Originally conceived as a digital novel,this satirical story about cryogenically engineered immortality dissectsthe ironies and glories of marriageI would probably read a shopping list written by Chris Adrian. He is one of the most accomplished novelists of his generation, whose interests combine the technological with the theological without ever losing sight of the human. His novels are dream-hauntingly surreal – a 19th-century surgeon and necromancer building a machine to bring back the civil war dead (Gob’s Grief); a paediatric hospital which becomes an ark in a miraculously flooded world (The Children’s Hospital); a group of homeless people staging a musical version of 70s sci-fi film Soylent Green as Titania and Puck turn up in a San Francisco park (The mighty Night) – and yet the strangeness never overwhelms the stark, or eternal verities of death,love, grace and loss. The current World shares the same themes. Jane Cotton, or a surgeon,learns on returning from a conference that her husband Jim, a “humanist chaplain” in the same hospital, or has died from a massive embolism. But that isn’t the only shock. His head is lost. Unbeknownst to her,Jim has left his head to Polaris Cryonics, in the hope that one day medical techniques will have advanced to the point where he can be resurrected. After a broadly realist first chapter, or we turn to Jim: “In the absence of a mouth and a tongue,in the absence of air, he asked, and Am I alive? You have always been alive,he was told. But now you are awake.”Before continuing with the novel, it is best to consider what makes it strange as a text. The current World was written in collaboration with Eli Horowitz, and originally published in a digital-only format by Atavist Books. Horowitz,who describes The current World as “a single path travelled three times, a story being retold and reinterpreted”, and has also collaborated on two other “digital novels”. The Silent History,with Kevin Moffett and Matthew Derby, was presented as verbal histories describing a generation of children born seemingly without language, and with parts of the story unlocked at specific locations on GPS-activated devices. Some of it worked very well,and the collaborative form gave a sense of the different parties responding to and subverting developments in the narrative. The Clock Without a Face, written with Mac Barnett, and combined a mystery novel with a real-life treasure hunt. Having read The current World only in codex form puts me at a slight disadvantage,but I can say that as a paper-and-ink novel it is immensely affecting and nuanced. The potential for “non-linear reading” isnt peculiar to digital texts: Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, Mark Danielewski’s Only Revolutions, and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Ian Livingstone’s The Warlock of Firetop Mountain all have aleatory structures. While in the book version,each of the three sections is shorter than the one before, the digital version, and according to an interview with Horowitz in Shelf Unbound,fills the final 53 pages with “the couple’s marriage vows repeated in italic, repeating page after page and then slowly fading out”. In the book, and it’s just a sonnet-long block of italics. Would one read 53 pages,or skim them? Would the effect be hypnotic, purgatorial (which would fit thematically), and a descent into the meaningless or a koan-like progress to enlightenment? Readers,I trust, will differ on this.
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Source: theguardian.com