A beautifully written, beautifully conceived little fairy tale. I almost wish it could have gone on forever, especially as I feel that the ending is the weakest part of the book.
Half of the novel is based on a gorgeous, appealing little wheeze. The afterlife (at least, the immediate afterlife) is neither Heaven nor Hell, but an ordinary City of day jobs and coffeeshops, minor inconveniences and random encounters, in which the Dead live as comfortably as they choose, as long as someone in the living world remembers them. Once the last living person who remembers them dies (and makes the transition to the City), they vanish, "softly and suddenly away" as Lewis Carroll would have said (and, indeed, "never be met with again.") No one knows where they go.
So, the City is a waiting room. It's a Purgatory, of sorts, but a very gentle and self-directed one. It's a place of choices, and --perhaps -- second chances: you can choose to be exactly the same obnoxious, work- and status-driven jerk you were in life. Or, you can choose to live the life you wished you'd been able to live when you were alive -- say, open up an greasy spoon diner, where you greet all of your customers by name, and serve up wonderful all-day breakfasts. If you enjoyed your life, you can carry on doing exactly what you used to do -- perhaps with the benefit of new friends, new lovers, or a new, revitalized relationship with someone you'd become stale with. All up to you.
As you have probably guessed, I unreservedly loved the half of the book set in the City. I loved the (seemingly) random focus on a different residents of the City in each chapter, stories that hinted at their connections to the world of the Living, hinted at the familiar yet slightly dystopian future of its backstory, and made some nicely timed revelations about the drama unfolding for the Living and the Dead. I loved the fact that Brockmeier kept the mechanics vague, and even a little illogical: there is money (there are a couple of beggars, and a crazy street preacher has some coins thrown at him by a woman who just wants him to leave her alone), but no sense that it's needed to get food at the diner, or paper for Luca Sims' homemade news sheet. And where does the food that's cooked and eaten, and the coffee that drunk in great quantities, and the paper come from? Dunno, don't really care. The City, for me, is a metaphor, in the very best sense, about love and the persistence of memory. Things that, you could argue, are pretty illogical themselves ...
My recollection, from my first reading of the novel about 10 years ago, was that I wasn't as blown away by the other half of the book -- the steadily unfolding drama of Laura Byrd, who is struggling to survive in Antarctica just as a particularly virulent virus is ripping across the globe. As I recalled, I understood Laura's story was necessary -- trying for no spoilers here (although I think you can guess what's what), but the deaths of so many people in the wider world, and Laura's dogged survival, has a great impact on the City -- provides what is, otherwise, just a nice wheeze with drama, mystery, something at stake.
So here's what's really interesting for me, on this rereading: reading it NOW (November 2020 -- hello from the Apocalypse, and Lockdown Hell, everyone ... :-), the chapters with Laura were, for the most part, brilliant. I don't know where Mr. Brockmeier got his crystal ball, but can I order one, please? Some of the offhand remarks about "the Blinks" (the terrible, highly contagious and almost instantly fatal disease) are painfully, well, funny, in a dark, black, bleak sort of way. From a diary entry, by one of Laura's companions ...
"There's every single indication that the virus has taken a global toll. What's the word I'm looking for? Not an epidemic, but a --? Can't remember ..."
Hmm, I think I can help you there (Later, down the page, he remembers. Pandemic. Yeah, I don't think we're going to forget that one for a while ...) And another one, from a teenager's blog the survivors discover, on an internet that it quietly folding in on itself, and vanishing (kind of like the City ...)
"A few of us are still asymptomatic. We're holed up in the high school gym, away from everybody else. If it wasn't for the stupid quarantine, we'd be long gone by now ..."
What breaks my heart -- and is SO DARN TRUE -- about that is how the high school jock throws around words like "asymptomatic" and "quarantine" as if they're the most natural things in the world. Brockmeier, in one line, captures how the virus even changes our vocabulary ...
Sadly, I am still not blown away by the final couple of chapter which IMHO, become too poetical, too airy-fairy. The real strengths of this fairy tale is how grounded it is, both in the ordinary, everyday world of the City, and in the snow and terrible loneliness of the Antarctic. BUT .. this is still a keeper, and highly recommended ...
Yo check it, this book, is like the greatest book I ever read, it's about this woman right, the last woman on earth, NOT Tom Cruise in the Last Samurai, not Fresh Prince/ID4 last man on earth, not book of Eli, but the last woman on Earth, but the hitch, she don't know she is the last woman so she is trying to find he fellow man, but there ain't nobody, oh yeah and she is stuck in Antarctica of all places. But get this every other Chapter is not about her it's about the people in the afterlife! All the people in her mind who live in a city in limbo happily or not-so happily ever after or at least until she kicks the can. This is a trippy spiritual book about survival and life after death. You meet all kinds of Characters and they each have touching stories.
