The Amateurs inspired, not derivative
Liz Harmer’s debut novel may feel similar to other works, but it remains fresh, satisfying
“There is no such thing as a new idea,” Mark Twain once wrote. “We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.”
The first part of Liz Harmer’s debut novel, The Amateurs, feels like Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, what life’s like for people left behind after a significant portion of the population has left our earthly confines. In The Leftovers, it’s the rapture. In The Amateurs, it’s through something called port and no one’s sure where people have gone. Is it time travel? Is it heaven, death, a better place, a slit in the multiverse like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials? Is it a killing machine, a population control device?
Three dozen or so people find themselves in a city centre eating canned beans, without electricity or running water, endlessly debating their next steps, wondering whether to stay and wait for people’s returns, or to go in search of others who stayed. Perched on the horn of this dilemma is the most steady of the unsteady group, Marie, opening her art gallery daily though there’s no one to let in and nightly pining for her ex-husband, Jason.
Part 2 feels like Dave Eggers’ The Circle. PINA, the manufacturer of port, is a kind of uber-Facebook/Google corporation that knows way, way more than it should (Cambridge Analytica, anyone?) But one PINA employee, Brandon, one of the chair’s chosen 12 apostles, discovers evidence that the port device is more diabolical than PINA has let on, partly because PINA lied about key facts to get its product to market (and the Trumpists continue to promote deregulation of industries).
A bridge halfway through the book gives us a glimpse into port, and it ain’t pretty.
The segment, focusing on a minor character who has entered port, will dispel a reader of any romantic notions had from Jack Finney’s Time and Again or Diane Gabaldon’s Outlander series.
Despite that interlude, Harmer surprisingly keeps the mystery of port going through to a satisfying coda. The ending is less predictable than inevitable.
And like all good science fiction, The Amateurs ably carries the weight of analogy: the grand themes of technology and what we’ve done to our planet and ourselves, and the no-less-grand truth of loss: friendships dissolve, love fades, people die.
Parts of Harmer’s The Amateurs may seem borrowed but the whole is fresh and new.
Raymond Beauchemin is the author of Everything I Own. His next book is a collection of novellas, The Emptiest Quarter.