Temporary Agency
Lesbian protagonist; GLBT-positive world. Graphic violence.
. Highly Recommended.
February 8, 2010 | Revid 43 < prev | next >
Ellen Pierson is just another fourteen-year-old growing up in suburban Long Island: taking part in all the right public rituals, attaining her personal totems, and developing a crush on the lawyer who lead the spiritual liberation of the Pentagon. But everything changes when her cousin Paul comes to her for help with his new girlfriend, a smart, beautiful, charming, successful young woman—who, it turns out, isn't quite human.
An absolutely fantastic read! The setting is an alternate reality where the integration of the spiritual world with everyday life is taken to its logical extreme, resulting in a government bureaucracy devoted entirely to regulating the cosmic sphere—but still indulging in the same kinds of graft and corruption. From the very first page, Ellen seamlessly guides us into a world at once completely mundane (it's Long Island, after all) and completely bizarre, coloring her narrative with casual asides about commonplace events—adolescent scarification rituals, for example—that, as contemporary readers, we're assumed to know about or to have experienced ourselves. The result is an instantly engrossing world, much like what Steve Perry accomplishes in his science fiction, and a story fired with the kind of immediacy that makes the book hard to put down, even briefly.
Ellen's lurid descriptions of the more macabre elements of the story were like the high-contrast distillations found in comic book narratives. In fact, they reminded me of a Marvel crossover called Inferno that I'd pored over in high school: Manhattan under assault by demonic forces—with gruesome results. But the depth of Pollack's characters, especially Ellen herself, turns the shallow gratification of blood and guts into a moving examination of both grief and desire. Ellen's emotional entanglements are fraught with conflict, lending a painfully realistic edge to her narrative voice.
In some way, the story is like a metaphorical resolution of the tension between old traditions and the modern world. It brought to my mind's eye something I saw years ago, but can't remember where or when: a young native dancer at a powwow, decked out in a full feathered headdress and traditional leggings—and his breastplate woven with the iridescent undersides of compact disks.
Unique and unapologetic, the world Pollack creates is as breathtaking in its beauty as it is in its strangeness. Very satisfying and very highly recommended.
Note: Unquenchable Fire (1992) is set in the same world, but without queer protagonists; a breathtakingly detailed modern creation-myth, I still found it less compelling than Temporary Agency.
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