Up-to-the-minute polling reveals that 86 per cent of readers who've reached this point in the narrative happily accept that Ian died when struck by a train, that he awoke in an afterlife that failed to correspond to popular expectations, and that he spent an unspecified period of time in a netherworldly mental institution. They also accept that he was accompanied by an Indian guide named Tonto while occasionally pursued by an undead philospher-assassin armed with an impressive array of lethal, high-tech gadgets. In short, these readers believe what they've been told. These readers are straight-shooting, early-rising, salt-of-the-earth types who like to take things at face value, trust their neighbours, pay their taxes, go to bed early, and never, ever, skip to the last page of the book.
As I was sitting and reading Beforelife, someone asked me what it was about and I flipped back to the page that begins with the above paragraph to let her see for herself – thinking then (and now) that it's fairly representative of the plot, the humour, and the metafictional style of author Randal Graham. After she finished the page, this friend turned to me and said, “Well that's...exhausting.” And it is, rather; while reading this book I felt like an iPhone with too many tabs open in the background, my battery draining more quickly than usual. But that's not to say this read wasn't enjoyable: as an irony-drenched and philosophical action-packed romp through the nature of reality, this book is certainly an achievement of idea- and wordplay. But at over five hundred pages, that's a whole lot of battery drain.
As that opening quote makes clear, Ian Brown was struck dead by a train (it happens in the first paragraph of the book, so it's no spoiler), and after a churn through the River Styx, he's fished out of the water by a beautiful young woman, Tonto, who offers to be his guide. She explains that, like all humans, Ian had just been manifested by the river, and if he believes that he has any memories of the “beforelife”, that's merely a temporary hallucinatory side-effect of the manifestation process: there is no existence before the now – there was no train, no midlevel government official named Ian, no wife named Penelope – despite Ian's persisting memories of that life. While Ian is immediately institutionalised, machinations are put in play at the highest levels of this world's power structure that seem to belie the official stance on the beforelife: Just what do these high-ranking people actually know and to what lengths are they willing to go to protect their version of reality?
Historical thinkers show up in Beforelife as newly manifested characters who have no memory of what we would know of their lives here on Earth, and I laughed and groaned in equal measure at a lot of the punning concepts – as when the assassin-philosopher refers to his murderous specialty as the “Socratic Method” – and to strain the metafictional ideas, one character believes himself to be the protagonist in a novel, referring often to his own character sketch and the narrative demands of the omnipotent Author who is directing the action. I found this Rhinnick to be so annoying – with his clunky Anglicisms and starts and stops as he forever searches for the right word – that I inwardly sighed every time a chapter began from his perspective (and if the epilogue is hinting at an actual sequel from his perspective, that is a read I would go to lengths to avoid). To illustrate with an example I picked at random:
They were agog. Or rather, Tonto was agog. Ian was merely puzzled, which I found shabby. I mean to say, I hadn't expected the man to clap his hands and leap about, as these excesses are beyond him, and I'll admit the chap had suffered a bit of a blow: he'd heard it suggested, moments earlier, that his wires had been crossed and marbles scrambled by malefactors unknown, and that his much-loved better half – one Penelope-Something-or-Other – might be somewhere in Detroit, still imperilled by the very parties who'd meddled with Ian's mind. A nasty jar, I'd imagine, and one that smote this Ian Brown like a tee-shot to the navel. It was for this reason, I perceived, that the above-named Brown, rather than receiving my revelations with excited yips and other demonstrations of the enthusiastic spirit, just sat quietly and goggled in that baffled way of his.This meandering circumloquaciousness strained my patience in what was feeling like an overlong book, but I understand that the author is a law professor – has written textbooks on legal language – and there's no denying that this book was written by someone who loves the English language; every sentence is embellished and tweaked with flavour. It feels peevish to complain that too much attention was paid to each word, but eventually, any romp becomes a slog if it lasts too long. This is fairly representative of the humour:
Their trip down the spiralling ledge didn't technically count as spelunking, but it was close enough cousins to spelunking that any marriage between the two would have violated consanguinity laws in any state whose anthem wasn't scored for banjo and jug.That doesn't feel like a fresh joke, so what's the point? On the other hand, this book's big concept was interesting, the action wasn't predictable, and the revelations behind the Omega Missive made me laugh out loud. I remember loving Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series when it first came out, and while Beforelife constantly reminded me of Adams' quirky irony, it just didn't give me the same joy – which means either this book didn't quite succeed with the form or I have become crankier (and I'll admit, I have become crankier). After hemming and hawing, I'm giving three stars – with the reminder that I think of that as a decent rating.
