THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD
by Kevin Brockmeier
John Murray, £12.99; 272pp
WHEN THE IMAGINATIVE short story The Brief History of the Dead appeared in The New Yorker in 2003, the film rights were snatched by Warner Brothers even before its young Arkansan author, Kevin Brockmeier, had turned it into an equally imaginative post-apocalyptic novel.
That story now stands as the book’s first chapter, offering a glimpse of a city of highrise buildings, karaoke bars, tea rooms, black taxis, poplar trees and falafel stands, where the dead bide their time before passing on to their respective, uncertain fates. Thanks to Luka Sims, writer and editor of the Sims Sheet, the inhabitants of this dream-like community can speculate on their odd existence, piece together unfolding world events and share stories about their arrival through “the crossing”.
The blind man “travelled across a desert of living sand”; Lev Paley “watched his atoms break apart like marbles, roll across the universe”; Hanbing Lee “woke inside the body of an aphid and lived an entire life in the flesh of a single peach”; Graciella Cavazos “began to snow”.
Advertisement
These citizens do not age or have heartbeats and endure only as long as they are remembered by the living: some remain for centuries, others only a few years. That is, before the epidemic. The city begins to mutate and release its dead when, back on earth, in the middle of the 21st century, a deadly virus called “the Blinks” (uncontrollable blinking is the first sign of infection) spreads through the population. Streets, blocks and parks vanish; the inhabitants of a Pacific island appear in a parking garage at dawn, only to disappear by dusk.
This fascinating conceit unfolds through various points of view while Brockmeier earnestly explores the vagaries of memory, the coincidences of daily life, the inexplicable connections between people and the nature of religious belief. Although at times he errs on the side of whimsy, Brockmeier’s fiction/fantasy tale does not sacrifice warm feeling to cold detail.
Meanwhile, Laura Byrd, a wildlife specialist, has been sent to Antarctica by Coca-Cola to investigate the possibility of using polar ice in drinks. As she struggles to survive the frost, she does not realise that the virus is in Coke (which luckily she avoids), nor that the people she remembers en route — whether significant (parents, lovers and friends) or casual (mah-jong players in a café, a girl jumping rope in the park) — are in limbo on account of her, the last living soul.
As the two narratives mingle, their energy and invention are always compelling, even if the outcome is a shade anti- climactic and the survival tale less interesting. Perhaps Brockmeier should have put more faith in the place where he began, the city of the dead; measured against the infinite possibilities of his subject, the novel doesn’t quite achieve the profundity that he intends.
Still, his confident voice, observational brilliance and playful humour dazzle to the end. Brockmeier has two O. Henry Awards under his belt for good reason.