Present tense

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/01/2022 (1341 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This is a book about now. Yes, it is a work of fiction, deeply painting a world that is largely “dystopic” or “apocalyptic” or whatever buzzword you want to tag it with, but it is undeniably a book about our world, right here, right now. And it is therefore terrifying. Noah Hawley terrifying.

Hawley is a very busy person. Only nicely into his fifties, this indefatigable New Yorker is probably now most known for creating, writing, and directing the television series Fargo (2014-2020, with more to come?) — an anthology series emerging directly and rather miraculously from the Coen brothers’ magnificent and beloved 1996 über-dark comedy film. It seemed blasphemous when it was begun, but has deftly struck precisely the resonant chord through four full seasons. It now finds itself, as its ancestry, adored.

But there’s more. Hawley also wrote his own feature film, Lies and Alibis (2006), has been deeply in the mix with four other television series (Bones [2005-8], The Unusuals [2009], My Generation [2009] and Legion [2017-19]), and is in on the ground floor for the massively anticipated Alien feature (2022, we hope and pray).

But there’s more — far more. Anthem is not Hawley’s debut novel. No, it is his sixth since 1998 (including 2016’s Before the Fall). This is a productive human.

Such a large, varied body of work is difficult to classify succinctly, but Anthem explicitly helps us understand what it is Hawley has been, and is, on and on about: numbers and feelings.

Anthem takes its title not from Ayn Rand’s 1937 also-dystopic novella, but from its own fleeting episode early on: a young girl, a decade ago, unexpectedly sang the Star-Spangled Banner at a school recital and did so unexpectedly well, generating a spontaneous wave of patriotic fervour that took over a room.

Ten years later, as then that room, so now this world. But it has all gone to pot somehow, and there is a dead giveaway that the end is nigh: across the planet, teenagers are, inexplicably and en masse, killing themselves.

That angelic girl — impossibly named “Story” — grows up into the present and her parents, massively successful by any career measurements, lose track of her. You can see where this is going.

But this family with a missing Story constitute just a handful of the roster of characters who over-populate this busy book. There is 15-year-old Simon, the progeny of an even more successful and wealthy household who has been chucked into a “wellness” centre so that someone else might fix what ails him. And there is Louise, also a mid-teen, also lost but in such different ways. Then there is Bathsheba (hint, hint), sister of Samson (yes, Samson), the two split rudely apart, saddling Samson with a noble quest to find his missing princess sister who ends up locked up, of course, in a tower.

There’s also a bunch of semi-baddies who tag themselves after characters from The Lord of the Rings. And there’s the inevitable Prophet, but there’s also the Wizard, and even the Witch.

In short, what we have here is a very 2021 mash-up: it’s Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 chatting with Lord of the Flies, inquiring about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and talking to one another as if they are all inhabiting The Princess Bride. But not ambiguously then, or certainly tomorrow, but definitively now — today.

Even with all these predictable tropes and that dizzying spin of characters, Anthem is a riveting read. It speaks fantasy and uses no real names, but it is desperately easy to spot Trump, to glimpse Obama, to recognize the Proud Boys, to recall January 6, even to espy that outrageously armed preppy fellow in the pink shirt.

Throughout, the driving but lurking mystery is the motivation for those ubiquitous and co-ordinated suicides. We gradually learn it is about the climate crisis, it is about the income gap, it is about empty consumerism, it is about “slave device” phones, it is about encroaching bleakness and utter despair.

When one gets to the end, stumbling out of the rubble with the faithful remnant of this rag-tag, fairy-tale group, Hawley abruptly stops, and steps out from behind the curtain and coyly explains it to us — not completely, but a bit more fully than he had at the outset. At the start and peppered throughout, he paused to tell us that it is all forecast in his opening four words: “This book contains math.” Climate math, economics math, mortality math, cosmic math.

But it is also somehow, Hawley intones at the end, about empathy and whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.

So, if you want to read a book written by an experienced, masterful storyteller — a book about Math, a book about Empathy, and a book tracing a nimble romp through 2021 America — Anthem is for you. Now.

Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and Religion at St. Paul’s High School in Winnipeg. Right here. Right now.