A Different Perspective For An Apocalypse

I recently finished reading How High We Go In The Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu.

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT

  Rating: 3.25/5 stars

"Dr. Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue his recently deceased daughter's research, only to discover a virus, newly unearthed from melting permafrost. The plague unleashed reshapes life on earth for generations. Yet even while struggling to counter this destructive force, humanity stubbornly persists in myriad moving and ever inventive ways.

Among those adjusting to this new normal are an aspiring comedian, employed by a theme park designed for terminally ill children, who falls in love with a mother trying desperately to keep her son alive; a scientist who, having failed to save his own son from the plague, gets a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects-a pig-develops human speech; a man who, after recovering from his own coma, plans a block party for his neighbors who have also woken up to find that they alone have survived their families; and a widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter who must set off on cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.

From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead, How High We Go in the Dark follows a cast of intricately linked characters spanning hundreds of years as humanity endeavours to restore the delicate balance of the world. This is a story of unshakable hope that crosses literary lines to give us a world rebuilding itself through an endless capacity for love, resilience and reinvention. Wonderful and disquieting, dreamlike and all too possible."

Although this book has ‘A Novel’ printed right there on the cover, it really reads more like a story collection. Typically jaunty sci-fi trappings like space flight, robo-dogs, virtual reality worlds—even a talking pig—are rendered in macabre, sombre tones due to the mass deaths caused by the plague. This is not so much a book about grief as it is about the physical process of death, funerary rites, and mourning customs. Nagamatsu imagines a world overburdened by death in which there are euthanasia rollercoasters, ‘elegy hotels’ for the dying, hologrammatic urns, a group of neighbours planning to commingle their ashes. It’s inventive, but I was never quite sure whether I was reading attempts at black humour that just weren’t funny or attempts at earnestness that were too absurd to take seriously.

Despite being, at a surface-level, extremely topical, How High We Go in the Dark labors under the shadow of its influences. The sadsack loser working a degrading job in a dystopic theme park is classic George Saunders, but Nagamatsu is not able to conjure Saunders’ compassion and empathy. There’s a physicist whose predicament brings to mind Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan. A recurring tattoo à la Cloud Atlas. I was constantly being reminded of other books by everyone from Ray Bradbury to Elizabeth Tan.

What’s more, Nagamatsu retreads his own ideas, with some chapters feeling very similar to earlier ones, repeating story beats about estranged parents, or unrequited crushes on the dying. A traditional novel format would not have allowed for such redundancies. The repetitiveness also extends to word choices (characters ‘sprint’ across rooms; scenes are ‘punctuated’ by some detail or other) and a sameness to the various characters’ narrative voices.

A few intriguing details did crop up—like the transmuting, possibly luminescing internal organs of plague victims—and I wish these had been explored more. But its focus on the practicalities of death in a heightened sci-fi setting is enough to make How High We Go in the Dark an interesting entry in what is shaping up to be a glut of pandemic literature.

Check out How High We Go In The Dark, and discover what happens when the world is struck by disease.

Happy Reading :)