Future Home of the Living God

Everything that I am seeing – the pines, the maples, the roadside malls, insurance companies and tattoo joints, the ditch weeds and the people in the houses – is all physically balanced on this cusp between the now of things, and the big incomprehensible change to come. And yet nothing seems terribly unusual. A bit quiet, perhaps, and some sermons advertised on church billboards are more alarming than usual. Endtime at Last! Are You Ready to Rapture? In one enormous, empty field a sign is planted that reads Future Home of the Living God. It's just a bare field, fallow and weedy, stretching to the pale horizon.

As I understand it, Louise Erdrich began writing Future Home of the Living God in 2002 as a response to what she perceived to be President Bush's clampdown on women's rights. She let it lay dormant during the Obama years, but with last year's election of Trump, Erdrich returned to the manuscript with a vengeance. I include this information only because it didn't surprise me to learn it – although I have always found Erdrich to be a gifted and thoughtful author, this book felt rushed, and ultimately, a bit pointless and unoriginal; a poli-fictional response on behalf of a half-bewildered nation. I am particularly disappointed because as a Native American author, Erdrich had the opportunity to explore a unique viewpoint on dystopia – wouldn't the collapse of Western Civilisation pave a return to a pre-Colombian paradise where traditional knowledge is king? – but Erdrich doesn't follow through on this promising idea. More than anything, this book reads like a twenty-first century update on the early days of The Handmaid's Taleuniverse, and I don't know if that's very profound; I do know that it didn't feel well executed.

“Indians have been adapting since before 1492 so I guess we'll keep adapting.”
“But the world is going to pieces.”
“It is always going to pieces.”
“But this is different.”
“It is always different. We'll adapt.”

In the near-future, evolution seems to be suddenly running in reverse with various species producing throwbacks – sabre-toothed cats, giant dragonflies, and predomesticated plants are popping up everywhere – and although there are rumours, no one knows for sure what is happening with human babies: Are they viable in this new world? Are they born alive but Neanderthalish? The narrator is a twenty-six year old woman – an Ojibwe raised by white liberals – and as she confesses to the diary she is keeping (the format of this book), she is several months pregnant and excited to meet whatever she is carrying. Cedar is able to move freely at first (as she is not visibly pregnant and society hasn't quite collapsed yet) and she decides to meet her birth mother for the first time; ostensibly to ask about the family medical history, but obviously seeking deeper connections. By the time Cedar returns to Minneapolis, the banks have collapsed, communications are down, the government has ordered pregnant women to report to detention centres, and according to her boyfriend, Phil, she'll need to go into hiding. With the mention of the Patriot Act and the deployment of secret military drones and surveillance devices, this book had the potential to extrapolate a totalitarian future from today's blithe acceptance of the loss of small liberties (as in 1984, et al) but because Cedar is hidden from what's going on in the world, and we are only reading what she records, the reader doesn't really know what's happening out there either.

As a teenaged rebellion against her progressive and atheist adoptive parents, Cedar had joined the Catholic Church and supported herself as an adult by writing a subscription-funded newsletter for her parish, Zeal. Because Cedar takes pride in the scholarship behind her writing, and since she has nothing better to do when she first goes into hiding than draft her next issue, she assembles the writings on the Incarnation and makes cursory links between the Immaculate Conception and what is happening with human reproduction in the present. This thread could have made the whole quite profound – if the Church accepts Evolution because it proves the God-driven perfectibility of humanity, what does a disruption in the evolutionary process say about the existence (or concern) of God? – but, like with the thread about Native issues, it dangles without going anywhere; is ultimately abandoned.

The sky has bloomed, it is verdant with stars. Deep, brilliant, soft. I am comforted because nothing we have done to this earth affects them. I think of the neurons in your brain connecting, branching, forming the capacity I hope you will have for wonder. They are connecting, like galaxies. Perhaps we function as neurons ourselves, interconnecting thoughts in the giant mud of God.

I loved that line “the giant mud of God”, but despite the book's title and Cedar's musings, there's nothing ultimately philosophical or deeply meaningful about this book: it is primarily about the loss of women's rights in a world where humanity (men and women both) want control over the bodies of those who are incubating the future; a fact that's admittedly true today and could well become a matter of concern in the future: just what loss of liberty would we all put up with if the future of the human race was at stake? The narrative does eventually become an adventure story – with close calls and escapes and a fretful journey through the abandoned mines beneath Minneapolis – but again, because this is Cedar's diary and she is always shielded from the bigger realities, I found it frustrating that we don't know what is actually going on.

Without act or will on my part, I am creating a collage of DNA and dreams, all those words made flesh, and I am doing it even in my sleep.

I understand that Erdrich was triggered to complete this manuscript by her concerns over Trump's election, but it really felt rushed in the end. What promised to be an interesting and meaningful exploration – the Native response to the colonisers' societal collapse, the death of God accompanying the extinction of humanity – was put aside for a low-level thriller, and it didn't end up telling me anything new about the world today or the people who inhabit it. Disappointed and rounding up to three stars.