I’ve been reading quite a few books about the afterlife recently and it’s odd how Teen Fiction seems to focus on this quite a lot. A while ago, I reviewed a book called If I Stay by Gayle Forman which I really enjoyed, and a sequel is also on its way. Although teens are not exactly the closest age group to death, I think it’s definitely something you start thinking about a lot more when you’re that age. It’s also, I feel, the time when you’re most afraid of dying. You’re old enough to realise the significance of death, your own proximity to it, yet not old enough to have really experienced anything. When you’re feeling isolated in so many other ways as a teen, death just seems like a final way for you to be shut out of people’s lives, including your own.
I know I definitely thought about death a lot more as a teenager than at any other time in my life. I was madly afraid of dying; I couldn’t even bear hearing people talk about it hypothetically. It wasn’t until I went to University that the fear decreased. I was living, really living; therefore I didn’t have to be afraid of dying. I certainly don’t want to die, and would be very pissed if I died now, but I know that, statistically, it’s unlikely, and that, even if it does happen, I will have at least accomplished a few things in my life.I think for teenagers that just isn’t there, and that’s why the idea of death and dying becomes, for some, a pathological fear, and, for others, a strange obsession. Obviously, there are many wonderfully, well adjusted young adults out there who simply deal and get on with it, but then when has teen fiction ever been about them?
Both of the books I want to talk about have similar ideas of the afterlife. Their characters inhabit a ‘heaven’ that works almost identically to the living world. People have jobs, own houses, drive cars, and pursue relationships, just like they do when alive. In both books, however, there’s a catch.
In Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin, Liz dies in a hit-and-run, aged only fifteen. She wakes up on her way to ‘Elsewhere’, a place where life does go on, except it goes on backwards. For every year spent in Elsewhere, Liz grows a year younger, yet this never stops her enjoying her after-life just like her first.
This book was great. To be honest, I don’t read a lot of funny fiction, and although this was by no means a comedic novel, it was very whimsical and sweet. Generally, everything I read is depressing, or dark, or very heavy, but even with a dead teenage protagonist, Elsewhere never feels like it’s a book about death. This is most definitely a book celebrating life, and all the wonderful things you can experience. It’s not a hardcore read, and is probably aimed at the younger end of the teenage market, but it was nice to read something light for a change and I think it offers an inventive take on the typical afterlife dilemma in fiction.
The other novel I read was The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. Originally released as an adult novel, it has become a crossover title, possibly because of its length (it is only 250 pages), and its lack of overly complicated language. Although I read it believing it to be a piece of teen fiction, I did feel that it would work just as well as a short adult read.
The book centres on the African tribal belief of three categories of human; those still alive on Earth; the recently departed; and the dead. When people die, they become the recently departed, as long as someone still alive on Earth remembers them. In this novel, a deadly virus begins to wipe out the population of the world, taking many of the inhabitants of The City (where the recently departed go) with it. As the novel progresses, more people disappear, until only people known to Laura Byrd, the one woman left alive on Earth, remain.
The novel raises some interesting ideas about memory and how a person can ‘live on’ in our minds. I had never heard the three categories belief before, but I find it a very interesting way of looking at life after death. The idea that family and friends can continue to be alive in our memories is a common one, albeit one that Brockmeier takes to an extreme.
It is, however, interesting to think of how many people you can remember if you really think about it. At one point in the novel, the character Puckett attempts to count all the people he can remember. In the end, it becomes an impossible task but he estimates each person would recall between 50 and 100,000 people. I am going to attempt to do this at some point, count all the people I can remember. My memory is notoriously bad so I’m sure I won’t get anywhere near that number but it’s an interesting task in any case.Brockmeier’s novel has an interesting premise and a likable main character. I do feel that the story would have played out better as a set of short stories, published together, but playing out independently of one another, or perhaps as simply one short story. I didn’t particularly enjoy the continual swapping between characters; although many other books have done it, and done it well, I felt it distracted me here. I would have preferred to read Laura’s story on its own, then stopped and read Luka’s story and so on. It is, in my opinion, a perfectly fine book, but nothing outstanding.
