Brissett wryly manipulates the reader’s social expectations in the cast of her characters and the framing of the weirdly shifting settings upon which her characters play and replay permutations of their tragedy. Night Shayamalan, Elysium eventually finds its own resting place somewhere in suspense between some of the signature concepts which each of these artists most famously expounded. Part David Mitchell, to be sure, but also part William Gibson, part H.G. They do it across a series of shifting landscapes melding the mystical and the technological, the future with the past, the possible with the mundane. Although the lives of the several characters seem different, maybe these are really the same souls, seen over and over again, diffracted each time as through seen through different facets of a prism. They struggle to find love, hold on to love, and cope with mourning lost love. Soon, it becomes apparent that the book is about a love shared by a collection of souls. A skyborne spot of green light, a wandering elk, bursts of computer code, an owl on the hunt, and a sorrowful gathering of friends and lovers, are but some elements within a panoply of leitmotifs persisting across the novel’s repeated narrative dissonances. Initially set in a seemingly contemporary, English-speaking, multicultural metropolis (implied but never explicitly stated to be New York), the book for the first several chapters seems naught save a series of vignettes of the inhabitants’ love lives, albeit interrupted by bizarre incongruities. Brissett explores something altogether different. Maybe that’s fair, but Elysium, unlike Stephenson’s oeuvre, is not the thrill of seeing new possibilities in the technologies, economics, or knowledge that make up (or might one day make up) what humanity calls “progress.” So although there is a futuristic setting and casual reference to advanced technologies, these are very much incidental to the story. It came up under the category of “readers who enjoyed Neal Stephenson also bought…” in the Amazon recommendations list.
I bought Jennifer Marie Brissett‘s Elysium as a download for my Kindle on a lark early this week.
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