Book Review: Strange Bodies

Marcel Theroux
2013
Awards: Campbell
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Theroux’s novel Strange Bodies starts in a tchotchke shop somewhere in Britain. A man comes in to see the shop owner. He claims to be her ex-boyfriend from long ago, Nicholas “Nicky” Slopen, and he can remember all sorts of things only her ex would know. The only problems are that (a) he doesn’t look anything like her ex, and (b) her ex is supposed to have died in a gruesome car accident a couple years before.

Nevertheless, the man claims to really be Nicky Slopen. And he leaves the shop owner with a flash drive that contains a troublingly credible story of what happened to him over the past few years. The rest of the novel tells that story—a story that will reveal whether or not someone has actually invented the technology to resurrect dead souls.

Slopen is a struggling academic, a specialist in the writing of Samuel Johnson. He has a loveless marriage and a strained relationship with his kids.

One day, a rich celebrity collector comes into Slopen’s bleak life to ask him to authenticate some papers that he is thinking about buying that purport to be lost letters of Samuel Johnson.

Slopen finds that the paper the letters are written on are only a couple years old, so he figures the letters must be forgeries. But the writing is absolutely, perfectly, undeniably, bafflingly Johnson’s.

Slopen insists on meeting the person who wrote the forgeries. The man appears to be an autistic savant: a Russian immigrant, Jack, who barely speaks at all, much less any English, but who produces an almost continuous stream of this very authentic Johnsonian material as Slopen watches.

Slopen starts visiting Jack regularly to try to find out more about him, and grows increasingly attached to him and his sister, Vera. Slopen’s attachment grows especially strong after his inevitable divorce.

Eventually Vera has to go back to Russia to see her doctor and leaves Jack in Slopen’s care. It is at this point that Slopen starts to put it together that Jack might actually be Johnson—or that at least his brain might be Johnson’s brain. And the more questions Slopen asks of the sinister people hovering around Jack and Vera—including the celebrity who asked him to verify the documents in the first place, and Vera’s “business associate” and bodyguard, who both live with her and Jack—the more he suspects something really unusual was going on.

Slopen confronts them all, one by one, and eventually learns that they are adherents of the philosophy of the 18th century Russian thinker Nikolai Federov, who theorized of immortality being possible for all humans. And that, following the theory that a person’s soul is present in their writing, they have developed a procedure to use a person’s collected writings to plant that person’s memories into the brain of another person.

There are just two problems with this (besides the fact that the idea that you can recreate a person’s whole personality from their writing is a shaky literary premise at best). The first problem is that they aren’t really giving a person immortality; they are creating a simulation of that person in another body. The original person still dies. (This has been explored to death in many other, better vehicles.)

And, second, in order to do this, they need to use someone else’s body as the vessel for the implanted memories. For all intents and purposes, this essentially kills the person whose body they are using.

Vera and Nicky are, to say the least, disturbed by all of this. And they know they have to stop the practice from becoming a way for wealthy few to perpetuate their personalities on the backs of unsuspecting working-class volunteers. But they know that no one else will believe their story, and that they are in mortal danger from the sinister forces behind the procedure, who will stop at nothing to shut them up.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On the plus side, the story is well written and (mostly) unfolds at a breezy clip. Theroux also does a good job of giving you just enough information that you can guess what’s happening—including the central conceit that not only has Samuel Johnson’s soul been transferred into the body of a working-class Russian man, but so also has that of our main character—but not so much information that you know how it happened, or why. So you want to keep reading to find that out.

Theroux also does a good job of telling the story discontinuously, which seems to be difficult for many writers. The story line jumps back and forth in time between the near past (the story of how Nicky Slopen in his original body met the resurrected Samuel Johnson and got involved with the Russians); the far past (the story of how Slopen and Johnson were resurrected); and the present (the story of the resurrected Slopen in the mental hospital, actually writing the narrative). The discontinuity is a little crazy-making, but completely fits the story, since Nicky himself has been driven a bit crazy by what happened to him and all he has to process to come to terms with it.

Theroux also is able to make his resurrected Samuel Johnson amazingly authentic. It makes me think Theroux must be a Johnson fan himself, well-read enough in Johnson’s papers and steeped enough in Johnson’s style to be able to make his Johnson character speak and write like the real thing.

There are just a couple problems with the book, but they are big ones for me.

For one thing, I’ve never been a big fan of Samuel Johnson’s writing. Far be it from me to use the term “navel-gazing” about the writings of such a philosophical giant. But he does spend quite a bit of time agonizing over the meaning of life, and the universe, and the nature of the soul, to the point where, if one were so inclined, one conceivably could describe it as unproductive noodling for noodling’s sake.

And, perhaps as is natural with this subject matter, his writing tends to get depressing. Which brings us to the second issue I have with the book: the tone. Samuel Johnson always leaves me feeling unproductively melancholy and pessimistic.

In several places in the novel, Slopen raves about how great it is that Johnson is able to look unblinkingly at reality, recognizing that all the things we do on Earth are most likely completely meaningless, and that the ways we try to make ourselves feel better about that fact are just Band-Aids. In a passage near the beginning of the book, Slopen writes:

I’m poor in everything but ironies, and to be truthful, I’ve forgotten what’s so good about irony in the first place. It’s just the resting state of the universe. Johnson puts it best in a section I can recall from memory. “The real state of sublunary nature,” he calls it, “in which, at the same time, the reveler is hastening to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design or purpose.”

But the truth is that the irony he describes in those easy pairings—revelers sharing the world with mourners, Wile E. Coyote foiled by the Road Runner’s cheery energy—is simply the last available meaning before the significance of anything decays to random chance. Many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design or purpose. Good becomes bad, bad good; love degenerates to dullness and senseless animosity. Irony is not order, but it gives a shape to things. We can’t believe that a rational God had a hand in this chaos, but we’re not quite ready to sign up to the devastating truth of Johnson’s last line. Our faith in irony is a sticking plaster to restore our loss of Faith in its larger sense. (Pp. 77-78)

Slopen and his idol Johnson both also have an ever-present feeling that our reality is fragile, and based simply on consensus. They are hyper-aware that the “facts” we take for granted—“the state of a marriage, artistic merit, a person’s true nature”—are liable to fall apart at any moment, simply because those involved might stop believing in them.

And, because they are aware of this, they stand ever poised on the precipice of oppressive gloom and insanity. They are just this side of mental breakdown. Slopen describes Johnson as the master of “keeping it real in spite of the danger of melancholy and losing your grip on sanity.” As Slopen says,

To me, Johnson’s recognition of that is part of his acute modernity as a moralist. I think he saw the relation between individual and collective delusion: the threat of madness to the human mind and the body politic. He knew that it was a small step from religious mania to religious wars. Madness is part of that turn away from the real that Johnson was so vigilant in confronting wherever he found it—not because of his confidence in reason, but because he knew from his own experience how fragile the rule of reason is.

No one more embodies the illuminating potency of reason. Johnson was devastating in his capacity to sniff out the fake in its different guises… But this very power was riddled with its opposites: melancholy and uncertainty; fear of his own loosening grip on the nature of reality.” (P. 148)

Years ago, I used to find this kind of thinking appealing. It seemed to cut through pretense and offer an unvarnished, honest view of the world. But I find that I have grown weary of it, and now it seems pretentious itself. I don’t have the patience any longer for maudlin, self-absorbed noodling about reality and the soul. I don’t necessarily think that reality is that fragile. I think it is possible to look at the world and be cynical and skeptical and honest without falling into a pit of despair. I want to find joy where I can, and to be able to acknowledge pain without being overcome by ennui and pessimism.

But Johnson doesn’t seem to be able to do that, and neither does Slopen. They remain stubbornly forlorn and depressed.