Reviews

• Dystopien sind normalerweise nicht mein Ding, rauben Sie mir doch - wenn sie gut geschrieben sind - die Hoffnung, dass die verfahrene Weltsituation besser werden könnte. Casper gelingt es mit knappen Worten jedoch, den Glauben daran zu wecken, dass selbst wenn die Mehrzahl der ökologischen, ökonomischen und politischen Katastrophen eintreten, die sich derzeit anzubahnen scheinen, nichts verloren ist. Den traumatisierten Überlebenden ihrer Katastrophen wohnt trotz aller ihrer Schwächen eine menschliche Größe inne, die den Wert des einzelnen Menschen und seines Lebens auch unter widrigsten Umständen feiert. Den begeisterten Kritiken der anderen Leser mag ich mich diesmal anschließen.

• Review of The Mercy Journals Claudia Casper (also by Claudia Casper ‘the Reconstruction’). This thoroughly enjoyable read is set in a credible future, not so far ahead as to tax imagination but far enough for the eloquently set scene to be plausible. Against an apocalyptic degeneration of society, 40 years’ hence, the author creates a powerful and eponymous character on his road of perdition. The apocalypse, a combination of factors including drought, greed, pandemics and environmental catastrophe, follows familiar themes but without the singularity, for example, described by Paolo Bacigalupi in The Wind Up Girl or The Water Knife, or Edward Robertson’s The Breakers series with its alien twist. Even Bacigalupi’s contrasting disaster books of global flooding (Ship Breaker/Drowned Cities), lose their veracity when set against Casper’s verisimilitude of a future where the multiplier effect brings humanity to its knees. Like the author’s earlier publication, ‘the Reconstruction’, a novel threaded with deep, perhaps autobiographical emotion, The Mercy Journals, observes the rebuilding of a human from a fragile, fragmented jig-saw into a re-centred person, not once more at peace but at least no longer a broken mirror of their soul. The tempo of the narrative flexes with the main character. Mercy, a war veteran trying to forget his actions as a service man whilst living in a world on the cusp of stability, bares his troubled soul to a new lover. She has her own baggage “I’m fighting my own battle…..I don’t have the strength to fight yours…Either you want sympathy or you want sex. I’m not giving you both” and she leaves. The first section of the book records the subsequent disintegration of Mercy whose cathartic scribblings become the journals of the title. The second phase of the book, at a different pace, picks up the dysfunctional group of Mercy, his brother and a nephew. Set against a backdrop of self-sufficiency and with a predatory female cougar as metaphor for the ‘elephant in the room’, the three join forces with a pregnant woman who has fallen foul of the one child policy enacted to save the world further exhaustion. The pace builds until the penultimate act spawns the climax of Mercy’s salvation and suddenly there is hope not just for one man but for all mankind. Humanity; her struggles, dilemmas and fickle cruelties, brought to juxtaposed life in this tale, may yet be saved. There are many pleasant touches in this story of madness and redemption. Mercy’s conscience comes alive in through serenading worms whilst the first person narrative allows the reader to empathise with Mercy, be a dispassionate observer or imagine life through the eyes of the other, less completed, characters. Phrases stood out, beautifully crafted evocations: “forest floor smelled of late-winter rot, not punky, but a fresh, loamy smell”. The female cougar comes alive, not just as a metaphor, but as a thing of vibrant beauty. Perhaps the lasting impression from this book is the power of writing itself. As Mercy reflects, “You, my future reader, have become my witness, my companion. I may not be a writer, but I have become someone who writes.”

• This novel weaves large important complex themes into a recognizable world of what may come. The story is told through discovered journals from the future so we the reader are actually readers from the future reading of a future that is already past. It's an interesting conceit. While the Mercy Journals moves quickly with lean language, there is a remarkable depth that continues to build towards a perplexingly emotional conclusion. The strength of this emotion comes as a surprise because there is level of humanity layered in the first person voice of the narrator that has taken hold of the reader - perhaps a kind of love even for the person one might easily be oneself. I loved it.

• This is a book for the many of us who wonder and dread what our world will look like after the ravages of climate change have taken their toll. In this gripping, character driven, page turner of a book, Casper offers us a glimpse of that future world, greatly altered by trauma and cataclysmic events, but still comfortingly familiar, where human beings continue to struggle for love, family, connection to nature, and a sense of meaning in their lives.

• I read this when I learned it had won the Philip K. Dick Award. An amazing book. Chilling. Haunting. The second half left me breathless.

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