Book Review: The Casualties
/The Casualties
Even to call it the past is misleading. The events of August 2017 remain a part of the present. Every building, every child, every grain of rice: Each is possible only because of what happened. Just because it is not our custom to build statues, chisel letters in stone, recreate that day with actors, relive it in prose or verse, there's no doubt how people feel. As they hold their children, kiss their loved ones, they think of how they might have been. They imagine the wars, the climate change and overpopulation. When they think of life Before, most of them are grateful.
The narrative voice of The Casualties incorporates the events of August 2017 as givens, and the book's many plots first patiently converge upon those events and then refract off them in more and more seriously distorted ways. The book is a post-apocalyptic novel that's mostly about pre-apocalyptic days.The story focuses on bland, affable Samuel Clark, who lives in the Comely Bank area of Edinburgh and works in a used bookshop, where his omnivorous curiosity about other people is regularly satisfied by the intake of their donated books, which all tell him detailed stories about their previous owners. The narrative voice is speaking from a time when this very idea would be mysterious to readers: even if they grasped such an old-fashioned idea as books printed on paper, surely once those books appeared, they were “mass produced, identical”? But Samuel Clark knows different:
This changed as soon as a person began reading. Then they folded page corners over, opened the book so wide its front and back covers touched, turned pages with food-smeared hands, underlined passages, scribbled comments in margins, wrote thoughts or a phone number on its blank pages, forced it into a coat pocket, tore strips from a page to write on, rested a cup or mug on its cover, left it lying in direct sunlight, spilt water on it, took it into the bath, sat or slept on it, highlighted significant passages with fluorescent pens, drew smiling faces next to parts they liked, drew frowning ones next to parts they hated, tore out pages they thought offensive, tore out pages they thought brilliant, sprayed perfume or cologne on its pages, substituted their name of the characters, unstitched the binding then reordered the pages, crossed out every word containing the letter T, crossed out every female name and wrote the bitch in their place.
The striking thing about such a passage (aside from the odds-on bet that Holdstock has spent time behind the counter of a used bookshop, or has listened to the whining of somebody who has) mirrors the larger movement of the novel itself: the things done to the books grow gradually more bizarre and off-kilter even while the surrounding narrative structure tries its best to emphasize their normality. The mundane nature of Samuel Clark (and of course there ends up being a bit more to him than appearances suggest) is pointedly contrasted with the cast of freaks and eccentrics Holdstock introduces, from a stylish man who happens to live under a bridge to a young woman with a hideous facial deformity to a Goth girl whose many weird traits include fantasizing about Samuel himself. We watch these people go about the daily trivia of their lives, all of it subtly (and the not at all subtly) underscored by the enormous disruption that's both in their immediate future and, as we learn of it, in the story's immediate past.On a sociological level, it should perhaps be alarming that the zeitgeist of the Republic of Letters is so obsessed with the end of the world. But on the level of actual works, there's no denying the vein of creativity that's being tapped by such fin-de-siecle fidgeting. In 2015, apocalypses have come in all flavors, from Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake, in which the end came a thousand years ago (Doomsday narrowly preceding Domesday, as it were), to Matt Bell's tale of layered desperation, Scrapper, to Gold Fame Citrus, in which Claire Vaye Watkins joins the long tradition of envisioning the post-apocalyptic wasteland to resemble Los Angeles (only with less freeway congestion). In The Casualties, the typical Carnaby Street sneer of a certain neighborhood or village being “stuck in the past” is, like so much else in the book, weirdly (and, at the novel's end, pointedly) inverted into a kind of benison. That genuinely is alarming, but readers might be enjoying the stories too much to care.