by Jaspreet Singh
TOUCHWOOD EDITIONS
2022/$22.00/256 pp.
Before Lila, the narrator of Jaspreet Singh’s third novel, can begin to tell the story of a major scientific hoax, she must face the truth of her own complicity. A promising geology student from Chandigarh, Lila sees her career cut short by institutional scandal and personal trauma—her esteemed professor commits nation-shaming fossil fraud and two of her close colleagues die mysteriously under his supervision. Lila then migrates to Calgary’s hub of groundbreaking earth sciences and reinvents herself as a science writer who specializes in profiling scientists of a certain hubris. Once she is ready to flesh out her sketchy physiognomies into revealing investigative biographies (hers included), she resorts to speculative fiction.
Face opens with Lila seated across from her writing partner in a workshop exercise that prompts her to look closely into the face of the other and abstract what she sees. For Lila, this is the spectral trace of another face from her past, which she tracks down to her not-so-dead colleague, now prospering as a rock-star geoengineer after feigning suicide and migrating (also) to Calgary to escape their professor’s fate of becoming a racialized scapegoat. Amid multiple deaths (real and fake), Lila traces the story back to the corruptive influence of western imperialism.
Singh brilliantly manages to control what might otherwise have been an unwieldy mix of ghost story, crime fiction, doppelgänger fiction, science writing, cultural biography, fantasy and critical race theory under the rubric of speculative fiction—Lila’s default genre. Science readers will recognize the real-life scientists to whom the novel’s characters and their aliases allude, such as Vishwa Jit Gupta, the Chandigarh fossil-hoaxer, whom Singh doubly revisions as Lila’s defamed professor “Dr. G.” and as her reputedly dead, face-saving colleague “Vikram Jit,” who renames himself “Amitabh Ghosh” after acclaimed science/speculative fiction writer Amitav Ghosh. They will also appreciate Lila’s learned and provocative interrogation of scientific “self-correction,” including the failure of zealous whistle-blowing to prevent hoax-induced “data contamination” from enjoying an enduring legacy, and the pyrrhic grand plan of planet-saving geoengineering to salt our polluted Anthropocene skies with sun-reflecting, earth-poisoning chemicals.
Putting a human face to geology is not an objective science but a case for acute scrutiny, implies Singh. In Face he assembles a battery of literary strategies to confront the Anthropocene in all its deceits, the prime one being “the Anthropocene” itself, that universalizing conceit which acknowledges humanity’s epochal impact on earth systems, while simultaneously effacing the unjust distribution of human culpability and suffering.
Dianne Chisholm is a professor emeritus at the U of A.
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