Striking cover, wot? About which I’ll have more to say later, but for now you can already tell a few things about the book even if you haven’t read about it elsewhere:
- You might wonder about the color, but clearly a cat — or at least catness in general — figures prominently herein.
- The fonts are strikingly artificial. (Cutouts? Stencils?)
- And although any old cover includes the book’s title, this cover practically fetishizes the title’s… well, the title’s novelty, its weirdness. It doesn’t just include but highlights the internal parentheses: it makes you notice them.
So let’s concede those details right up front (er, so to speak):
Yes, Mort(e) features a cat — not incidentally, but as its protagonist. The cat has chosen the name “Mort(e)” for himself, parentheses and all (right down to the human associations of morte-with-an-e, and mort-without-an-e). Which must imply that while the cat may be an animal, he’s probably not a natural animal. He is, in fact, something of a made creature…
—
I hadn’t been reading the book long before I began recommending it to others. I couched these recommendations in terms which made plain the passing strangeness of its premise and its narrative, as well as its title. Indeed, to one friend I described the book as a whole thusly:
[When I read a review of Mort(e), the book] sounded almost too weird to be good — but it’s actually good in about equal proportion to its weirdness.
You can glean even more of this strangeness without reading a single review, just from the publisher’s description — or for that matter, just from flipping open the book and noticing its internal, chapter-break illustrations. (I’ve included a couple of these illustrations in this review.)
Some highlights, in broad terms:
The plot develops in a future not that distant from our present. Around the world, within a span of just a few years — overnight, in fact — the animal kingdom has risen up against Earth’s human “masters.” The uprising has been outward, indeed literal: small, individual animals have grown to human size, and walk about on their hind legs, while their forepaws have lost their fur, and grown into hands. In the “war with no name” against humans, they shoot guns, use explosives, drive cars and trucks. They wear clothes, and they watch TV. They speak.
Along with these sudden developments have come many of what might be the expected internal ones: they think, they strategize, yearn, and love. They fight and sacrifice on one another’s behalves. They develop loyalties and treacheries. They get confused, arrogant, under- and over-confident…
Much of this may sound rather Animal Farm-ish. (In mid-2015, when I’m writing this, it may also remind many of James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge’s Zoo, and the recent television mini-series based on it.) True, the sudden physical changes have no prior literary counterpart that I know of, and can be a little hard to picture even with the help of images (like the one at above right). But Mort(e)‘s truly bizarre twist, for me, lies in the book’s explanation for the sudden changes in size and conformation, in intelligence and society and culture:
Ants.
Or rather, an ant: an über-ant, not just the queen of a colony but the queen of all colonies, a giant Queen Mother centuries — maybe millennia — of age. She carries within her the history and knowledge of all the ant colonies and all the queens that have come before, passed down the generations to her via the insects’ unique form of olfactory communication. And she carries within her — oh boy, does she ever — the seething hatred of humans which you might expect of such an ant, with its memories of past poisons, fire, and flood in the service of human “dominion.” Far from fearing them, this ant despises humans:
Homo sapiens had a weakness for their language, a sort of gullibility. Whereas knowledge was stored with the Queen, ensuring almost complete infallibility from the moment a pair of antennae came into contact, humans would have to bicker over translations, authorship, historical context, symbolism, and meaning. They had to rely on the faulty memory of storytellers, the biased interpretations of scribes, and the whims of inefficient bureaucrats in order to pass down their collected knowledge. In a way, she was disappointed. She had hoped that somehow the humans would surprise her and show a capacity that she had yet to discover, something that would make them worthy adversaries. But they were merely talking monkeys, an unfortunate anomaly staining the elegance of the animal kingdom, and the entire world was worse off for it.
The Queen is behind it all: the sudden growth spurt, the intelligence and bravery, and the very motivations of the surface animals. After a hundred millennia and more, it’s their turn.
—
Repino manages all of this adroitly, without (wisely, in my view) trying to explain it too much. (If you haven’t suspended your disbelief by the time you encounter all the above in Mort(e), further details would surely aggravate your skepticism.) He chooses a much better tactic: make the plot and the characters and the settings so interesting — indeed, arresting — that the reader stops raising questions altogether.Central to this tactic is his portrayal of the book’s protagonist. Mort(e) is a soldier of surpassing courage and skill, a ruthless killer of human enemies (morte-with-an-e, right?), and a highly intelligent one. He is not, in short, an opponent any human would wish on him- or herself.
But Mort(e) also has a very human core, framed with conflict, anxiety, and discontent. While aware of human cruelty, and disgusted by human weakness, he is tortured by memories of his former John-Doe existence (i.e., as a kind of Mort-without-an-e): memories of his pre-Change name (Sebastian), of a patch of sunlight in which he used to doze in the house he shared with a human family, and above all of the neighbor’s dog Sheba, Sebastian’s only pre-war animal friend. His open questions about those particular humans, about their house, and especially about Sheba give Mort(e) the ambition, the drive, and the courage at last to overcome the difficulties of not just a human-controlled past, but an ant-engineered future.
—
Not incidentally, at the heart of Mort(e)’s conflicted psychology are echoes of our own 21st-century culture — the tensions between science and faith, say, between intellect and heart, secularism and spirituality. (Readers may also recognize traces of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy’s conflicts between science and religion.)In particular, humans as depicted in Mort(e) are little more than clever, technologically adept slaves to fantasy and religion, who regard the world’s struggles as a battle of the forces of God with those of the Underworld.
The forcibly evolved animal kingdom, on the other hand, looks down on any soft-hearted, squishy notions like love, nostalgia, and faith. Thanks to the ants’ proclivities, in which the practical allows no room for the ideal, the animals are driven by clear-eyed realism. They are not (generally) cruel. But they are implacable when it comes to achieving what they want.
—
Mort(e) is Repino’s first novel. In my view, it is not flawless; the climactic scenes felt rushed, with just a bit too little buildup of suspense. While the main characters’ back stories and their natures in the “present” are sharply (believably, memorably) drawn, I can’t say that I’d classify it quite as a literary read. (In a year in which I also read Station Eleven, I doubt that any other post-apocalyptic tale will, y’know, bowl me over.) But I very much recommend it; an easy four of five stars, from this quarter.I will be very surprised if Mort(e) never makes it to movie screens, especially as an anime-style production (whether drawn or “live action,” a la Guardians of the Galaxy). Numerous times, I thought of the scenes in Spirited Away in which humans are transformed into pigs, and vice-versa.
________________
About the cover:
As I read the book, I kept looking back at the cover. I liked the cover so much that I sought out Kapo Ng, its designer, to ask about certain features of it. Here’s some of what I learned from him:
- The bright color — which in print editions appears more orange than red — has no special connotation. (The publisher requested a bright color, and orange is Ng’s favorite: a happy accident.)
- All formats of the book’s cover, at least in this edition, feature a blurb at the bottom (from Daniel H. Wilson, author of Robopocalypse: “After a fantastical leap into an apocalypse of sentient animals, Mort(e) never looks back. Read this novel and you will never look at your pet the same way again”). I’ve here used the cover as Ng designed it, sans blurb, which really emphasizes the uncluttered starkness.
- The stencil-like font of “A Novel by Robert Repino” was chosen by intention: it suggests the stenciled lettering used on military vehicles and facilities, and thus points to the war at the heart of the book. (There’s no particular significance to other fonts on the cover, other than to imply a futuristic context.)
As I looked further at the cover, I was struck by the pure bilateral symmetry of the cat’s face. And my attention came to focus on the cat’s nose, whiskers, and mouth. I thought I saw a vaguely insectoid silhouette there. It also hinted at… well, it reminded me of the old logo for the Hollywood studio called RKO Radio Pictures (at right). I wondered, as I told Ng, if this might have been intentional as well — if so, it cleverly suggested the means by which the ants transmit their Evolve overnight! Evolve now! instructions to the surface animals (via ant-constructed versions of broadcast antennae)…
Alas, this last reading proves to have been fantasy on my part. It illustrates two principles of Gestalt perception theory. First, there’s reification:
…an aspect of perception in which the object as perceived contains more spatial information than what is actually present. As we attempt to match what we see to the familiar patterns we have stored in memory, there isn’t always an exact match. Instead we find a near match and then fill in the gaps of what we think we should see.
And second, closure:
When seeing a complex arrangement of elements, we tend to look for a single, recognizable pattern.
(source)
In short: there’s such a thing as reading too closely. (Yet another weird human frailty!)
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