When you die, you don’t go to heaven. At least not right away. According to Kevin Brockmeier’s dazzling new novel, THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD, you first go to “the city.”
In the city, our dearly departed live, work and play just as they do on Earth, and remain there as residents so long as those they left behind continue to remember them. But when a pandemic-level virus wipes out the planet’s population, the city dwindles to one lone person: a newspaper man named Sims who runs off a daily sheet on a mimeograph machine. It’s not long after that another person pops up, and another, and many more to where all is normal again. Why? It could have something to do with Laura Byrd, a wildlife specialist stationed in Antarctica.
Because of her remote, next-to-uninhabitable location, Laura is spared falling victim to the deadly strain – one she knows nothing about. With her communications to the outside world severed and survival hopes shaky, she has little to do but think about loved ones until the day she dies. Like an expert juggler, Brockmeier takes turns devoting a chapter to Laura and one to those in the city, though allows their arcs to overlap as she recalls friends and acquaintances of the past, who eventually figure out their connection to one another. So maybe the ending doesn’t mesh together quite like it should; even a juggler drops a ball now and then.
With today’s terror-filled headlines of biological warfare and bird flu, Brockmeier’s “everyone dies” scenario isn’t that far-fetched, but BRIEF HISTORY is not a book interested in being harrowing. If anything, it’s optimistic and reassuring. No matter how large the world seems, it’s actually pretty small when you need it to be. BRIEF HISTORY has elements of thrillers, mysteries, fantasies, science fiction and horror, and yet it is none of these things. It is simply a great, human story – funny, sad and smart, with characters and themes that will stay with you. Not forever, to paraphrase a line from the book, but long enough. –Rod Lott
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