Severance – Looking into the Empty Shell of Everyday Life

"The city was so big. It lulled you into thinking that there were so many options, but most of the options had to with buying things."

Ling Ma, like most of the debut novelists nowadays, sets her story in a post-apocalyptic world. But unlike the authors jaunting through that particular genre, Ma eschews standard ‘fall-of-civilization’ action and predestined social messages. She rather offers an intimate portrait of a lonely, rootless millennial girl and her relationship with an old, daunting capitalist city. The story-line of Ling Ma’s Severance actually made me remember Emily St. John Mandel’s emotionally gripping end-of-the-world novel Station Eleven (it won the Arthur C Clarke award for best sci-fi novel, although it transcends such classifications). Station Eleven was sprinkled with certain functional elements of genre fiction, but eventually Mandel triumphantly used the post-apocalyptic setting to create a memorable literary fiction. Severance may not possess the profundity and thrills of Station Eleven; I felt Ma’s post-apocalyptic narrative was dull and the author’s preoccupations about capitalism, immigrant experience, and millennial angst often fizzles out due to the disjointed structure. Nevertheless, Severance is an interesting literary novel to have explored dystopia from a personal, micro level.

In Ling Ma’s novel, the world is infected with a deadly fungal infection called Shen Fever (originates from China’s Shenzhen). Candace Chen, a millennial first-generation Chinese-American, is the novel’s protagonist. She works for a giant New York publishing house, and her specialty is Bible production. While she longs to be one of the ‘Art Girls’, who are involved in the fields of photography and fashion, Candace Chen is very good at packaging the world’s best-selling book according to her clients’ needs. Brief interludes showcase Chen’s early life with her parents (both now-deceased) and their struggles to be successful in the land that has adopted them. In the post-apocalyptic narrative, Chen is pregnant and gets acquainted with a band of plague survivors, led by the weirdly religious IT professional named Bob. They are moving towards a mysterious facility in the Chicago suburbs, hoping to start anew.

Those who are stricken with Shen Fever don’t instantly die, only to come back alive with a taste for human flesh. The 'Fevered', as called by Chen, aren’t zombies although the victim’s brain are taken over by the fungal infection. The infected are simply caught within a behavioral loop, doing the quotidian tasks they did before the end of the world. They are engulfed within the hell of mundanity, slowly exhausting themselves to death. Although the infected are harmless (it’s a non-communicable disease!) and their brains don’t even register the presence of others, Bob and his crew during the stalks ‘mercifully’ kill the Fevered. The solitude-loving Chen, who had caught between the cultures of two worlds, doesn’t get suddenly friendly with the group. Chen’s normal life in the pre-disease world offers more insights on her choice to keep the human contact minimal.

Ling Ma

Before New York starts to crumble, Chen’s life has collapsed. Her father has died in an accident, her mother gradually lost herself to Alzheimer. Chen’s parents have always advised her to ‘be useful’, to ‘make something of herself’ in the country which has provided them a better life-style. This might partly be the reason why Chen decides to stay loyal to her work which she isn’t interested in doing, even when all of the workers and employers start to flee the city. She has rejected her boyfriend Jonathan’s offer to shift from New York in order to cling to the stability. But the stability and luxury of job only unexpectedly heightens the girl’s isolation. In the beginning of the end, Candace Chen also made her useful in a different way: she takes photos of deserted city and posts in her blog, which she operates under the pseudonym NY Ghost.

Severance isn’t much of a story about post-apocalypse, but a clever critique on late capitalism and the decadence of being creature of habits. Ling Ma makes shrewd observations on the Western economy that depends on labor outsourced to China and other countries with low-wage workers. But very often the critique is broached from the central character Chen’s personal experience. Unlike white-collar workers of 20th century, we aren’t obsessed over the meaningfulness of sacrificing one’s life for the job. We, the drones buzzing inside cubicles, know there isn’t any meaning to our desk jobs, although we still keep going with it in order to reap the monetary rewards – the only standard to make ourselves worthy in the teeming society. And by persistently glimpsing into the past, Chen seems to have eventually understood what’s important in her life thus leading to a sort of ‘hopeful’ escape. Further adding texture to Ling Ma’s predominantly personal take on capitalism is her paean to the life and spirit of New York plus the ruminations on internet. The comfort and menace of religion plus the perplexing immigrant experience also adds many layers to Candace’s story.

Overall, Ling Ma through Severance warns us about confining ourselves to a life of routine and rituals. In that sense, this isn’t an end-of-the-world fiction, but a snapshot of our present ‘fevered’ state. 

 

Bird Box – An Atmospheric and Concise Post-Apocalypse Horror Fiction

Post-apocalypse literature helps to conquer or at least express humankind’s fear of annihilation. While asteroid collisions, climate change, and nuclear holocaust taps into our dread of very real threats, the zombie apocalypse (and its variants) takes on a more metaphorical dimension. From Romero’s Dead franchise to Max Brooks’ globe-spanning horror novel World War Z, this outlandish imagination of end times has consistently flourished. Of course, there have been plenty of tweaks done to core zombie tale: Mike Carey’s novels referred to a bizarre fungus as the cause of zombie outbreak; in the overly stretched-out Walking Dead TV series, the viewers are left to fear the surviving humans as much as the monsters. Josh Malerman’s debut novel Bird Box (Published March 2014) does take the core of zombie apocalypse stories, where household of survivors exist amidst extreme hopelessness and paranoia. But the catch is the way the ‘threat’ is kept unknown or inscrutable. The novel might be set in a world plagued by an epidemic of insanity, suicides, and murders, although the force causing it is cleverly hidden.

In Josh Malerman’s dark and moving tale, the afflicted doesn’t chew human brains or spread the ‘virus’ through the bites. Nevertheless, they are driven insane, becoming a threat to themselves and others. The fascinating twist on this post-apocalyptic setting is that the mere sight of some ‘creature’ is instantly turning people insane. Furthermore, two aspects provide a singularly chilling experience: the characters have to operate blind (wear a blindfold) while venturing outside; the madness-causing ‘creatures’ are vaguely defined so as to make the dread omnipresent. Even the sound of rustling leaves causes panic. The novel opens with a young mother named Malorie living in a decrepit house with her two 4-year old children, who are simple addressed as ‘Boy’ and ‘Girl’. She has lived in the blanketed house for four years without venturing outside, except for the routine task of drawing water from a nearby well (after securing her by a blindfold). That’s about to change. She has planned to take her two children, put them in a rowboat, and make an excruciating journey on the river (situated few yards from the house).Naturally, Malorie and her children have to navigate the river blindfolded. 

Malorie fully understands that the trip can easily go wrong, but the destination presents her the only hope in this pernicious world. Naturally, we wonder how Malorie survived all these years and protected her children from the unknown menacing forces outside. With an exception of few chapters, Malorie’s present and recent past life is presented in alternating chapters. In the present, Malorie is a stern mother who has trained her children to solely rely on their hearing and to not ever remove their blindfold outside. The children have never experienced the rush of colors saturating the natural world, yet they devotedly yield to their mother’s rules, keeping the blindfold fastened and classify each sound in an ingenious manner. In the recent past, Malorie lived with her sister Shannon, while recovering from a fleeting love affair that left her pregnant. And soon, the civilization went to hell.

Sandra Bullock playing the lead role 'Malorie' in the movie adaptation (releasing Dec. 21, 2018)

People saw ‘something’ that made them go mad and commit shockingly brutal murders and suicides. The only better means to survive is to amass canned goods, hole-up by covering all the windows, and always wear blindfold while taking a step outside. When Shannon also becomes victim to the unknown force, Malorie finds a group of survivors in a house, situated near a river. As the two different timelines swiftly progress, we understand how Malorie ended up alone and why she’s making this trip. It’s the familiar narrative of betrayal, human frailty, and doubt. Yet Malerman’s eerie build-ups of blindfolded characters fumbling through the world full of incomprehensible horrors instill an edgy feeling throughout.

Josh Malerman (lead singer/songwriter for the rock band The High Strung) excels in placing the readers behind the blindfold, keeping our minds well-aligned with the paranoid fears of Malorie and others. The author delineates the survivors' characteristics in a blunt manner, although they are livelier than being a cannon fodder for horror set-pieces. The grimly fascinating human drama occurs later in the narrative with the arrival of a soft-spoken outsider (Gary), whose crazy thoughts seems much more hazardous than the unknown things lurking outside. It’s a little frustrating that Malerman provides no answers regarding what caused the bizarre pandemic. However, the obscure description of the alleged otherworldly ‘creatures’ passes off psychological terror even into the simplest of situations. For example, take the scenario where a falling leaf brushing the shoulder triggers high anxiety. Malerman’s ability to make us visualize the threats in an unseen world makes the evilness of their foes stronger and far-reaching. Moreover, this allows the tale’s scary dimensions to remain like an inkblot. You can make an allegory out of the monstrous creature (political, social or existential) or simply just opt to get swept away by the unsettling unfamiliarity of the creature. Overall, Bird Box is the suspenseful, not-to-missed page-turner for the post-apocalyptic horror fiction lovers.    

Borne – A Dazzling & Puzzling Dystopian Fiction

Borne is the latest novel (published April 2017) from acclaimed New Weird author Jeff VanderMeer. As in Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance), VanderMeer’s central concept in Borne is quite bizarre and totally unbelievable on the surface. But good thing about the writer’s works is that he doesn’t only use sci-fi platform to try and predict the future or perceive real-world problems through metaphorical or allegorical lens. At the crux of his discursive and unpredictable narrative course, there often lies a very humane story that’s equal parts profound and touching. With Borne, VanderMeer once again plunges into environmental themes and creates a weird yet immersive world, full of tantalizing details.

The novel is set in an unnamed city in a post-apocalyptic world. The city is the victim of a prolonged environmental catastrophe.  It’s inhabited by survivalists, known as scavengers, and myriad of cast-off, experimental bio-tech creatures, created by a mysterious and domineering corporate simply called ‘The Company’. Twenty eight year old, brown-skinned Rachel is our protagonist and narrator. She lives with her partner Wick in the Balcony Cliffs, an abandoned apartment complex which the couples have turned into their stronghold. Wick is a scientist who once worked for the Company and he uses fragments of biotech to make ends meet; the biotech includes memory ‘beetles’ which can either remove or supplement memories, diagnostic worms, and minnows which all brings a sort of drunkenness. Rachel is an experienced scavenger who is adept at setting traps, and finding food plus bio-tech supplies.

The most threatening factor of the city is Mord, a giant despotic bear that’s produced by the Company. It also has the ability to fly. Nevertheless, when the bear slumbers, Rachel precariously scavenges from the shaggy fur of Mord. It often provides treasure trove of bio-tech supplies. During one of these salvaging missions, Rachel finds a small, strange beacon-like pod, entangled deep in the hairy mass, which she describes as, “looked like a hybrid of squid and sea anemone………strobed emerald green across the purple every half minute or so”. She doesn’t know what it is: organic or company’s creation. Rachel brings it back to Balcony Cliffs, but refuses to allow Wick to take apart the ‘thing’.

A woodcut of Mord, the giant flying bear, created by Theo Ellsworth.

The city is also home to tribe of murderous, biologically-altered children, led by a mysterious woman, hailed as The Magician. It’s unclear whether she’s from the company or an emigrant, but she’s using bio-tech enhanced powers and gathering human force to defeat Mord. Rachel names the small ‘thing’ as Borne and wonders about it’s gradual growth, which still appears to be a plant. Soon, Borne begins to move, and to Rachel’s dismay, starts to speak. She begins teaching Borne and protects the creature as if it’s her own child, whenever Wick proposes to take it apart by insinuating that it might be a ‘weapon’. Although, Borne doesn’t remotely resemble a human child, Rachel starts to anthropomorphize the creature, by calling it a ‘he’, and assigns personality traits.  And, Borne grows exponentially, both in terms of size and intelligence. What started as a fist-sized ball now sprawls over the room and can use its flexible exterior to change shape and form. Rachel instills the sense of right and wrong to Borne and believes it’s as innocent as a child. But sudden drop in the local population of lizards, spiders, and other little living things besides themselves, proves Rachel otherwise. She later finds out that she can’t truly control Borne’s nature, but rejects Wick’s idea that her surrogate child might be a threat to their lives. Borne also sees itself as a person, loves Rachel like a mother, and tries its best to hide the malevolent side. As Rachel & Wick’s conflicted relationship with Borne reaches a threshold point, war for power begins to brew between Mord, its bear-like minions known as ‘Mord Proxies’, and the Magician (the Magician character and the destroyed world reminded me of anime master Miyazaki’s thought-provoking feature Princess Mononoke).

The best thing about VanderMeer’s prose in Borne is how he establishes the relationship between individual and the place. Oft we could read vivid details about the unnamed, ravaged city through Rachel’s sense of smell (there’s recurring reference to scent of ocean or pungent smell of bio-tech tidal pools) and acute perception. Nevertheless, the characters aren’t domineered by the texture of the strange wilderness. They actually stand out despite the bewildering setting. VanderMeer’s works repeatedly pay hefty tribute to nature’s resilient quality and suggests the interconnectedness of nature and whole human experience. He hints at how our humane quality (or morality) depends on the way we treat nature and other organisms. Mord, The Company, and the strange bio-techs could stand-in as the allegory for climate change and our rejection of nature’s inter-connectivity. But Borne doesn’t only stay as clever metaphor for tangible real-world problems, but also carries a deeply emotional tale at its heart.  Rachel’s relationship with Borne strikes a fine balance between the ultimate futility of anthropomorphizing all living organisms and the necessity to de-centralize human experience; to not see everything in human terms and also be mindful of how limitless and complex the world could be. Through Rachel’s narration or limited perspective, VanderMeer examines how we project personality onto animals, and yet not truly understand the creature’s unique beauty and importance.  

The Courtyard of Dead Astronauts by Kayla Harren

Perhaps the frustrating thing about the writer’s works is this limited perspective. His stories are strange and inexplicable, in a Lovecraftian sense. And, when all is said and done, the details still remain obscure although there’s a leftover feeling of having experienced something beautiful and strange. It may be akin to waking up from vivid dream and contemplating the slow dissipation of surrealistic mind-images. Moreover, VanderMeer often plays with readers’ preconceptions. He writes all the stock characters and big action set-pieces we come to expect from post-apocalyptic atmosphere. But the dynamics between the characters and outcome of battles largely deviates from our expectations (we initially compare Borne to E.T. but its much more complex than the stranded alien being). On a basic level, Borne could be read as a story chronicling the struggles and dilemmas of parenthood. Despite the fundamental weirdness in Rachel’s maternal feeling, the readers are thoroughly immersed in her palpable sense of love towards Borne. Like every ‘normal’ parent, she is elated to watch her surrogate child grow up, while at the same time trying to hold on to ‘him’; she wants to remain close to Borne, while also teaches ‘him’ to be independent. In spite of the interesting final twists, thrilling actions, and highly imaginative writing of bio-tech riddled atmosphere, what truly makes Borne a dazzling read is the profound ways Jeff Vandermeer uses the setting to get to the emotional truths. In the end, to the author’s credit, Borne (336 pages) doesn’t come off as a fantastical tale of flying, giant bears and talking tentacle monster; it’s actually a piercing tale of love, trust, sacrifice, and humanity’s undetachable relationship with the natural world. 

Station Eleven – A Non-Traditional Post-Apocalyptic Fiction on the Endurance of Art and Humanity

“Life, remembered is a series of photographs and disconnected short films”

Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel Station Eleven (published in 2014) is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where 99 percent of human population is wiped out by an unforeseen pandemic disease. The novel won the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science-fiction novel [also one of the year’s National Book Award finalists]. Despite the increasingly familiar post-apocalypse sub-genre and getting pigeon-holed as sci-fi, Station Eleven is much more distinct and understated than the usual survivalist exercise. Emily Mandel herself believes her novel doesn’t belong to any particular genre. Unlike many apocalypse novels, Emily’s narration is deeply introspective, wallowing less on the dystopian horror elements and rather hopefully focuses on the fresh culture that emerges once past the climate of mayhem.   

I initially believed the novel might duplicate few of the broadly imaginative dystopian setting of Stephen King’s The Stand or Robert McCammon’s Swan Song or Justin Cronin’s Passage Trilogy (though there’s a clever reference to this novel). But one-third into the book, I was intrigued by how private the tale is. Emily Mandel weaves a dual narrative -- set before the end of the world and twenty years after –that goes back and forth and follows the beauty of everyday existence through very small pocket of characters. By setting the novel two decades after the societal collapse, the writer smartly brings a ruminative perspective which mostly foregrounds the hopeful and unbreakable relationship between art and humanity.  Emily does hint upon the devastation and violence perpetuated in the lawless world, but mayhem and terror isn’t showcased as the only constant factor in the post-apocalyptic world. It subtly implies how much art could play a vital role in unearthing a fresh civilization and gradually disarm the gathered dark forces.

The novel begins with the death as expected. But the death isn’t the result of dangerous viral strain that will soon wipe out 99% of humanity. An experienced and super-famous Hollywood actor Arthur Leander collapses on the stage while playing King Lear at Toronto’s Elgin Theater. Jeevan Choudhary, an audience member and paramedic-in-training rushes towards Arthur and delivers CPR. But it’s too late. The actor’s heart has given up. However, it would be fascinating to note that Arthur and Shakespeare remain as connecting bridge to all the major characters. Soon after Arthur’s natural death, the spread of a deadly strand of flu (known as ‘Georgian Flu’) brings the entire human civilization to its knees. The story then shifts 20 years after the pandemic to follow ragtag members of Traveling Symphony. Kirstin Raymonde, the once 8 year old child actor who was part of the King Lear performance, is now the narrator of this disparate world. The 28 year old Kirsten and fellow survivors tour small and fairly isolated communities in the Midwest, performing Shakespeare and Orchestra music for the soulful, entertainment-deprived communities.

Author Emily St. John Mandel

The troupe of musicians and actors has faced their due share of violent conflicts over the years and has largely followed the same route without unnecessarily immersing themselves into the dirty local politics. The troupe’s horse-pulled caravan is adorned with a line from Star Trek Voyager: ‘Because survival is inefficient’. By bringing art to the ruined towns, the troupe hopes to showcase the best of humanity (“People want what was best about the world”, one troupe member remarks). We learn that Kirsten obsessively collects clippings and other information about Arthur from old-world magazines, the famous actor who was once kind to little Kirsten. It was Arthur who had gifted Kirsten her beloved graphic novel Station Eleven (about a smart physicist Dr. Eleven living in a huge spaceship after Earth’s surrender to an alien race). The origin of comics takes us back in time and provides us with the novel’s most interesting character Miranda, Arthur’s first wife whose personal afflictions fuels her creative energy. Like Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Star Trek, the graphic novel not simply stands as an alluring symbol of the past, but also emerges as the vital connecting nod between the past and present. The conflicts in the novel kicks-in when the troupe comes across a town that’s taken over by a malevolent ‘Prophet’ and couple of their former members, staying in the town, is pronounced missing. Thankfully, the story-line involving the ‘Prophet’ doesn’t take up familiar route, as writer Emily keeps on jumping back and forth to contemplate on the sweetness of life, before and after the end of the world we built. Despite the fragmented narrative structure, Emily Mandel makes rich thematic connections and bestows profound emotional connection between the characters.

Station Eleven is clearly less about apocalypse and more about memory, fame, yearning, loss and the transcendent beauty of art. The novelist infuses a deeply affecting and thoughtful elegiac tone into a story we otherwise dismiss it as ‘simple-minded page-turner’. Emily Mandel is less interested in making a broad statement on human race’s collective destiny. She rather keeps her narrow yet astoundingly focused vision to reflect on our built-in instinct for artistic expression, in the midst of desperation and catastrophe. What’s more interesting is how the author doesn’t take a discriminative attitude in positioning the different art forms. There’s Shakespeare and Beethoven whose timeless quality we oft cherish as high-art. But then there’s also constant reference to Star Trek and a graphic novel (seen as cheap entertainment). In Emily Mandel’s world, the art culture isn’t fit under strict categories, but simply as different forms of expression within a single existing plane, speaking to individuals in myriad ways.

Station Eleven watches our contemporary world with a sense of wonder and how we take all such advancements for granted. “You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light……. All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the 
Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze”, remarks Kirsten who finds this vision of old-world nearly unbelievable. Few of the survivors holes up at a abandoned airport, its Skymiles Lounge is over the years turned into ‘Museum of Civilization’, where the non-functional gadgets that once drove human’s existence are laid out neatly. In another scenario, a librarian hopes to restart the flow of information through a newspaper and puts together oral history of the new rise of civilization. Emily Mandel conveys the loss in those scenarios through her painful yet lyrical prose that we are nudged to ponder upon the little beauties of life we tend to overlook. Even when conveying the private losses of the characters (for example when Jeevan processes the unanticipated events inside the theater or when Miranda perceives the end of her glitzy Hollywood life) the author’s description rings with deep truth and shines with quiet beauty.  Perhaps the fact that Station Eleven doesn’t have any grand revelations and explosive actions may disappoint readers seeking an elaborate post-apocalyptic fiction. Nevertheless, it’s a superior literary work, which takes a trendy genre setting to get at the fundamental truth of art and human condition.