I’ve really enjoyed Emily St. John Mandel’s previous books (see my reviews of Sea of Tranquility, The Glass Hotel, and Station Eleven) and was excited when her new book was announced. It seem positively providential that it was somewhat connected to The Singer’s Gun, which I read earlier this year. You don’t have to read The Singer’s Gun first but it does follow a character from that book. I enjoy that St. John Mandel’s books all seem to have overlapping places and characters but aren’t a series in any traditional sense.
The year is 2031 and Ari Waker has recently been released from prison. The United States as we know it has ceased to exist, fracturing into city-states and smaller republics. Troops have just withdrawn from Los Angeles and on the first night after the curfew has lifted, Ari and her roommate Gloria go to a party. But something is strange about this party. There are people there who shouldn’t be and at the end, the host of the party has disappeared forever.
From this strange night we follow Ari over the years as she moves through the collapsed former USA, joining and escaping from various militias until she ends up in Paris. But what happened at that party has had long-reaching effects and will continue to follow Ari.
This is a hard book to discuss without giving too much away. There are some really interesting ideas being explored here about nature versus nurture and particularly about political futures but I think it’s a book that reads best if you don’t know too much going in to it. At the same time, it’s not St John Mandel’s best. I think it suffers from trying to do and be too much. There are a lot of characters and there are even multiple versions of these characters. This means that we don’t get to spend as much time with individual characters and so, by the end of the novel, I didn’t feel like I had a strong emotional connection to any of them. I would have preferred less scope and more depth. I wouldn’t have minded if this story had been split over two books and I do hope that St John Mandel returns to some of these places and people in a future novel.
