The novel “Maul” by Tricia Sullivan was published for the first time in 2003.
Sun is a teenager who is part of a girl gang. A Saturday she goes to the Mall along with her gang but there she and her friends end up clashing with another gang and their shopping projects must give way to weapons. The police intervention makes the situation even more complicated and dangerous.
Meniscus is used as a guinea pig in a laboratory that makes research on viruses. The hope is to avoid another epidemic which could wipe out the men but the research is made more difficult because Meniscus is not an ordinary man and the people around him have their own agenda.
Initially, “Maul” may seem a story of troubled teens, girls who go shopping at a mall but bring guns along with them. The fact that they are fighting another gang could confirm the initial impression were it not for the fact the parallel story of Meniscus starts as well.
The two parallel plots, made even more different by the fact that Sun tells her story in the first person while the one about Meniscus is told in the third person, already give a first idea of the complexity of “Maul”. It’s a novel that had a long and troubled genesis that began in the early ’90s, when Tricia Sullivan wrote a story about a character named Meniscus that was rejected by the magazine “Analog”.
It took years for the author to gather other ideas and build a story completely different and much more complex. A piece at a time, in a far from straightforward process, Tricia Sullivan added something to the story, putting it aside on various occasions because in some moments her life had other priorities.
In a novel that’s the result of over a decade of reflections with in the middle many events in the author’s private life, it’s not surprising to find a complexity in the plot and a richness concerning the characters, with their emotions and their motivations. It’s also a novel that was labeled in different ways but in my opinion it’s really one of the cases where labels end up distorting the idea that you can make about it.
Reading certain presentations, “Maul” seems a novel full of sex, almost a porn. There are explicit scenes from this point of view but often told in a funny way. Sexual issues are important in the novel but are developed in a more profound and subtle way than erotic stories because they’re also linked to other elements such as the social ones.
“Maul” was also defined feminist. Honestly I’m far from expert about the subject and its latest developments so it’s possible that this left me puzzled because of my limit. In the novel, many women are real bitches and definitely capable of nastiness levels at least equal to those of men.
OK, the characters of “Maul” are mostly female and at the beginning of the plot about Meniscus we’re told that there was an epidemic that struck specifically men. The consequence is that in that future the world is inhabited mostly by women with everything that derives from that.
It’s above all Meniscus story that gives the idea that “Maul” is a science fiction novel. I appreciate that Tricia Sullivan doesn’t throw everything in the readers’ face leaving them to capture the subtleties of the contents related to the future events and the connections between the two plots. The meanings connected to the mall could deserve an analysys on their own for their complexity.
On the other hand, honestly I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the result. The thousand subtleties immersed in the complexities of the two parallel plots end up making the novel a bit chaotic. It doesn’t help that in my opinion it’s a bit too long: I believe that cutting a few pieces here and there, especially in the second half of the plot set in the mall, would’ve been beneficial, also avoiding some slowing down of the pace.
In the end, as it was developed, “Maul” seems a science fiction novel written to be liked especialy by non science fiction fans. I think anyone not getting scared by its complexity and is interested in the topics developed can like it, without genre limitations.
