On one level, Troika by Colin Pascoe is a straightforward tale of a man abducted by aliens and being committed to a mental institution when he fails to convince others of what happened to him. But on another level, this acts as a vehicle for a different theory of science and evolution. Whether this is the author’s own theory is not stated, but the theory is explained through the voice of an alien in its attempts to educate Crib, the abductee.
What does happen is that the biologist side of the author (the credit at the start lists him as being head of biology at Clarendon College in Trowbridge) comes to the fore, as the theory that elevates thought in the process of evolution is explained. This monologue at times reads more like a text book than a novel, as it ranks thought as the fifth dimension, one that can help explain most scientific phenomena such as the dual – wave and particle – nature of light and how the Big Bang actually happened.
Structural Problems with Troika
Ideally there would be interaction between the two events, that somehow the knowledge passed onto Crib by the alien would prove useful in the main story line of his escape from the mental institution, but this doesn’t happen leaving one feeling not of reading a novel but rather a clumsy way of putting forward a pet theory.
The story also suffers from an odd omission. We are told that Crib has children and that these are central to his life. Yet at no point are we told how many children, how old they are, their names or their gender. When he returns from the abduction, his state was clearly unsettling to his wife to the extent that she eventually had him committed to the mental hospital, yet during this period we are told nothing about his children. How were they affected by his mental state?
The structure of the ending is also unusual in that there is not one but four alternative endings, each taking up just half a page.
Editing Problems
A final difficulty with the book concerns what can only be described as editing problems. The novel reads like a first draft rather than a polished, finished product. As well as the odd mistake – such as “sort” being used for “sought” – and inconsistencies, as with flipping between the American “toward” and the English “towards”, there is much loose writing and there are grammatical errors. A failure to maintain a consistent point of view in each section also distracts from the story.
Conclusion on Troika
There is nothing wrong with using the format of a novel to put forward a theory, whether political, scientific or other, and many successful writers have achieved this through the years. The trick though is to weave the theory into the structure of the story, and it is in this task that Colin Pascoe has failed. What we have is a story about a man’s escape from a mental institution punctuated almost randomly by an alien explaining to him in the past the scientific theory of thought, something Crib just seems to accept without question.
Wouldn’t it have been better if he doubted what he was being told? His acceptance would have carried more weight if he’d initially questioned the theory and then came to accept it through his experiences in the rest of the story. That would be just one way to fix the structural problems with this novel. There are others, but that combined with the editing problems mentioned leaves little left to recommend. There is the base of a good story here, but more care is needed to bring it out.
Troika (ISBN 978-07552-1287-3, 145 pages), published in 2010 by Bright Pen and Authors Online.
Steve Rogerson - Steve Rogerson is a UK-based writer specialising in television, technology, sports and beer.
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