Horatio finally understands the horror of your body being only a body, a fleshy, visceral thing that you are made up of, this fatigued puppet, this breaking vessel... Horatio wonders: what does revenge mean, to a body? [loc. 2900]
The tag for this novel is 'a lyrical, queer sci-fi retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet as a locked-room thriller', which removes much of the suspense for anyone familiar with the original tragedy. Instead of wondering who the murderer is, we wonder how, and why.
The setting is Elsinore Labs, in August 2047, and the novel opens with Horatio (the AI controlling the labs) discovering broken glass, a pool of blood, a cooling corpse. Dr Graham Lichfield is dead, and his son Hayden is kneeling beside the body. Two hours of records -- cameras, audio, lab accesses -- are missing from Horatio's records, and Hayden fears that someone has killed his father to obtain the Sisyphus Formula. His uncle Charles orders a lockdown of the lab: Hayden is determined to discover the murder by fair means or foul, and he has a captive audience.
The plot beats of Hamlet are all here, ingeniously reimagined for the science-fictional setting (the ghost is a wholly scientific phenomenon, a human trial of the Sisyphus Formula) and often transformed. Felicia Xia, Hayden's ex, has considerably more agency than Ophelia, and survives to give her perspective on the events; the relationship between Horatio and Hayden -- which is at the heart of this novel, and more truly tragic than the murder of Hayden's father -- is unique, surprising and beautifully written. And Liu's background in biochemistry is evident in their prose, with some of the most lyrical passages describing the gross physicality of bodies.
I didn't really engage with The Death I Gave Him, though I admire the style and the innovation. I didn't feel that the framing narrative (a history student's retelling of 'that fateful night', collating official sources and neuromapper logs, and imploring us to 'read between the lines') was foregrounded enough. The world outside the lab, both at the time of the murder and at the (considerably later) time of that framing narrative, is very thinly sketched: catastrophic storms, pandemics... And I didn't especially like, or relate to, any of the characters, except perhaps Horatio -- the inhuman AI with more humanity than most of the other protagonists. Hayden's depression and anxiety is just as annoying as the original Hamlet's!
An ingenious transformative work, beautifully written, with a poignant romance at heart: my lukewarm reaction is likely to be another case of 'right book, wrong time'.
Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this honest review. UK publication date is 12th September 2023.
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