Sarah Canary

Author: Karen Joy Fowler

Is this novel science fiction? Or is it fantasy, or a straight historical fiction? It could be any, depending on how you choose to read the famously enigmatic ending of the novel. But however you read it, it is a beautiful and fascinating work.A white woman walks into a camp of Chinese workers in the Pacific Northwest in the 1870s. She doesn't speak, maybe she can't speak, but she does utter birdlike sounds that leads the Chinese labourers to christen her Sarah Canary. One of the Chinese tries to take care of her, which leads the two on an odyssey among the outcasts of American society at the time, encountering blacks, the insane, feminists and artists among others. At the end, Sarah is transformed into something indescribably and disappears. Was she an alien? Was she a figment of the imagination?Silent to the end, however, Sarah's journey shines an extraordinary light into murky corners of American history, and gives a voice to those who were usually voiceless. Sarah Canary is an emotionally powerful work, beautifully crafted, delicious to read, that makes us question our own notions of genre. It is undoubtedly science fiction, unless you decide otherwise.

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Throughout her career, Karen Joy Fowler has flirted with genre rather than embracing it full bloodedly; practically all of her novels and stories have an enigmatic quality to them that means it is never decisively clear whether they are science fiction or not, but they feel as though they should be. Typical of this quality is We are All Completely Beside Ourselves, in which a scientist raises a chimpanzee as part of the family, before circumstances force him to remove the chimp. The reasons are never fully explained to his youngest daughter, who spends the rest of her life blaming herself for the disappearance of her "sister". What makes it science fictional is that the story does not concern itself with what the chimp learned from living with a human family, but rather what the daughter learned from living with a chimp. As always with Fowler, the writing is exquisitely good.

If you are fascinated by the enigmatic form of first contact represented by Sarah Canary, you should also look out for A Maggot by John Fowles. Set in the 1730s, the story revolves around various conflicting accounts of a journey taken by an aristocrat and a small group of companions. Gradually, as we sort through the mysterious story, we realise that what the travellers encounter on their journey is a spacecraft, or possibly a time machine, and they are given a glimpse of highly advanced technology and the world it might create, but from their 18th century experience they are not able to make sense of what they see.