Intimations of Immortality

A few years ago, in the wake of the publication and huge success of Gone Girl, a slew of novels followed featuring 30-somethng unstable, often alcoholic women witnessing something that others doubted.   I’m now sensing a new trend in fiction – the exploration of immortality and contemplations of life after death.  Two recent books that I have read come at this idea from two different directions, one more successfully than the other.  The premise of Eternal Life by Dara Horn is that a woman makes a bargain with God that she will give up her own death to save her son from dying.  Thus, Rachel is immortal, now in the 21^st century having lived over 2,000 years and having borne dozens of children to many husbands in a variety of lands.  The story quickly takes you back to her original life in Roman-occupied Palestine to her love affair with a young priest, Elazar, and her marriage to another man.  Much of the book focuses on this story, jumping back to the present when the young priest, the father of the original son, tracks her down.  He made the bargain too and has spent centuries trying to get Rachel to love him again and live with him. You finally learn that he was responsible for the death of her first husband and, although he was not a man she loved, she cannot forgive Elazar.  Predictably, after living so long, Rachel wants to die and when her current granddaughter, Hannah, a geneticist, sneaks some of Rachel’s DNA and discovers she is strangely young, it occurs to Rachel that Hannah could correct the life gene and let her grow old.  Hannah is more interested in figuring out how to give other people extended lives, an idea that Rachel thinks is very bad.  This is one opportunity for Horn to extrapolate on such a scenario, but unfortunately she doesn’t go very far nor does this book explore in any great depth other ethical questions raised by immortality:  Would only the rich be afforded this luxury?  What would it mean for continual population growth?  Would people be less moral if they knew their actions didn’t risk permanent death?  Too, it would have been interesting to hear more about the years in between Rachel’s first life and her present incarnation. Did she try new things, explore new places?  Did she experience personal growth?

Like Eternal Lives, The Afterlives by first time novelist Thomas Pierce is concerned with death and immortality. Jim Byrd, a 33 year old loan officer living in Shula, North Carolina, has a heart attack and is technically dead for 5 minutes before being revived.  In the aftermath of this event, Jim is panicked by the realization that while “dead” he does not see or feel anything – no angels, no white lights, no tunnels, no dead relatives welcoming him.  What if our existence ends with our physical death?  If not exactly obsessed, Jim definitely becomes more sensitive to signs of some sort of afterlife, researching a local house purported to have ghosts, seeking out a psychic who performs automatic writing and finally taking part in the experimental work of a physicist trying to verify existence beyond the corporeal.  He joins a new wave church, The Church of Search,  (“There’s no preacher, no core set of beliefs.  It’s more like a lecture series than anything else” (65)) where he makes a friend who wants to have his brain put in cold storage until “they can upload it to a computer and bring you back to life” (222). He engages in a discussion with a friend of his stepdaughter who posits, “Us being individual souls, it’s all an illusion.  All of us are little leaves on the same house plant.  God’s got a major-major case of split personality.  He’s like this crazy sci-fi writer, and he’s writing seven billion stories at once in his head. ” This leads Jim to wonder, “If I’m only a character in a story, then will I still exist after the story ends?”  (147) Thus, the book meanders through different possible understandings of the whys and hows of life and death.  Jim shares his musings and questions with his father who tells him, “I look at your mother and I think she’s got it all figured out. . .Me, I wake up in cold sweats at night.  I toss and turn.  I don’t want to die, but then again, I don’t want to live forever, either.  There’s no winning, is there?”  (65)  This thought nicely encapsulates ideas from both books. 

The physicist’s idea that time is not linear and that past, present and future exist simultaneously suggests an existence both larger and yet more confined than the idea of, say, reincarnation or, in the case of Eternal Life, living forever in one’s present self. Communication with dead people and belief in ghostly presences seem like desperate efforts to find comfort.  Will science and technology at some point be able to extend our existence?  While exploring the different ways human beings grapple with their mortality, the book doesn’t really provide any satisfying answers – but can it?    Ultimately, what brings peace if not answers to Jim is the love he finds with Annie, a high school sweetheart with whom he rekindles the flame 20 years later.  The certainty of their daily happiness together has to suffice in the face of the uncertainty of the future.  The Afterlives is an engaging read and well worth the time.

Other New and Related Titles

How to Stop Time by Matt Haig – from Amazon, “Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret.  He may look like an ordinary 41-yer-old, but owing to a rare condition, he’s been alive for centuries.”

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin – from Amazon, “It’s 1969 in New York’s Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die.  The Gold children – four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness – sneak out to hear their fortunes.  The prophecies inform their next five decades.”