2022/77: How High We Go In The Dark -- Sequoia Nagamatsu

I wish I could taste. I wish I wasn’t so tired all the time. I hate that when I do have the energy to go out, I get angry at all the people who didn’t get the plague or somehow walked away from it scot-free. I hate how the world is finally coming together to help the planet when I’m coming undone. [loc. 3748]

It starts with the discovery of an ancient corpse in the permafrost, part Neanderthal and part something else, and the precautionary (and haphazard) quarantine that follows. Or perhaps it starts when a woman leaves her child behind to embark on a long journey. Or when a robot dog malfunctions. Or when a pig starts to speak.

How High We Go In The Dark is more a collection, a connection, of short stories than a traditional novel: I was reminded of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, though the mood and the setting(s) are quite different. The chapters are distinct first-person narratives, though the narrator of one story may be a character in another. There are overarching themes: family, mutual acceptance, the industry of death. For, although parts of How High We Go were published in the Before Times, this is very much a pandemic novel, exploring the human side of the 'Arctic plague' which transforms the world. There are euthanasia theme parks (apparently the Euthanasia Coaster is a thing); death hotels; genetic modification; public grieving. There are stories about reconnecting with one's community, and stories about holding onto whatever remains of the dead.

The writing is beautiful, despite the bleakness of the scenario, and there are glimpses of connections that are never explained. I was moved to tears by some chapters (a man trying to preserve the recording, the spirit, of a dead woman within a failing robotic dog; a pig declaring that it wants to help) and left cold by others.

Unfortunately one of the chapters that really didn't work for me was the final one, 'The Scope of Possibility', in which the story comes full circle, the plague's origin is explained, and a great many names are clunkily dropped. This chapter felt like a trivialisation of what had gone before, and I found it oddly distressing.

Yet there are happy endings here, and reunions, and homecoming: there is art, and kindness, and love, and hope. Sometimes surreal, sometimes melancholy, the best of this novel has lodged in my brain.