The Brief History of the Dead

Like my last review, "The Brief History of the Dead" has a split narrative, with it alternating between two separate stories. However, in my opinion Kevin Brockmeier, the author of "The Brief History of the Dead," does it better than Cory Doctorow did in "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town." For one thing, in this book the two narratives are split into alternating chapters, whereas in Doctorow's story they alternated pretty much whenever Doctorow wanted them too, which led to some confusion and the feeling that Doctorow wasn't weighing his stories equally. "The Brief History of the Dead," on the other hand, feels equally balanced between its two stories.

The first of the two stories involves the City, where people go when they die. It's a city composed of everything people need where people live basically the way they did when they die. However, people don't stay in the City forever: only as long as there is someone alive to remember them. And lately huge groups of people have been vanishing to what comes after the city, as new arrivals report a worldwide pandemic of a virus that kills within 24 hours, nicknamed "The Blinks."

The other story concerns Laura Byrd, a wildlife specialist working for Coca-Cola in the Antartic, and quite possibly the last person alive in the world, as she struggles to survive and find shelter and a functioning radio to contact the outside world--assuming there's an outside world to contact. Her story compliments the stories of those still left in the City, as it both gives clues as to how she knows them and helps to show the state the living world is in, where the threat of terrorism is omnipresent and Coca-Cola owns one third of Antartica.

I really liked the chapters set in the City. Th first, which deals with the City as a whole, goes from person to person, giving a very powerful image of the City as a whole. It works very well as an introduction to the rest of the book, which makes sense, as it was originally a seperate short story. All of the other chapters in the City focus on one particular character, showing how they see the City and the situation that they're in with only one person still alive in the world. The City itself seems so interesting and unique that I found myself constantly interested in learning more about it.

I was less impressed with the Laura Byrd chapters. They were well-written, and Laura is an interesting character, but she's really the only character we see in them, aside from flashbacks. Really, they're a survival story, which, although it's a good survival story, is just not quite as interesting as exploring the City was. However, it is more a case of the City chapters being so good as opposed to the Laura chapters being bad.

I would have liked perhaps one more chapter each of the City and Laura chapters (or at least one more City chapter), as they both have somewhat ambiguous endings, but their endings do work as is. It's really more a function of me being so fascinated with some of the mysteries of the City that I wanted to learn more and more.

All in all, this was a wondrous and wonderful book that's thoughtful, exciting, and very well written. Everyone should read this book if they can.