It's impossible to know how we'll react to losing a loved one until it happens. Similarly, it's difficult to predict how an ongoing pandemic and environmental crisis will shape our society's future. But these are issues which Sequoia Nagamatsu movingly examines on many different individual human levels within his imaginative and absorbing debut “How High We Go In The Dark”. The novel opens with the discovery of the preserved remains of a prehistoric girl who is found amidst the melting permafrost in the Arctic Circle and, with her, a deadly virus is reintroduced into human civilization. By following the many lives of a number of linked individuals across hundreds of years we see the way our society splits apart, comes back together and grieves for what is lost.
In some ways, this book functions like a group of interconnected short stories. The different chapters focus on subjects as varied as a theme park for terminally ill children, a pig grown for organ transplants that develops an ability to talk, a mechanic that no longer has the parts to repair families' beloved mechanical dogs, a scientific breakthrough that's implanted in one man's mind and an artist who paints murals in the corridors of a spaceship that seeks a new planet for humans. Yet the ending of the book circles back to the beginning in an innovative and surprising way. With its emphasis on themes of technology, space travel and a dystopian future this novel might appear like standard science fiction from the outside, but the story's real world resonance and psychologically complex characters feels more resonant of inventive hybrid novels such as “Bewilderment” by Richard Powers, “Station Eleven” by Emily St John Mandel and “XX” by Rian Hughes.
This is a narrative driven by deeply human stories centred around love, the painful experience of letting go, the ways we memorialise each other and our ability to persist through challenging circumstances. Certainly there are some characters which I connected with than others, but I enjoyed the way some more peripheral characters come to the forefront in different sections while also letting us know about the fates of other characters we know well. This not only gradually gives the reader a deeper understanding of certain people but shows how these individuals exist in a rich network of various different experiences. It's alternately horrifying and inspiring following how Nagamatsu imagines the evolution of humanity amidst dramatic global changes. But, just as one character chooses to name her own constellations in the sky, this story ultimately demonstrates how we can each form our own destinies.
