For Those About to Die from Bird Flu: Austinist Reviews The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier

In alternating chapters, Brockmeier tells the story of the city, as its citizens struggle to make sense of their situation, and Laura, as she slogs across the frozen continent.

The novel inverts the conventions of several genres to interesting, unsettling effect. The chapters concerning Laura read like a survival story. In fact, her trek is modeled in part after Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s aptly-titled Polar expedition memoir, The Worst Journey in the World. The futility of Laura’s mission is evident almost immediately—but on the other hand, the lives of a lot of dead people hang on her ability to stay alive. Then in the chapters set in the city, The Brief History of the Dead is a semi-suspense novel, reminiscent of last year’s Never Let Me Go. Like Ishiguro, Brockmeier offers a steady but subdued series of revelations, which has the effect of maintaining narrative interest without dominating the story. The Coca-Cola corporation, which has a profound influence on both worlds, elicits satirical treatment, and the fantastic logic of the plot evokes Borges’ short fictions.

At its heart, this is a philosophical novel, in the everyday sense of the word—thought-provoking and contemplative. For one thing, it makes you think about how many people you know. Laura Bird knows thousands of people, whereas Austinist, according to myspace, knows only 466! More head-scratchingly, Brockmeier plays around the question of mortality popular with self-help gurus: If today was the last day of your life, how would you spend it? One would imagine that the people in the city, having already died once, would be more preoccupied with this question than they are, especially since a second obliteration could come at any time.

But no one indulges in the kind of drug-fueled make-out parties you might expect from people with no way to plan for the future. The newspaperman keeps reporting; lovers go to bed alienated; a highly placed executive worries about his company’s reputation; and Laura’s colleagues on the research trip persist in the same stupid arguments that occupied them on earth. The people in the city adjust quickly to their circumstances and are not overly preoccupied with their futures—which may seem farfetched, until you reflect that the regular world is already fairly weird and the future is uncertain, and no one’s got their hair on fire about that.

The Brief History of the Dead is unsettling at times (show of hands if you like to spend your days thinking about the inevitability of death, not to mention the negligence of multinational corporations). Even the question referenced in the opening paragraph, of what happens after you kick the bucket, is dodged, since Brockmeier doesn’t speculate about the post-city existence of the dead folks. But there’s something sweet about the implicit suggestion—that if we woke up on the other side, we would carry on as before. Reading books and reviewing them for Austinist. Or, if its you’re hobby, leaving comments about bloggers’ spelling and grammatical errors. Now get too it—