Lily Brooks-Dalton (Hachette Australia) 2016, 253pp, $29.99
Brooks-Dalton’s ambitious tale certainly has an apocalyptic aspect but this is no The Road, as it instead explores what it is to be lonely on a vast scale, and how the most deafening cosmic silence would make even the most stubborn misanthrope long for human contact.
In what must be a near future, two characters are separated by unimaginable distance, with alternating chapters given to the arrogant 78 year old Augustine, a onetime enfant terrible of the science world who pigheadedly stays behind when his fellow Arctic researchers are evacuated due to the threat of war, and the younger Sully, a crew member of the first manned trip to Jupiter, who has plenty of time to mull over her past mistakes. Both thought that being far away from their problems would somehow blunt them, but then the Earth goes ominously quiet.
Augustine discovers a mysterious girl named Iris who must have been left behind and soon he becomes a proxy parent and sincerely regrets his past choices, while Sully tries to keep her colleagues’ morale up while fighting despair, as the author bounces back and forth from their sad pasts to their uncertain presents with often gorgeous prose.
The potential end-of-the-world isn’t actually the point here, so if you’re looking for nuclear devastation and genocidal horror then apply elsewhere, as this is mostly about the characters. And nighty night…
I Wake Up Screening 