As the very real threat of a global virus wiping us all out once again rears its ugly maw, Mike Chen’s new novel offers something a bit different: hope.
The dystopian genre has spanned everything from lush overgrown trees to vast barren wastelands where we fight for water. Sometimes it’s all water and we’re still fighting. The point is that the apocalypse has made us lawless and angry and we aren’t going to take it anymore.
So, Mike Chen’s unique approach in A BEGINNING AT THE END is to imagine, as he puts it in an afterword, a scenario in which the world didn’t end so much as pause for a few beats. In the six years after a global pandemic, society hasn’t crumbled but hasn’t realigned. There are still self-governing cities, some are hippie communes and while we hear about some of the wasteland gangs, these are not Chen’s focus.
Instead he examines three people in San Francisco, where they are working on getting the Wi-Fi back to a place of stability and people are dealing with the post-traumatic stress the big event, or colloquially PASD. Moira was a once a pop star who has used the event as a means of escaping her past and father. Scarred by her past, wedding planner Krista is determined to ensure no child suffers her own tragedies. Meanwhile, survivor Rob can’t bring himself to tell his daughter Sunny that her mother died six years earlier in an accident, letting her believe she is receiving treatment out of town.
Having read a few dystopian books over the last few years, from Stephen King’s classic The Stand to more recent outings like Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers and Sean Adams’ The Heap, it’s interesting to see that the enduring nature of people is still core to these tales. Like the 1970s Terry Nation show Survivors, and to a lesser extent Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, Chen’s story is most interesting when we just see how lives have changed in this landscape.
There are two threads that drift away from this core premise a bit. The first of these is a third act crisis that requires all the parties to put aside their differences and go off on a hunt for a missing person. It’s the fuel that gives the back half of the book some dramatic urgency, so it’s not too much of an issue. Yet through this a second global crisis emerges, a mutation of the first that threatens to undermine the central theme of just getting on with it.
Which is a shame, because Chen’s structure initially gives us just enough detail of the first crisis that we can extrapolate what might have been. Snippets of reports, speeches or online encyclopedia entries are a kind of secondary narrative played out in epistolary. When this juxtaposition is eroded, some of the emotional connection is lost as well.
Yet more than anything, A BEGINNING AT THE END, as the title would imply, says a lot about pathways to survival. Given that it was only last week that the Doomsday Clock moved closest to midnight in its 73-year history, the Coronavirus threatens a global pandemic – and here in Australia the country burned for several months – it’s nice to think of humanity as something that outlasts existing structures and governments.
2020 | US | WRITER: Mike Chen | PUBLISHER: HarperCollins Australia| LENGTH: 400 pages | RELEASE DATE: 14 January 2020
