity sets the plot of Roppotucha Greenberg’s novella in motion. Specifically, ‘a mix up with the phone booking’. From this seemingly banal springboard, Jenny experiences a series of mind-bending, meta-narrative events in multiple layers of reality.
Everything is not at it seems. For a start, Tligol is home to giants, a fact of which the reader is periodically reminded. The presence of one in particular, who dwells on a bridge in the middle of the city, is deliberately mysterious: ‘I’d begun to think I’d made him up,’ the narrator admits at one point.
Like any traveller becoming accustomed to a new city’s traditions, mores and politics, Jennifer is a suitably eyes-wide-open guide to show us around Tligol. Amid the confusion, she finds comfort in controlling the controllable, for example by learning Old Tligolian, even though the language is no longer widely spoken.
Language learning is a clever device that Greenberg uses to develop certain plot and character points. For one, learning a foreign language allows us to see the world anew with a child-like curiosity, which adds to the mystery and mystique of Tligol. ‘There is a bird in the tree,’ Jenny says. For all the complexity of phrasal verbs and the conditional mode, language learning offers a simplicity that re-sets and refreshes priorities: which words do I really need to know to describe my surroundings, my feelings, my experiences? ‘I was practising my conjugations when the explosion happened,’ she says casually, a sentence that could be taken from a textbook on the imperfect and perfect tenses.
Second, the focus on language combines smartly with Tligol’s temporal tricks. The city is a spatial representation of time: the various ‘time layers’ allow past, present and future happenings to (co-)exist spatially. This challenge to chronology is at odds with the simplicity of much occidental thought with its obsessive linearity. In Tligol, as in other traditions more in tune with the Earth, death is not at end point. Meanwhile, grief for loss can precede the joy of discovery.
While the philosophical and psychology elements succeed at every turn, the characters sometimes feel under-developed. This is epitomised by Tom, who is thrice likened to a cartoon character in the handful of interactions we have with him. First introduced as ‘more of a cartoon character than a person’, he then somehow later proceeds to ‘fossil[ise] into a cartoon version of himself’ before finally we learn that ‘he cartoonised himself’. The repetition, perhaps, is cartoonishly fitting.
For all the mystery and rootlessness, certain elements do seem overly familiar. The religion described at various points seems suspiciously Christian, with ‘candles’, ‘prayer’ and an ‘altar’. And a description of Tligolian patriotism is uncomfortably real worldly in its hostility to outsiders. ‘Nobody asked you to come here, Jenny,’ Tom retorts when she questions some of Tligol’s customs.
It is also depressing that, in a time-bending world, the reality of needless animal abuse is unchanged. In a tense scene near the end of the book, Jenny and her friend Martha discuss deep existential questions while roasting a chicken. The impact of their angsty exchange is significantly lessened by comparison with the dead bird: it is hard to take seriously their grumbles while an individual who never had a chance at life is being merrily stuffed and cooked in the background.
‘Tligol was unstable, and its streets moved when you weren’t looking,’ the narrator muses towards the end of the novella. Sometimes the familiar is the strangest of all. Sometimes, the longer we look, the stranger things we previously thought were normal start to seem.
Roppotucha Greenberg, Getting by in Tligolian (Arachne Press, 2023).
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