One of my very favorite books of recent years was 2014’s Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. I loved that book so much that I couldn’t even bring myself to write a review of it; I just wanted to savor the memory of it, so to speak — to keep the memory unspoiled by words which would linger long afterwards, eventually becoming for me the memory themselves.
Three years after reading Station Eleven, I began encountering advance reviews of Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M, which often compared it — not at all unfavorably — with Station Eleven. Skeptical at first, I poked into the new book’s general nature, its premise and characters; in a way, though, I didn’t want to know too much in advance. Given such a premise and such characters, the anticipation of reading it resembled my memory of having read Station Eleven, in reverse: I didn’t want the words I read then to overhang the reading experience. So I quit reading advance reviews, placed a pre-release order, and just waited.
And all that intertwining of memory and language? It anticipated the very point.
—
Now, a few weeks after finishing The Book of M, I know that the parallels between the two books were not just marketing hype.
Differences? Sure. For starters, you might think, Well, he’s writing a review of this one; he must love it less. Not so, though: I love it differently — and wouldn’t trade the reading experience for anything.
Let’s begin by summarizing some of the most general information about The Book of M. (In keeping with my general practice here, I will try very hard to avoid spoilers — but I won’t tell you nothing about what happens, or to whom, because then what sort of review would it be?)
In interviews, Shepherd has talked about a lifelong fascination with shadows. “They have so much symbolism,” she told one interviewer. “As a kid, I played games with my own shadow, and I tried to outsmart it. It made me feel a little bit magical.” Later, playing with the idea of shadows, she began to look into the mythology surrounding shadows, especially those of living creatures — their cultural significance, what roles they might have played in history and art, and so on. That’s when she came across a phenomenon popularly called “Zero Shadow Day.” While there’s nothing in Wikipedia about it at the moment, it was described by an answerer at Quora like this:
…it happens twice a year, for places between +23.5 and -23.5 degrees latitude.
…For people living between +23.5 and -23.5 degrees latitude, the Sun’s declination will be equal to their latitude twice — once during Uttarayan and once during Dakshinayan. On these two days, the Sun will be exactly overhead at noon and will not cast a shadow of an object on the ground. This Zero Shadow Day will clearly be different for different places on earth.
[Notes: Declination is the angle of the sun’s position above or below the “celestial equator” at a given day and time. The Hindu calendar’s Uttarayan falls on or around January 14 of every year; Dakshinayan, on or around July 16. The Astronomical Society of India actually promotes an Android app to “interactively explore the length of shadows and the position of the Sun for any date, time and place.”]
Zero Shadow Day, says Shepherd, provided the specific seed which would sprout into The Book of M. The world it depicts has been transformed by a mysterious, well, call it a condition — not a pestilence, neither a war nor famine, and not an ecological or other artificial disaster as far as anyone can tell: humans have begun to lose their shadows.
Animals, plants, regular inanimate solid objects — they continue, reliably, to cast shadows. But, humans, and humans only, are losing theirs.
—
Let’s think about this a moment: why would such a phenomenon apply only to humans? To begin with, whatever else you can say about humans, we’re master if inadvertent opportunists — if a physical property or phenomenon can be turned to human advantage, intentionally or not, we’ll come to use it in a way that the rest of the physical world does not. To take only the most obvious example, every living thing consists of cells, and many living things have come to evolve cells with properties placing them along a continuum we call consciousness. We also have lost basic things with little or no evolutionary value, although they might seem to have been a “given” of everyday reality before animals (including us) came along — radial symmetry, for instance.So what might humans have come to use their shadows for, which other objects have not? What — like our shadows — need to be small early in life, but later on to grow, and finally to reverse course and wither, eventually, to nothing?
Try this: memory.
And if a person suddenly, not gradually, lost his or her shadow in this case… well, you can see the implications. A great deal of memory would remain in her or his head, of course — but memory, notoriously fragile (especially with nowhere but one’s head in which to stow it), would start to deteriorate further. You’d forget that you remembered some stuff. Other things you thought you remembered would — just as in real life memory — be demonstrably, even fantastically false. The world as you experienced it would both (a) fade and drop away, and (b) bloom, dotted with previously unrecognizable small realities. Eventually you would face the final terror: you would not remember who you were, you would not remember your need to eat and drink, you would not remember the names of those around you or what they meant to you, and you would at last—
Well, perhaps you can see where this is going.
—
That’s the world of The Book of M. No one knows what has caused the condition, and what has caused it doesn’t matter because it’s spreading too quickly: first one person in India loses his shadow, and then a few more people do, and then the phenomenon begins to burgeon spontaneously and without apparent cause around the world. The shadlowlessness is referred to as the Forgetting, because losing one’s shadow might be plain old weird, but forgetting has meaning, has consequences. Just as with other “plagues” (if plague it is), the Forgetting doesn’t hit everyone; but when it hits someone, it’s random, irreversible, and fast, running its course within weeks or months.In the landscape of post-apocalyptic literature and pop culture, this provides multiple neat opportunities to differentiate shadowlessness from, say, zombification or fatal infection. You can’t “catch” shadowlessness, for instance. But in the presence of a shadowless loved one, you might easily become very uncomfortable — sorrowful at first, outright grieving, then perhaps occasionally losing patience, ultimately becoming frightened as the person you thought you knew becomes someone else. The shadowed would come to congregate with one another, while the shadowless would rampage free through the landscape, urban and otherwise, recognizing none of it and knowing nothing of their place there, or how to behave, or what “to behave” even means… Yeah. I’d probably huddle elsewhere, too.
—
So that’s the premise. In a novel, though, we also want to know about the characters and their experiences — their relationships — with one another. Ever mindful of the potential for spoilerism, some quick notes:- The story’s told through the eyes of four main characters, all but one of whom have shadows during the course of the book’s action:
- Max (no surname that we’re ever given, I think): a young woman who loses her shadow fairly early in the book
- Orlando (Ory) Zhang: Max’s husband who, with Max, is attending a wedding in Northern Virginia when news of the arrival of shadowlessness in the US first hits
- Mahnaz (Naz) Ahmadi: a young woman from Iran attending college in Boston
- a (mostly) unnamed man in New Orleans identified as “the amnesiac,” who — prior to the outbreak of shadowlessness — had lost all memories before the moment he lost consciousness in a car accident
- Interestingly — not insignificantly — only Max’s portions of the story are related in present tense and first person; all the others come to us in a more distanced third-person POV.
- As the story begins, with the obvious exception of Max and Ory, none of these characters are known to the others. But they all know one another by book’s end.
- The story’s arc traces the course of characters making their way — sometimes physically, sometimes metaphorically — across the landscape of the Forgetting.
—
What of the writing in The Book of M — how successful is the tale’s telling?Early on, Shepherd describes some of the Forgetting’s consequences:
Two years ago, when the Forgetting first reached the United States, [Ory] and Max saw its effects. They had watched a shadowless man speaking perfect English walk straight into a fire, not remembering what it was. Heard children with no silhouettes ask flowers where the nearest water flowed as if the flowers could understand, but then inexplicably were able to head directly to it. Once a woman missing her dark twin named all the coins of their currency, but when she opened her hands, the metal pieces were in shapes they had never seen, engraved with designs of no country.
Later:
Strange rain during the day that somehow soaked only every other street, and to Naz’s terror and bafflement, followed movement, as if tracking her. Footsteps for which she could never pinpoint the origin.
And:
Screams echoed throughout the nights.
The language is brisk and efficient, describing complex, highly dramatic events and behaviors evocatively but without flourish or baroque syntax. Of course “austerity” and “beauty” aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive terms. And I’d argue, further, that a facility for capturing fantastical realities in spare language is the mark of a fine mind with disciplined control of the tools at its disposal.
—
I did note two things I might have preferred otherwise:One: the dramatic climax of the book come just a shade (no pun intended!) early for me. It was not the emotional high point; that came later, and satisfyingly. But a particular confrontation had been built up — if and when a film or miniseries of the book is made, it will no doubt become the action moment which has everyone’s pulse racing. The denouement which followed, though, seemed almost to constitute a prolonged epilogue — a drawn-out mini-sequel, if you will — to the book’s narrative.
And two, honestly, a quibble…:
Not often, but occasionally, I noticed an awkwardness in the language the characters used when speaking to one another. However, I marked only one specific instance of this:
One response of the shadowed to the Forgetting, unsurprisingly, is a mystical one — to see in the shadowless (as some now see in the mad) a touch of the divine. The adherents of this response establish a cult of sorts, called “Transcendence.” We first encounter them through the eyes of a panicky man. Why is he running? In conversation with Max and a few others:
“Transcendence,” he whispered. The two women with him shuddered at the word.
We looked at one another, trying to see if any of us recognized that name.
“Transcendence,” one of the women finally repeated. “The people that dress all in white.”
Here’s what brought me up short in that passage: “Transcendence” is the name of an organization. But because the references to it are all spoken, and always coupled together with plural verb forms, why would the characters who are speaking and hearing it in conversation immediately recognize the word as a singular abstract noun, “Transcendence” instead of “Transcendents”?
Well, that is indeed a quibble, and I’ve probably bungled its expression anyhow.
Worse, concluding this review with it would not do justice to The Book of M and to Shepherd: the one a thrilling, heartbreaking, headily thought-provoking tale of both real-world and moral complexity; the other, a writer so far of — astonishingly — just this one novel. I look forward to seeing what she puts her hand to next.
_____________
P.S. While growing up, Shepherd trained in classical ballet. It occurred to me that one definition of dancing might be: the rhythmic, disciplined separation of one’s self from one’s shadow. That can’t be coincidence, can it?
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