San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Dystopian fiction? Virus makes it real
Katie Flynn’s thoughtprovoking debut, “The Companions,” opens in a quarantined California. Dahlia, a teenager living in a San Francisco highrise, hasn’t gone outside in two years and 17 days. The world has been overtaken by an insidious, deadly virus, and the very air is dangerous. Sound familiar?
Flynn’s novel must have seemed like futuristic dystopian fiction when it was released on March 3, just weeks before the country began locking down because of the coronavirus pandemic, but reading it now is to encounter an uncannily deft description of what we’re all living through. Dahlia attends school on a screen; her social life is limited to her mother. Lungclogging wildfires are the backdrop of life in Northern California. Flynn might be describing any number of American households in the fall of 2020, with one notable exception: In this world, dying is wholly optional, at least if you have the money. Humans on the brink of death can pay to have their consciousness uploaded into an artificial body — called a “companion.” These new life forms are the intellectual property of medtechnology company Metis, which sells them to people ( sometimes loved ones of the deceased, sometimes strangers) in need of connection. Depending on the quality of their bodies, or “skin” ( also negotiable for a price), companions move through the world almost indistinguishable from living humans. In addition to having access to all of their memories, they can feel touch, and in some cases, even override their programming to act with free will.
Flynn’s ambitious novel features eight pointofview characters — some human, some companion — and spans decades, starting during quarantine and moving far beyond quarantine’s end, to the years after companions are recalled and many of them are trying to survive under the radar, in a world that has become hostile to artificial life. Every spoke of this vast narrative is connected in some way to Lilac, an early model whose urgent questions about her tragic death fuel the plot.
Lilac is Dahlia’s companion — at least at the start of her journey — and Dahlia uses her mostly for entertainment, begging her to share the story of the day she died over and over again. Lilac begins with familiar details of adolescence that are thrilling to Dahlia ( and us) for describing a way of life that now seems lost ( high school parties, crowded hallways, the intimate smell of someone else’s bedroom).
But her story soon takes a turn. Lilac can’t make sense of her violent, sudden death, and she’s consumed with questions about what happened, not just to her, but also to her best friend. Eventually, she’ll set off in search of answers, and along the way many other characters pick up the baton of the story: Gabe, an orphan who grows up over the course of the novel and whose life is a portrait of resilience during turbulent times; Cam, a sensitive nursing home aide whose collision with Lilac changes both of their lives; Mrs. Espera, a former Hollywood executive’s wife who longs to become a companion herself; and Diana, a scientist wracked with guilt about her involvement in the Metis corporation
“The Companions”
and companion technology.
But despite dozens of narrative turns, Lilac’s yearning to know the truth about her life always acts on and complicates the plot.
Flynn knows how to grab a reader, and her skills are especially evident at the start of each chapter. In one, we land in snowy Siberia, embedded in the POV of a famous movie star briefly referenced in another character’s section — it’s a thrilling shift, and what at first seems to move us far away from Lilac and the central story line winds up laying essential plot groundwork. As is perhaps nearly inevitable in a novel that splices together so many POVs cut from so many moments in time, sometimes chapters — each of them really a selfcontained story — seem to end a beat too soon, and new sections, particularly when they hinge on events happening offscreen, can feel jarringly convenient, as if these eight characters are the only characters in the entire world, meeting again and again in a series of outlandish coincidences.
But these are small quibbles for a debut that always chooses boldness and writes into big questions without flinching: What does it mean to be human? Who are we without our memories? What will the future of the planet, of technology, look like? Novelists have asked these questions before, in contemporary classics like
Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go,” two great comps for “The Companions.”
But Flynn’s way of asking, at this particular moment in time, gives these questions new urgency and dimension. What might have seemed like too many layers of tragedy and chaos for a novel in 2018 read, in 2020, as smart and prescient. The virus and quarantine collide with rapid technological advancements that are making human life quickly unrecognizable, climate change has led to horrific wildfires that make life in certain parts of California increasingly dangerous, and there’s a widening chasm between opportunities available to the uberrich and those available to everyone else.
“The Companions” is an urgent and heartfelt exploration, not just of what it means to be alive now, but of how we might prepare for what’s coming.
Julie Buntin is the author of the novel “Marlena.” Email: books@ sfchronicle. com