Sacred and Terrible Air (review)
I recently finished the novel Sacred and Terrible Air by Robert Kurvitz. Born from what must have been an appallingly high-concept D&D campaign, it was published in Estonia in 2013 after five years of writing and immediately panned. However, the setting, themes, and some characters were reworked into Disco Elysium (released 2019) which is now widely regarded as one of the best video games ever made (certainly tied with Morrowind for my favorite). There are some fan translations of TSATA floating around, one of which I downloaded and printed on Lulu for around $5.
The following isn't a review, just my cluttered thought cabinet immediately after reading it. Beware of spoilers for both TSATA and DE.
- It's interesting to see how some of the raw materials from this book were re-assembled into DE. Harry seems like a fusion of the three leads, combining Tereesz's hard-boiled cop, Khan's frumpiness, and Jesper's drug addiction & self-destruction. Cuno is basically Zigi.
- The differences are also fascinating. TSATA is a lot darker than DE; I think the RPG format gives the latter more breathing room to insert moments of levity, whereas the novel has to stay more focused. Focusing on the dockworker's union brings a lot to DE as well.
- What actually is the Pale? It behaves like a natural disaster at times, uprooting trees and flinging them skyward, initiating flows of refugees, etc., but it also has more metaphysical/metatextual properties, literally erasing people from the past. But also, people can run maglev & telephone lines through it(?). It's described at one point as 'concentrated past'. Animals can move in and out of it, but they might not be alive (?). It causes fruit to go moldy. When it consumes you, you become just a 'protein'.
- It's been too long since I've read Deleuze to say anything intelligent about it, but aspects of the Pale remind me of some of the ?bad? body without organs examples in A Thousand Plateaus. "The hypochondriac body: the organs are destroyed, the damage has already been done, nothing happens anymore." Vs. the ecastatic body of communism and hardcore anodic dance music. "Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized, vitrified, sewn-up bodies, when the BwO is also full of gaiety, ecstasy, and dance?" We might say that the moralist status quo is the societal super-ego, desperately trying to hold molar assemblages together against entropy. Miro is the fascist collapse of the strata too fast: 'If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe." Salvation is delicate work.
- The description of Pale taiga landscape Zigi was exploring reminded me strongly of the Zone in Stalker. Perhaps no coincidence that Stalker was filmed in Estonia.
- I don't fully understand Ambrosius St. Miro -- the crisis destroying the world is some combination of: encroaching Pale, sclerotic Moralism that allows nihilism to propagate, Miro starting a war and nuking cities with his fleet of Mesque airships. These are all clearly mutually interlinked, but the connection is left vague, vibes-based. And yet it works? In the epilogue we learn that he was the son/ward/companion of Rodionov -- which I suppose could hint that he is in some way the vector for Rodionov's entroponetic revenge weapon (?)
- Harry's 'Tequila Sunset / Apocalypse Cop' option in DE takes on a new light after reading this. I think that will be the angle for my next playthrough.
- Compelling theories
- Malin Lund was pregnant by Zigi; taking six pills of the Samaran speed was possibly an attempt at an abortion. The 'child' may have been (or became) a Pale swallow like the one in the church in DE.
- If Malin is still communicating with Zigi somehow, she might have actually 'written' the letters he had forged
- It's amazingly prescient about the current zeitgeist, given it was published in 2013. Capitalist Realism (which I assumed was a major influence on DE) only came out in 2009! The sense that the present is just endlessly recycling the past, ambient paranoia about child abuse, nihilistic agression by a nuclear-armed state. Hell, even the deluge of ai-pollution over the last few years feels like the Pale coming to dissolve everything intelligible.
- Finally, it couldn't be more perfect to read a pirated fan-translation of this book, haunted by the ghost of 5-6(!!) planned sequels and the recent collapse of ZA/UM as a game studio; the book itself is an almost-disappeared artifact of the Pale.