Dystopian twist to origins tale
WHEN Louise Erdrich’s new novel opens, Cedar Hawk Songmaker – the 26-year-old “adopted child of Minneapolis liberals” – is four months pregnant. For the first time, she’s moved to discover more about her biological parents, members of the Ojibwe tribe, not least because she wants to know about any genetic abnormalities lying in wait for her unborn child.
It’s certainly the right time to be worrying about such issues since Erdrich’s fictional world is that of a near-future America marked by “biological chaos”. Evolution hasn’t simply stopped; it’s going backwards.
This means a variety of things, from the appearance of prehistoric animals in backyards to an extension of the Patriot Act, under the Church of the New Constitution in the US, which calls for “gravid female detention”. Thus, what begins as a story about motherhood quickly metamorphoses into an escape adventure.
Although it might seem like Future Home of the Living God
is its own unexpected mutation in Erdrich’s oeuvre, the novel’s underlying themes – of adoption, parentage and lineage – have also been central to some of her other works, particularly the two novels that preceded this one, The Round
House, and its follow-up, LaRose. As such, it would be unfair to see this new work only as a product of the current historical moment, especially since Erdrich has been vocal about the fact that she began writing the novel back in 2002 as a response to George W Bush’s reinstatement of the “global gag rule”.
Given today’s conservative agenda in the US regarding women’s reproductive rights, it makes perfect sense Erdrich’s story is seeing the light of day now. With the renewed interest in The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s impossible not to read Future Home of
the Living God as a homage to Margaret Atwood’s genre-defining novel. There are also echoes of PD James’s dystopian novel about mass infertility The Children of
Men. The problem, however, is that while both Atwood and James excel at the dystopian world-building that underlies their plots, Erdrich’s wider world never convinces.
The introduction of every new detail comes with a series of associated questions. It’s all so muddled, in fact, that even the elements that Erdrich’s proved herself a past master of – the entanglements of kith and kin – are also somewhat lacking.
It’s testament to Erdrich’s storytelling powers that I found myself eagerly turning each page, but there were simply too many unexplained absences and leaps in the plot, character development and scene-setting for this to rival her previous works.
–