Neela Sim, founder of the Dove Suite fansite, reported in a recent blog post that “Song for the End of the World” is frequently being played at memorials and funerals across the country. The post included photos sent in by ARAMIS survivors who were inspired to get tattoos featuring the song's lyrics. The band released a statement in response to the Trillis announcement. “Music has always been a way for people to come together, and that has never seemed more important than it does right now. If we've learned anything over the past year, it's that sometimes a voice in the darkness can reach out and save you from feeling alone.”
There are plenty of books and movies about disaster and survival, so it shouldn't really feel like too much of a coincidence that author Saleema Nawaz imagined and wrote about a novel coronavirus coming out of rural China in the year 2020. Having spent six years researching and writing about the progression of her fictional virus, Songs for the End of the World (although not exactly the same as COVID-19) certainly captures something of the times I find myself in right now – and that makes for a strange and weighty reading experience. It's hard for me to mentally separate this book from the times in which I read it (did I find it weightier because of its prescience?), and some of the narrative choices felt a bit too deliberate to me, so while I'd want to give it 3.5 stars if I could, I'm going to round down. Still enjoyed the weirdness of reading it right now.
Jejo's dead. So are Cam and Lucas and the master. Teresa, Declan, Felix, and Paloma are in the hospital. It's that bad flu that's on the news. Sorry for telling you like this but I can't talk now and it's better that you know.
In early summer of 2020, a novel coronavirus – soon to be officially named ARAMIS (Acute Respiratory and Muscular Inflammatory Syndrome) – is brought to NYC; likely carried unwittingly by a visiting Chinese kung fu master. The virus spreads quickly – those exposed can act as asymptomatic carriers for weeks – and anyone who thinks they may have been in contact with someone who gets sick is asked to voluntarily self-quarantine for twenty-one days. The streets quickly start to empty out – many start working from home, and those who do venture out for essentials don masks and gloves – but what makes ARAMIS so very frightening is that it proves particularly fatal for children. As ARAMIS spreads throughout America (the US is the hardest hit country; not much is said about other countries, although Canada is able to contain the virus to its west coast), the biggest question seems to be whether a person's ultimate duty is to oneself and one's immediate family (to gather – even hoard – supplies and isolate in some remote place) or to society at large (and find ways to help others, even at personal risk). Nawaz obviously put a lot of research into how such a virus arises and spreads, as well as the typical global and personal response to such threats, and the ARAMIS pandemic proceeds in an all too familiar trajectory. It's not the same as what's happening now – Nawaz doesn't have the entire world staying home to “plank the curve” – but it's close enough to have made me keep reading with avidity to see how she would resolve everything.
Our lives have a way of getting bound up with those of the people we've known. Like heavenly bodies caught in one another's orbit. Even once you go your separate ways, it's hard to get fully disentangled.
Ultimately, this is a novel, and Nawaz complicates the story of the progression of her virus with characters and their little lives. Jumping around in time, a large group of disparate characters are eventually shown to all be within a few degrees of separation from one another, and that is one of the threads that felt too novelistically deliberate to me. Also, many of the characters cross paths through the Philosophy department of a small liberal arts college in New England, and that made it too easy (to my way of thinking) for everyone to be having deep philosophical conversations in every timeline. Also, with a virus that disproportionately kills children, it felt too obvious to have so many couples (and singles) having babies, or fighting about having babies, or discussing the morality of bringing babies into a broken world before ARAMIS even arrives. I enjoyed the book overall, but not so much the development of the plot.
I particularly liked the irony of a novelist character seeing a surge in sales of his own prescient book about an emerging novel coronavirus, How to Avoid the Plague; how weird this extra layer must be for Nawaz (and she responds to that notion in a Q&A at the end of the book – it's dated from March, so I imagine it has become even weirder for her.) And even if Nawaz's world doesn't respond quite as drastically as ours has (people can still go to work and there are still funerals, flights, and cruise ships, etc.), she did imagine much of what has come to pass (including racist backlash against Asian-Americans). A few examples:
• Even the grocery aisle at the drugstore was picked over. He leaned down to inspect a lone instant ramen bowl on the bottom shelf while a woman in a purple raincoat edged over to move away from him.
• He wondered why he was surprised that churches would change with the times. He imagined the Holy Spirit flowing like a meme through the internet.
• She has an involuntary vision of a pandemic-ravaged planet and a new global culture that will have her doing a Skype call in Esperanto with someone in China.
Maybe Esperanto is a step too far, but wherever the fictional chimed with my actual experience, I felt a surge of recognition; and that makes for an engaging reading experience. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that this isn't a hopeless read – Nawaz imagines us all to be pretty decent at heart – and that has also chimed with my own experience here in the real world. I am glad to have had an opportunity to read Songs for the End of the World (thanks to NetGalley) while in self-isolation, and I hope that Nawaz finds success with this upon wide release.
