I have just put my copy of Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town on my book­shelf. I am reminded of the main char­ac­ter, a middle-aged ex-retailer called Alan, who is asked dur­ing the course of the book, “Have you read all these books on your book­case?” He replies, “Naw. What’s the point of a bunch of books you’ve already read?” I could not find this inform­a­tion in the hard copy of the book itself, because I made no notes, but it was easy to down­load the plain text of the book from Doctorow’s web­site. You see, his nov­els are avail­able for free online. It doesn’t seem to hurt sales. In my case, I read the first chapter on his web­site, pootled on over to Amazon, bought that sucker before I’d taken a second drag on my tea.

The story begins with a middle-aged man called Alan refur­bish­ing his house in a trendy dis­trict of Toronto. He loves sand­ing, and so he should: his father was a moun­tain. His mother was a wash­ing machine. That’s right. His father kept the roof over their heads and his mother kept their clothes clean. There’s more. Alan’s younger brother, Bradley, is psychic. Charlie is an island. Davie is dead, and wants revenge on those who killed him. Edward, Frederick and George are triplets; they fit inside one another like a Russian doll. There is a dark pool at the centre of father-the-mountain where its great slow thoughts can be heard above the put-put of the diesel gen­er­ator power­ing mom.

Once Alan’s house is fin­ished, he attempts to integ­rate with the com­munity, start­ing with his imme­di­ate neigh­bours. Some of them are friendly. Others treat him with con­tempt. One, Krishna, recog­nises that Alan is not pre­cisely human. Krishna sets out to make life hard for Alan by align­ing with the dead brother, Davie, who demands revenge his mur­der­ers, start­ing with Alan. While the enemies are tough, the friends are true friends: Mimi, for instance, is a young woman with nas­cent, downy wings on her back. They grow again each time she cuts them back. Like Alan, she looks on at soci­ety from an uneasy orbit.

As the novel unfolds, Alan’s efforts to integ­rate – mostly by erect­ing a huge wire­less net­work with his punk friend Kurt – are hampered by the stalk­ing Davie. At points, we are flung back to Alan’s early life on the moun­tain, and begin to appre­ci­ate the depth of his ali­en­a­tion from human­ity. These flash­backs serve to heighten our desire to see Alan – a fun­da­ment­ally good man, des­pite all he has done and had done to him – get con­nec­ted along with his wire­less pro­ject. There is some­thing sad in Alan that reminds us of old sci­ence fic­tion stor­ies in an auto­maton would mimic human beha­viour and har­bours dreams of integ­ra­tion into human soci­ety. The invit­a­tion never comes, of course. Sometimes it is bet­ter to leave town and start a soci­ety of your own. Doctorow’s novel wants to tell that you can’t escape your weird­ness. If you were born in a wash­ing machine under a moun­tain, then get used to it. If you have wings on your back, don’t cut them off. Spread them and fly.