Well, now I don’t care about
the ToB at all. I have no dog in this fight. I guess I hope THE GOOD LORD BIRD
wins, but this year’s is pretty much over for me already.
But let’s go back to a few
minutes before I read the end of the review. Interestingly (?), both of these
novels deal with immortality, whether author-derived or turtle-conferred. LIFE
AFTER LIFE concerns Ursula, a woman growing up over the course of the twentieth
century, mostly in England, who has the ability—to use a video game term—respawn
after every type of death. Whether she is murdered or drowns or kills herself,
she is reborn, and has many of the same experiences but avoids that particular
death. She doesn’t know this about herself (and I think the novel would have
been greatly more interesting had she somehow figured this out, or known it all
along; what wouldn’t you do if you knew you couldn’t die?) but she has vague
premonitions of having had past lives, and these premonitions push her toward
an ineffective psychoanalyst. She is surrounded by a host of interesting and
flawed characters, but is not herself noticeably flawed; in my previous review
I held that she is only supposed to be a stand-in for the reader, and I support
that interpretation still. Although the ToB reviewer thinks he will revisit
this novel, I doubt that I will; like a video game, once you’ve played it all
the way through in every permutation of Ursula, there’s nothing new to
discover. There is nothing in Ursula to agree or disagree with, to find myself
in apposition or opposition to. Ursula experiences a great many historical
events, but these too hold little interest in revisiting; we know what happened
and in many cases it seems inexorable. What could Ursula have done (save for
the opening scene of her shooting Hitler) to change the course of WWII? Ursula
never made it that far up the power ladder. At best she was Eva Braun’s best
friend, and even killing Eva Braun seems unlikely to have convinced Hitler of
the error of his ways. Could Ursula have done more? Sure, but we can’t fault
her for what she did.
THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES, on the
other hand, has at its center Abraham Norton Perina, a deeply flawed man to
whom we can certainly see ourselves in opposition; there are many things Norton
could have done differently, or better, from his due diligence on med school
and his subsequent employment to his treatment of the native people of the island
of Ivu’ivu, to his behavior as a father and as a person. Norton’s flaws are
myriad, and to me some of the most interesting are his treatment of his
brother, and his feelings about romantic relationships. Norton wants us to
believe, at the end of the novel, that he was never loved, and could never find
the type of love he truly desired. (Ursula, I want to note, has lives in which
she is both loved and unloved, but the relationship that seems to mean the most
to her is her relationship with her distant father. Despite the professed
importance of this relationship, we don’t see many scenes of Ursula and her father
sharing “quality time.”) Is Norton being truthful in these disclosures? Perhaps
Norton had opportunities for love and discarded them, or deterred them with his
own disdain and general personal awfulness? Why is he so upset with his brother’s
homosexuality, and his brother’s long-term relationship? What does Norton find
so enviable and admirable about young Ivu’ivuans that he couldn’t have found
with young men from his hometown, or from his university or med school? Many
readers of this novel seem incredibly willing to throw it aside, having finished
it and having made their judgments of the moral unacceptability of Norton. I
guess I’m interested in explaining the monster, or at least in exploring what
makes him so monstrous. A lot was made of the importance of an absent or disengaged
mother in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. A similar thesis is hesitantly proposed
for Norton; his mother is sometimes catatonic and strangely unconcerned with
him or his brother, and she dies when he is still rather young. Freudianly,
Norton hates his father and ceases to think of him much after college. Norton
finds him not sufficiently driven by success, although Norton doesn’t quite undertake
his anthropology assignment as an avenue to success; Norton is floundering as
he finishes up med school and might otherwise have had to return home to take
up the family business. But I would still read that novel (Norton in middle
America, trying to hide his awfulness behind the business of being a gentleman
farmer) because Norton’s flaws and his cravenness and his lack of likability
make him interesting to me. Ursula is too smooth a surface; the conceit of LIFE
AFTER LIFE is interesting, but I wish it had been applied to a more meaty
character.
My winner: THE PEOPLE IN THE
TREES
ToB’s winner: LIFE AFTER LIFE
Read the terrible official
judgment here.
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