The Lazarus Project

Title: The Lazarus Project
Author: Alexandar Hemon
Date: 2008

The narrative of The Lazarus Project is an ever-increasingly densely woven tapestry between the three main entities of:
a) the murder of a Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch approximately a century ago by the Chief of Police when Lazarus went to his house to deliver a message;
b) the travels of the writer-character Brik, who gains a grant to write the book and travels from Chicago to Europe to follow Lazarus’s tail and
c) the aura of the author himself, an undisguised mirror of the writer-character. Like the character, Hemon is a Bosnian who has moved to Chicago, none too certain about the cultural integration aspects of the transition. Like Brik, Hemon gained a grant to write the book in question, and like the character, he travelled on the course through Europe detailed, accompanied (just as the character was) by his photographer friend Velibor Bozovic (a.k.a. Ahmed Rora in the book).

Throughout the narrative, the strands of past and present become increasingly interwoven. A discussion on the nature of the creation of history, literature and art is entered into directly with the reader, as the mirrors and resonances are made ever more apparent. Observations of a flapping foot, the glass eyes of a fox fur around the neck of a woman on a tram, people’s names, their motives, feelings of isolation and detachment, of ostracism and the motivation and consequences thereof – all these echo from author, to writer-character, to the newly-created and imagined past of Lazarus Averbuch’s day, and back to the reader. The work is so structured and organically knit together is seems to writhe into a self-evolved life-form between the pages. This is not a book or a ‘story’, it is a take-you-by-the-shoulders-and-shake-you invitation to consider what history is, who made (and is making) it, what cultural and social frictions consist of and what lessons we ought to learn from history but have failed to.

The title itself is key to one of the ultimate questions Hemon poses. He ponders on the resurrection of the biblical Lazarus – was Lazarus pleased to be raised from the grave, or was it just another exile from death? Did he ever return ‘home’ or is he still wandering the earth? It is another mirror for an oft-asked question of typically post-apocalyptic scenarios: if humanity rises from the ashes, is that existence worth inhabiting? From the wrecks of so many human tragedies – the pogrom of Kishinjev or the bombing of Sarajevo and all their associated horrors, people rise and walk away - but where will they go, and why should they. It is not a question that Hemon gives the answer to here, except for an aching longing to return ‘home’ – though the entity that was called ‘home’ as such no longer really exists. It is another mirror of the path from the present to the past, built on regret and barely understood, but desperately needed for the journey into the future. In Hemon’s own commentary in an interview: ‘memory metabolises the past’.

The Year of the Flood

Author: Margaret Atwood
Title: The Year of the Flood
2009


In a post-apocalyptic world where most humans have been exterminated by a man-made disease (called ‘the Waterless Flood’), the events surrounding the actual outbreak are narrated chiefly from the viewpoints of two females: Toby and Ren.

Toby has tried to eliminate sentimentality from her life in an effort to survive: when young, her mother is killed off by the first experimentations of the HelthWyzer company that is later to unleash the Waterless flood, and her father commits suicide in the ensuing despair and financial ruin. Toby works her way through employment at the dubious ‘SecretBurgers’ chain, only jumping ship whenher very life is endangered by the unwelcome attentions of Blanco the manager. She escapes and hides in the anonymity of the ‘Gods Gardeners’ group: the third main narrative source in the book. There, although she finds it difficult to accept all (if any) of the teachings, she becomes a respected member through behaving as if she does. Eventually her old nemesis Blanco find her, and she leaves the Gardeners group, and with their help buys herself a new identity. Her new hideout is AnooYoo the health spa. Here she will spend the time in hiding while the pandemic rages outside.

Ren is young and fragile from start to end. Her character does not change very much throughout the narrative. Brought to the Gods Gardeners group by her mother Lucerne (see below) she spends her early years there, before being taken equally abruptly back to the Coporation life – creating conflict amid her half-formed values and beliefs. Early on in her transfer back to ‘normality’ she falls in love with Jimmy, and never recovers from loosing his affections. Having been abandoned by her mother, she works for a short while with Toby at AnooYoo spa but finds the struggle of all the conflicting memories and influences too much, and gets employed at a high-end sex club Scales and Tails. Here she seems the happiest. Her most believable love in life is her affection for Amanda, a girl of about the same age whom she brought from the street into the Gods Gardeners group.

Amanda has fought her way through Texas droughts and through the streets, and later will fight her way into being an eco-artist. After the Flood she fights her way into the city from Wisconsin after receiving a call for help from Ren, to help her out of the room she is trapped in. Even when captured by the demonically murderous Blanco, she fights back when given any chance. Amanda is something of a beacon of hope to the characters in the novel as well as to us, as a signal from the author that it is possible to be an instinctive (and successful) survivor without loss of charisma and compassion. Unfortunately, Amanda as a character is more of a glitterring cut-out than a living entity - something I'm not sure was entirely intentional. Perhaps the ultimate message is that it is after all impossible to retain all qualities. What does this reflect on the future of the newly-man-made 'improved' humans? Perhaps, bleakly.

Themes:

Man-made. Possibly the most dominant theme. The new animal splices (liobams, rakunks, Mo'hair sheep), the new plants, the new diseases and supposed ‘cures’ all whirling round in ever-decreasing spirals for the purpose of profit. Juxtaposed with this is the ever-decreasing number of non-man-made animals, plants and objects. Connected with the theme of:

Recycling. The earth is being ‘used up’ (species extinction etc) but new things are constantly being made out of it. The gardeners insist on recycling everything, but what would happen if no-one ever made anything or used anything new? There would be nothing to recycle, as one of the characters opines. The carbon garboil vats which burn all carbon waste into a residue of oil and water is a corporate mirror of the Gardeners’ phrasiology of ‘donating protein’ for either eating meat or being eaten, and terming internment of a corpse as ‘recycling’.

Acting versus Speaking / Belief versus Reality

Toby is the main centre for Actions over words, likewise her beliefs are shaped not so much by theory as by physical repetition. The implication is that this is a very valid, possibly the most honest, way of forming beliefs. Despite her doubts she is trusted by the Gods Gardeners mastermind Adam One, and later her impulses and reactions to events show that she has indeed accepted the teachings of the Gardeners perhaps more than she realises. The counterpoint to Toby is Ren’s mother Lucerne. She has joined the Gardeners purely to be near Zeb, leaving her CorpSeCorps husband and pampered existence in fact but not in spirit. She makes no effort other than lip-service to muck in with work, and has effectively kidnapped her daughter Ren when she left, showing no interest in her whatsoever. We later learn that she blackmailed Zeb into taking her as a partner by threatening to reveal his earlier identity to the CorpSeCorps. When she becomes tired of Zeb, she returns to her earlier life and fabricates a story about being kidnapped. In a later twist, her husband is indeed kidnapped, but is not rescued by the Corporation – at which she moves on immediately to another man and kicks Ren out of the nest as there is now not enough money to go round.