Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead is different from most of the other apocalyptic fiction I’ve read in that half the story is about what happens to the dead people after they’ve died. In this novel, when people die, they inhabit the City until the last person on Earth having a memory of them has also died. Then they disappear from the City. Every odd numbered chapter in this book is about the lives of those who live in the City. People enter and disappear from the City consistantly, meeting and interacting with each other and carrying on lives independent of the lives they lived before.
Suddenly, lots of people start entering the City (dying on Earth), then very soon disappearing (because everyone who remembers them on Earth has died). Some survive. It becomes clear to the survivors that there has been a pandemic on Earth. They seek each other out and try to figure out why they have survived, and what they can expect.
Meanwhile, in the even numbered chapters, Laura Byrd is still alive on Earth at a research station in the Antarctic, trying to keep her wits about her. She is unaware that anything untoward has happened to everyone else on Earth. When her partners fail to return from an expedition to another station to use the radio after their communication equipment failed, she sets off for answers. Her sledge trek across the cold Antarctic, through snow and over ice broken by fissures and crevasses, in the dark Antarctic winter, was the best part of the book. Her memories – of family, of old friends and new acquaintances, of the meeting that got her this assignment at the bottom of the world — kept her sane as she trudged toward her last hope of getting in touch with anyone.
The book seemed to be more about memory and memories than about the end of human life on earth. It was almost as if the wiping out of the human population was incidental to the main theme, that memories are what make a life. The cause of the pandemic was interesting, and Laura’s fight for survival was a heart-pounding adventure.
I was just looking around minding my own business when BLAM some blogger jumps out at me tells me about a book called The Brief History of the Dead and then WHOOOP off she goes leaving me curled up quivering on the floor in desperate need of yet another book when I have far too many to read already.
Curse you!
And yeah, I just got a copy of it from my library.
–Greg “The Undead Rat”
Hey, it works both ways, Greg. I checked out your blog, and now I’ve got a hold on the first of the Cree Black novels.
You may be a little disappointed in “The Brief History…” if you’re looking for horror. (I realize you probably like more than just horror). But I hope you like it anyway! Let me know.
Jeanette
Right now I’m looking for something thoughtful and unsettling. Maybe creepy, but that’s not necessary. What really drew me to this book was the concepts of memory and afterlife and Laura’s trek across the Antarctic. A book like that? You just gotta give it a shot.
–Greg
ALERT: Spoilers Ahead. If you haven’t read this book but intend to, just know that I didn’t like it much and read no further. Really, it will ruin it for you.
Good review Jeanette. Excellent description of events and I agree with your conclusion. However, I will now enter Grinch mode.
I started off enjoying Brief History of the Dead – being partial to post-apocalyptic fiction even if it doesn’t involve zombies – but by the end I had to force myself to finish it. I was ready to leap into the pages and finish off Laura myself just to get it over with.
And Laura’s journey to the City … I felt like Elaine in Seinfeld talking about The English Patient. Could it have lasted any longer? It seems like the author wanted reviewers to be able to talk about the lyrical beauty of the prose. It didn’t work for me and I’m really a sensitive guy. Seriously, it doesn’t take much for me to tear-up.
The author’s science is pretty bad as well, though, I suppose, actual science isn’t the point as much as how it can all end by someone doing something dumb. I’m pretty sure that the virus couldn’t be distributed the way the author describes it.
My biggest disappointment is that I don’t think that the author kept to the rules he set up for the City. I can accept that the City got smaller as the few remaining people of earth died but why didn’t something happen to the remaining residents when Laura finally died. Well, we wouldn’t have been able to read about naked Laura following the dancing lights to the city. Mostly I thought that the author didn’t know how to end the book and opted for the old “let the reader’s imagination fill in the details” approach.
Thanks, Jeanette, for helping me process this book in a way I haven’t been able to. I read it shortly after it came out, at a time when few of the readers I know had seen it, so I didn’t have a chance to talk it through.
You are right, though, in that it is mostly a musing on the way we use memory to create and sustain our lives. It seems to me that Brockmeier’s version shows the ‘closure’ lie – that we can somehow forget our way out of life-changing events. (In that case, Alzheimer’s is truly an apocalyptic disease.)
And yes, the ‘rules’ of the City came off as somewhat arbitrary towards the end, but it occurred to me that Brockmeier’s intention was that the City residents didn’t really have time to put patterns on what they were seeing. That pattern recognition, and ability to predict future events based on past experiences, is also a function of memory.
Anyway, I loved the jacket illustration!
Andrew, the jacket illustration is pretty cool. It is one reason I picked up the book in the first place. It does a good job of capturing the theme/spirit of the book.
I agree with you and Jeanette about using memory to create and sustain our lives. I just wish the author had been a bit more consistent.
Andrew, the jacket illustration is pretty cool. It is one reason I picked up the book in the first place and it does a good job of capturing the theme/spirit of the book.
I agree with you and Jeanette about the author using memory to create and sustain our lives. I just wish the he had been a bit more consistent.
Ooh. The Brief History of the Dead sounds apocalyptically awesome.
I do enjoy novels with plotlines that involve threats to humankind. Just finished a great thriller by Paul Mark Tag in which a genetic anomaly threatens the foundations of the world’s religions. Couldn’t put it down.
Tag is a former naval research scientist, so his science is plausible, but I think I’d still give Brockmeier’s novel a go, even if his science is a bit “off”.
ALERT: Spoilers ahead
Mack, I agree that the last two chapters were too long, and Brockmeier strived (reached?) for a beautiful, poetic ending. I wasn’t thrilled by it, and skimmed through those last chapters quickly. I had to re-skim them to write the review, but I hadn’t missed anything and I still feel the same way. It must have been difficult to conceive of and write the ending — but if one doesn’t have a clear idea for an ending for a story like this, I suppose one shouldn’t write it. Still, I liked the premise of the book a lot, and the plot, despite the ending.
Another thing about the ending was that even though Laura was struggling to survive, I didn’t see that in the long run it would be any good for her to survive. If she were the only, truly the only person left on Earth, stuck in the Antarctic with no real viable way to get home, all she could hope for was about a year in the food-stocked research center until the food ran out. Boring! I’d rather get it all over with myself, I think. She could write her memoirs, but there would be no one ever to read them. I guess she didn’t know for absolutely sure she was the only one left on Earth, though, so the struggle was worth it to her.
Andrew, you made some good points, and not just about the cover. I’d have to reread it to see what you mean by the residents of the City not having time to put patterns on what they were seeing. There were some residents there for long periods of time, like the boy who was killed at age eight, the brother of one of the researchers. Some people had figured out that Laura was still alive. There were groups trying to get in touch with her telepathically, a reverse of people in this world trying to communicate with the dead.
One thing I kept thinking was that Brockmeier was probably trying to fit too much into the story. For instance, there was a blind man in the City, and often blind people are used symbolically. I can’t figure out if his blindness was supposed to mean something, unless what you’re saying, that people don’t have time to put patterns on what they’re seeing. Could that be what you’re saying? Perhaps his blindness symbolized the residents’ inability to see life on Earth. We in this world don’t have time to put patterns on what we’re seeing, either, and are blind to see what happens on the other side of life (if there is another side). Interesting.
I read the book. Well at least to the final chapters, I am just curious, what happened to her and the city?
I’m not sure how far you got. Reading the last few chapters would give you the answer. But (SPOILER ALERT):
It’s sort of a spoiler alert, since the ending is inevitable. Laura dies. I think Brockmeier gives enough background in the story for readers to understand what happens to the city — it collapses in on itself. However, this brief summary does no justice at all to Brockheimer’s writing. The last few lines are, “It would happen in a matter of days or weeks. They would gather together in the clearing around the monument [in a park], however many thousands of them there were, and they would stand, shoulder to shoulder. They would listen to each other’s voices, and they would breathe each other’s breath. And they would wait for that power that would pull them like a chain into whatever came next, into that distant world where broken souls are wrenched out of their histories.”
[…] and zamani. (If you want a terrific fiction take on the same idea, try Kevin Brockmeier’s Brief History of the Dead.) Sasha essentially means people or events retained in the memory of the living; zamani denotes […]