DARE TO KNOW
Do not exceed expiry date
James Kennedy wishes you a very happy death day.
RELEASED 14 SEPTEMBER 304 pages | Hardback/ebook Author James Kennedy Publisher Quirk Books
Who’d want to know the exact date and time of their death? According to Dare To Know, plenty of people – and they’d be willing to pay for it too. The unnamed narrator is a mathematician and salesman, making the arcane and subjective calculations that produce expiry dates for the clients of a company called Dare To Know.
He’s also middle-aged, divorced and directionless; his performance at the company is on the slide and his commissions are shrinking. After a car crash, he takes the forbidden step of looking up his own time, only to discover that he was supposed to die 23 minutes ago. This is unheard of. The calculations are never wrong. He becomes desperate to find out what it means, and seeks the answers in his own past.
James Kennedy’s first novel for adults (he has a previous children’s book to his name) is audaciously clever and wellwritten. It’s set in a present day where this weird branch of physics, based around particles known as thanatons, has become a normal part of the world. It hasn’t actually changed the world that much, though it’s opened up philosophical quandaries around the nature of free will, and naturally it’s had an effect on those who have elected to find out their death date.
It makes sense that everyone else would just try to ignore it. A particularly striking and bleakly funny passage relates an incident where a man informed all the passengers on a plane that he’d just learned he was going to die on this flight, and therefore everyone else was surely going to die too.
The narrative skips back and forth across our protagonist’s life, focusing in on particular times, places and people. We see him hanging out with his roommate
Renard at a physics summer camp in 1987. We see the rise and fall of his relationship with college girlfriend Julia, who he’s still hung up on. His early days at Dare To Know. His ill-fated decision to attend Julia’s wedding with his new girlfriend, Erin. The collapse of his own marriage.
The non-linear approach contrasts perfectly with the stark, clinical nature of thanaton calculations: real life isn’t a straightforward progression towards your own death, it’s much messier than that.
The overall picture emerges in a skilful way, linked by recurring motifs. Renard introduces the narrator to an eerie, primitive computer game and the lost civilisation of Cahokia, both of which haunt him down the years. An experience where he was freaked out by the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and a later encounter with the notorious “butcher” sleeve of Yesterday And Today, are echoed when Julia torments him by repeatedly playing The Beatles’ novelty B-side “You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)”. All these things give the novel vital texture, but they also illuminate its philosophical aspects.
All this makes it sound like the book isn’t very propulsive, but it’s certainly absorbing and does have an idiosyncratic thriller-ish dimension – it’s just all so weird and ambiguous that it’s hard to explain anything about it without spoiling it.
The narrator’s jerkishness and self-pity can be a bit much to stomach at times – he’s screwed up his life, he knows it, and he’s going to tell you about it. Some readers may lose patience with him, as he really doesn’t have anyone to blame but himself, and the novel requires him to sink pretty low for the story to develop.
Ultimately, though, all this is in the service of a quite superb piece of storytelling: vivid, thoughtprovoking and unsettling. After you finish it you’ll want to go back to the start and read it again.
Eddie Robson
The book is just all so weird and ambiguous that it’s hard to explain anything about it
James Kennedy wrote his first story aged seven; in “The Strange Ship”, two ghosts visit an alien spaceship and blow it up.