Review of Illusions by Jenny Fagan – Life After Queues and Bureaucracy | books

CEnnie Fagan’s fifth satirical novel, Illusions, begins with an epigraph from the Kurt Vonnegut-inspired science fiction novel Venus on the Half-Shell by Philip José Farmer. “The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” The afterthought seeps into the original statement, supporting and undermining the whole thing.

Infinity and immortality are inescapably present in Illusions, which takes place in a vast antechamber of the afterlife, “the greatest station for the soul in existence.” It’s the metaphysical equivalent of a department store, helping you sort out your false perceptions of yourself from who you actually are, before you’re processed and sent to whatever comes next (or, if you fail the questionnaire, immediately disbanded). Although to be honest, no one in the process is sure what the next thing is.

The lines have always been long, moody, full of angry, entitled, and afraid people, like life. But lately things are getting worse. It is possible that the wider universe has had enough of the human race, and the Earth is collapsing. As a result, ribbons of death wind across the infinite floor of processing; Unable to handle the overload, the leaderboard goes crazy beyond repair. There’s something going on, up here, down here, and in the broader continuum. The processing hall was suddenly filled with a million cats, and things were increasingly not what they seemed.

The fantasies flow with impatience, invention and humor. Fagan’s goals are exactly what we hoped for: greed, politics, and fame. Smartphone culture. Imagination culture. Billionaires, the media and “the conversation.” Always, and especially, anyone who believes that by surrendering themselves to digital simulations, they can escape not only inevitable death, but actual life as well. The process of expelling fake regimes like this is an ugly process. They must be removed from the victim’s body openly, like live, slimy eels. Immediately, everyone else in the processing queue knows who you are: a mass murderer, a rapist, a corrupt CEO, and a pimp of underage girls. They know what you did, and how you hid it from yourself. And that’s before you get asked the really awkward questions. So, processing is not heaven. It’s like a cross between Heathrow Airport security on the day before Christmas and an employment center on a wet Monday somewhere in Wolverhampton.

Employees, no matter how they feel about work, don’t have time to engage with you. Your wizard, or administrator, is called Edi. Edie died of cancer, and she has been working here ever since. Her advice to the newly dead is to focus on recognizing their self-delusions, and not to waste time – hers or the time of the applicants standing in line behind them. Don’t ask your supervisor if he or she has seen your favorite movie. “I didn’t do it, but if I did, I’d probably think it was bullshit.” Edie has been here a long time, she gets angry easily and all she cares about is her son. “It was my life, my heart” — because recognizing and owning your identity are the central issues here — “by far the best part of me,” she says. She firmly believes that he is still alive there, and will soon be on the waiting list. It’s a major violation of supervisor protocol to monitor him, but how could she not?

Edie does her best as a novelist, but it can get a little tiresome. Her monologue is all we have, packed with information about everything from the details of administrative organization to the mysterious, contradictory structures of the Universal Beyond. It has to act as an agent for the author’s efforts to build the entire world. Thus, other characters can appear a bit thin and transparent, even for dead people. As earthly, not-yet-dead readers, we sometimes wish Eddie would take a curious breath, be less intent on putting everything into words, and show us something we can look at directly. It will be easier to process everything. But we generally laugh or freak out too much to care.

At first, it’s hard not to think of Illusions as a version of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, its patriarchal values ​​and hierarchies subtly reversed. But soon the values ​​of the afterlife, as Eddie describes it, begin to seem illusory, a spectacle run by shady and hypocritical overlords. As shown below, as well as above. Later, a kind of celebratory pathos replaces irony as the main thrust of the novel, and we are left with the tentative feeling that Edie was never who she thought she was, and her speech delivery, with its shouting and repetition, was a clever imitation of the monologue of a troubled soul who had not yet shaken off her delusions. We’ve been elevated, but that’s part of Fagan’s genius in making even ascension seem fragile, uncertain, and wishful thinking.

Illusions by Jenny Fagan is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£18.99). To support The Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.