Dystopian debut
Nick Holdstock’s debut novel is being promoted as matching a style of postapocalyptic fiction mastered by Tom Perrotta in The Leftovers. The connection’s a bit of a reach.
Depicting ordinary individual and communal reactions to a Rapture-like event, Perrotta’s fanciful (but Antichrist-free) setting granted him ample opportunity to explore such real-world problems as grief, alienation and fractured social relations. Occasionally recalling Doris Lessing’s unique experiments in science fiction as well as Ransom Riggs’ illustrated Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Holdstock’s quirky and at points baffling storytelling is mostly retrospective.
It’s August 2077, on the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the Disaster, when a cosmic accident caused “the almost total loss of life on three continents in less than a day.” The geriatric Philippines-based narrator is recollecting the final stretch of months of Comely Bank, an insular suburb near a desolate landscape at the edge of Edinburgh.
In a peculiar voice that intermixes a fairy tale’s once-upon-a-time tone with a hefty portion of didacticism, this Survivor is describing the world of Before, dwelling in particular on a dissolute group of loosely interconnected outsiders, “relics” who stood out in 2017 — an era, he says, of “constant crisis” and “perpetual war.”
These eccentric and profoundly damaged individuals, “human equivalents to the commemorative plaques on the walls, the statues of great leaders, the dried-up wells into which people dropped coins in exchange for good luck,” serve the narrator’s psychological needs as well as a documentary one: to exhibit “the old world as it actually was.”
While the narrator does offer glimpses of a remade and apparently better society “without borders” whose global governmental power seems centralized around Manila, his compulsion is not to account for that future world’s recovery or to describe how its outlook and material wealth managed to become so utopian in so few decades. He’s preoccupied with Comely Bank and his former identity there.
From there: portraiture of people who’d hit bottom.
There’s orphaned bibliophile Samuel Clark, a murderer-to-be who hears voices and who runs a charity shop. He later rooms with Alasdair, a deranged homeless man who drinks his own urine.
Meanwhile Sam’s employee Caitlin, in a bridal veil meant to disguise a whitepainted face with an eyeball-sized lump on its left cheek (her face later becomes a canvas of bloody cracks), is hateful to her “incredibly superficial culture” that confuses beauty with virtue. She’s introduced as being back on solid food after having her jaw broken by the angry girlfriend of a man she’d slept with.
There’s Sinead, who fights a near-constant state of arousal and impulses for promiscuity; she grows an unwholesome attachment to Sam. Rita and Sean are cruel, violent drunks. Trudy, an escapee from a violent, sadistic husband in the Philippines, is a prostitute who hasn’t escaped so much as found woe in a new locale. Through their interactions and crises, the narrator offers persistent criticism of Before — its materialism, its vanity, its folly and so on.
Although the snide professorial tone can be humorous (e.g., “Traditionally during that time of the year — just before Christmas — it was socially acceptable for people to drink until they passed out or told each other the truth”), Sinead, Trudy, Sam and the rest often register as a catalogue of weird characteristics rather than individuals to care about.
Ultimately, Holdstock’s choice to say so little about 2077 while giving so much of his attention to bizarre traits, violent outbursts and poor decisions may leave readers wondering about an intriguing parallel universe where he opted for an opposite emphasis.