The future as presented in the first part of the book (meaning, your reading assignment for last week) seems a fairly optimistic one, considering the problems facing us now in the early part of the 21st century. In Solitaire there is a newly-formed world government with more clout than our present-day United Nations. Jackal’s little world of Ko Island is devoid of sexism, racism, and homophobia. People on the island do not seem too concerned about maintaining traditional male and female roles. Jackal’s father Carlos is the cook in the family and the gentler and more supportive of the two parents though he is always under the domination of his wife. Jackal’s lover is another woman, a fact accepted by parents and company officials. Even sexual jealousy does not seem to be an issue here – Snow knows about Jackal’s “encounter” with Tiger and is secure enough not to mind. The people on Ko Island have personal freedom and acceptance that few of us find in our lives today. It is almost a utopia, an ideal society with, in the case of Ko Island though not the rest of the world, a corporation replacing government and even the family. For the personal and the professional are merged here, and Ko watches benevolently over its employees like a good parent.
But no family, no society is perfect; and this one is no exception. The new EarthGov has its detractors, and terrorism is not yet a thing of the past. The terrorist group Steel Breeze hopes to stop what its members see as a dangerous centralization that will erase the distinctions among the world’s cultures (a process many today already lament and attribute to the spread of American goods and technology) (109). Further, awareness of this impending loss exists in the competition of the old nation-states over the prestige of their respective Hopes. Ko is seeking to become the first corporate member of the new government. Analin Chou tells Jackal: “Our negotiations with EarthGov are highly confidential [ .…] I expect it’s the same for all the nations sponsoring a Hope. Everyone’s jockeying for the most visible role for their people, something they can point to and say, ‘Look what our culture has given the world.’”
So competition among groups still exists.
Moreover, it still exists between
people. We once again find tension between a mother and daughter, but it is
not caused by a generation gap. It is
due to Donatella’s jealousy about Jackal’s status at work. Like some mothers,
she feels supplanted by her daughter and resents her, but the focus is on their
work, not Jackal’s youth or good looks, specifically the leadership of the Garbo
Project. (You get the name, don’t you? Greta Garbo was the actress who treasured her privacy and was famous for saying, “I want to
be alone.”)
It is clear also that Donatella has never been a particularly motherly mother; though we see that she does love her daughter when the cliff collapses under poor Terry in Jackal's childhood (one of several foreshadowings of the fall of the elevators). Growing up with a competitive parent and with the attention of the world focused on her as a Hope has not been good for Jackal. Even before she learns that her Hope status is false, a sham perpetrated by Ko itself with the cooperation of her parents, she is insecure. She tells Snow: “I’m not really as good as the rest of them to begin with” (80).
Her work sustains her (59) (and in this
she is like many women today who have jobs that they love, something that was
not as prevalent 100 or even 50 years ago.) We see Jackal’s enthusiasm in her participation
in the workshop with Gavin Neill. She
has been well-trained by Ko, but all the training in the world can’t engender an
ability that isn’t there: Jackal is good
at facilitation. She loves it -- unlike Jeremy Sawyer, who feels facilitation techniques are manipulative and
cold.
In contrast to Jeremy, Jackal cannot bear to have her hero Gavin Neill, who “is Ko," or Ko itself, criticized. Snow is different: she is concerned at Jeremy’s “expulsion” — to her, “protesting poor process and bad communication” should not be cause of exile from the Ko community. And she is critical of Ko’s treatment of Jackal: “I think you’ve been really jerked around and I don’t understand why you don’t want to look at that” (81). Jackal can only respond: “I’m lucky to be a part of Ko. They take good care of me” (82), a sentiment echoed by Analin Chou who tells her, “We won’t let you fail” (73).
It’s as if Ko is the mother Jackal never had.
But like Donatella, Ko does not take good care of Jackal. After the accident, the corporation, worried that events will reflect badly on them and perhaps even lose them Ko Island, which they lease from Hong Kong, Ko distances itself from Jackal, and she is deprived of all “hope,” symbolically in the loss of her Hope status, literally in her imprisonment. If we had any inklings, like Snow and Jeremy, that perhaps Ko is not entirely benevolent, we see our fears realized in Jackal's being forced by Ko to plead guilty to a crime she did not commit. We see the cold, brutal side of the corporation that is willing to hold Jackal’s parents hostage, threatening to expel them if Jackal does not plead guilty to an act of terrorism. Even the court trying Jackal is in league with Ko. She doesn’t have a chance against these powerful alliances. She is sentenced to forty years without possibility of parole.
But then to her great surprise, her sentence is suddenly reduced from forty years to what she will perceive as eight years, in reality eighteen months in virtual solitary confinement. Ironically, this reduction is made possible by the very technology being explored in the Garbo Project, the one she was supposed to lead and which occasioned her mother’s outburst and revelation of her fraudulent status in the first place. It is also the technology that Jeremy Sawyer protested against because he found it dangerous (58).
It turns out in retrospect that Jeremy’s dismissal was another foreshadowing of what will happen to Jackal: “I’m not Jeremy, she told herself. I’m good at this work and I’m safe, no matter how scared I am. All I have to do is keep on working” (59). She says this in the grips of her anxiety about her false Hope status and her resultant difficulties with her webmate, Tiger. But she is not safe, and being good at one’s job is not enough if one’s own house is not in order.
For Jackal’s Hope status has caused problems in all her personal relationships. We learn more about her behavior as a Hope when she is in the company of her webmates on the way to Kowloon just before the accident. She is used to her celebrity status, used to having her way, and this creates difficulties with her web, as Mist tells her: “Everyone gets along fine with you because they have to” (87). She is at times a spoiled child, as when she breaks Tiger’s nose, at times arrogant and unkind as when she chides Mist for not being more knowledgeable about international politics.
When Jackal’s defense attorney (from Ko, of course), Ms. Arsenault, first talks to her, she exclaims: “Jesus….I didn’t realize how young she was […. ] I wasn’t referring to her date of birth” (114). Jackal may be in her twenties, but in many ways she is still an over-protected child in her vast inexperience of the world. Even in our own world, children are the “hopes” of their parents and must learn that the world does not revolve around them, something that dawns on them gradually and often brings terrible anxiety. If I’m not the center of everything, perhaps I’m nothing. At some basic unconscious level almost all of us are afraid that we are not who people think we are – that we are fakes and someday we will be found out. That’s why, I think, Jackal’s story resonates so well with so many of us. In Jackal, this recurring complex of feelings is externalized and made literal. She has always felt undeserving and inadequate. A lot has been demanded of her. Her knowledge that her Hope status is false triggers almost unbearable anxiety.
The leaders of Ko are fully aware of Jackal’s state of mind. After she breaks Tiger’s nose, she is sharply reprimanded by Neill. But Neill’s memo to Analin Chao just afterward shows a caring that he does not reveal to Jackal: “I agree with your [Chao’s] assessment that she’s discovered the true circumstances of her status as a Hope. It’s the only logical basis for the conflict she’s experiencing.” Like an over-protective parent, he tries to make things right. “The poor kid’s got enough to deal with right now, so can someone from your corner please take Tiger Amomato and sit on him hard?" (65).
It’s ironic that it is Neill’s attempt to protect Jackal from Tiger that brings about their presence at the terrible elevator accident. The chain of events moves forward with a certain inexorability –- Jackal’s attempt to befriend Tiger doesn’t work too well, leaving her even more anxious, so she agrees to the trip with her web to Kowloon and the fateful ride up the Needle in order to placate him. He tells her, “I just wanted you to do something because I said so. Because I asked” (101). So human beings have not essentially changed – some like Tiger still seek power over others as a way to enhance their own status.
Subject to these human urges, having drunk too much, itself a manifestation of her anxiety, Jackal falls asleep and misses the elevator ride that traps her webmates. Trained from childhood to be a Hope and take charge, she cannot stop taking charge even when she is out of her depth: when the elevator is stuck and no one knows what to do, she feels “she would go mad unless she did something, anything, right now” (102). More mature people know that sometimes it is best to do nothing. But Jackal attempts to fix the problem and instead perhaps commits a fatal error. Without her interference, the passengers might have lived.
We don’t know this for sure. One of the elevator passengers was Senator Bey, the Senator to the Earth Congress from Hong Kong, which is seeking independence from China. Just after the accident someone we do not know named Scully writes to someone else named Bert: “And the very next day, Sheila Donaghue turned up on the net to claim responsibility on behalf of Steel Breeze for what she called the assassination of the senator” (109). We first heard of Steel Breeze, ironically, just before the accident, when Jackal and her webmates are uncomfortable with Hong Kong surveillance and Tiger explains that “what they’re really worried about is Steel Breeze” (86). Other than Donaghue’s declaration, the only evidence pointing to deliberate foul play is the fact that one of the two guards Jackal talked to disappears and the other is found dead (112). If the elevator accident is indeed a terrorist act, perhaps nothing Jackal did could have made a difference. The most that we know is that she was not able to help solve the problem.
She hasn’t committed a crime, just made a mistake. It’s one of the great ironies of life that we may not intend to harm people, but when we do cause harm, even inadvertently, we must pay the consequences. In the world of Solitaire, equality may govern human affairs, but people are still people and still dangerously flawed in their lack of self-knowledge.
Many thanks to Kelley for joining our discussion. We look forward to more conversation.
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