You think you know how terrible immortality could be? Forget
your sad vampires and your lonely gods — the new bookStrange Bodiesby Marcel Therouxhas the saddest version of living forever.
And the most saddening part? It’s a distortion of the writer’s greatest dream: to live
on through your words.
Top image: Edwin Hasler.
Some spoilers ahead…
In Strange Bodies,
an expert on Samuel Johnson turns up, months after his death, and leaves his
friend a document that he wrote while he was stuck inside a mental institution.
Is he actually Dr. Nicholas Slopen, back from the dead, or just a madman? And
what does this all have to do with the story he writes, about being paid to
authenticate a cache of previously unknown letters from Dr. Johnson?
We soon discover that this stranger is not quite Nicky
Slopen, but has all of Slopen’s memories and identity — and the letters from
Samuel Johnson are actually the product of a “savant” who is somehow
channeling the long-dead author? Soon enough, Slopen’s recollections lead us
into murky waters about identity and memory, and what makes us who we are, as
he learns more about the mysterious Malevin Procedure.
The whole thing winds up being sort of like the most
depressing episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse
ever, as Slopen explores living on in a new body and unravels the sad tale of
how he got to this distressing point. It’s like Dollhouse, if Dollhouse
consisted of long discussions of authorship, provenances, Samuel Johnson versus
John Milton, literature versus science and the nature of sorrow.
Slopen is a tragic protagonist, even before he falls afoul
of the Malevin Procedure and discovers a far-reaching conspiracy to decant
people. He’s estranged from his wife, and mostly from his children as well, and
his academic career is kind of a shambles as he confronts the sad reality of
being an expert on a semi-obscure topic in the early 21st century.
Without giving too much away, the Malevin Procedure works by
using the written word — which is why there’s a guy writing new Samuel Johnson
material over 200 years later. And Strange Bodies is often at its best when it
explores the notion that words shape our reality and our identities, and that
writing fiction is a kind of scientific process.
There’s a great debate early on in the book between Nicky
and Vera, who is involved with the Malevin Procedure. Vera insists that
“there is no natural distinction between the arts and sciences,” and
Tolstoy and Dovstoyevsky have also “discovered the laws of nature,”
just like Newton
or Einstein. To which Nicky responds that Tolstoy and Dovstoyevsky are
novelists, and “by definition, they made things up.”
Vera responds: “Bill Gates also makes things up. Is he
a novelist? Science, it’s a process of creation too. Literature itself is a
species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.” And
then she tells him to close his eyes, and proceeds to describe a scene with
such vividness that he sees it perfectly in his mind’s eye, and feels transported.
This is the central idea of the book, more or less — that
writing actually encodes the world, sort of like a computer, and that really
vivid wordcraft can create something lasting and robust. It’s a very flattering
idea for a novelist, of course, since it elevates the novelist’s art beyond
mere entertainment into some kind of cosmic worldbuilding.
And yet, the loneliness of Nicky Slopen and the general
misery we visit in this novel are a constant reminder that our selfhoods and sense
of reality are constructed socially, with other people, and even if you know
who you are, you still have to convince other people. Over and over and over.
As someone says at one point in Theroux’ novel, “the job of words is to
construct the fiction of our separate identity.”
Trapped in a madhouse, Slopen comes to realize that
“reality is not as robust as we think it is” — some things, like
gravity and the tides, go on no matter what we think of them. But a lot of the
“finer details” of reality are entirely consensual and fragile.
So to some extent this is a book about the lonesomeness and
tragedy of living too long and suffering too much — but it’s also a cautionary
tale about what happens when you see too much of the code of the universe.
