Firstly, the cover of this book will likely be winning my best book cover of the year award – the whole galaxy within a cat is brilliant!
The Delusions is the first book by Jenni Fagan that I’ve read, and I’ll definitely be reading more on the basis of it. If you were to insist on a comparison, I’d say she’s the Scottish Nicola Barker. Barker is an author whose work I really admire and she never writes the same book twice, although there’s always a hint (or more) of satire behind her novels which go from conventional to batshit-crazy! I’ll have a bit of a Barker project coming up soon by the way – I could add in Fagan given that I have The Panopticon and Luckenbooth on my shelves…
Imagine the afterlife if you will – the immediate bit after death where your soul is in the bardo (cf George Saunders’ Booker-winning novel)- or on the Stairway to Heaven or Highway to Hell to cast a rock’n’roll metaphor. Talking of stairways, you may have seen the wonderful Powell & Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death where shot-down pilot David Niven having ascended the stairway must argue for his life in front of a celestial court. You may have a vision of St Peter at the pearly gates… No! Stop there! Jenni Fagan gives us a vision of the entry into the afterlife that is like no other in The Delusions.
You’re newly dead and your soul enters the transition place, the bardo, or ‘Arrivals’ if you will, for ‘processing’. Above you is a big leaderboard showing stats of souls being processed. Ahead of you are queues of oft-bamboozled souls approaching what can only be described as check-in desks. You’re automatically in the right ‘Queue’ for you headed by a ‘personal Admin’. Children and teens often get Batshiva’s queue, she’s been doing admin for 126 years now.
Batshiva to my right has a Queue of mostly under-eighteens today. […] Batshiva has an unnerving ability to pinpoint what any child or teenager needs to Pass. For those who cannot manage to do that = she also has the skillset required to Dissolve them.’
Crooks and rapists etc. often get Eustace who will dispatch them to the ‘Theatre for the Performance of Cruelty’ – the equivalent of Dante’s Inferno or Hieronymous Bosch’s Hell panel from The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych. Other souls that don’t Pass get dissolved or join the morass of Trapped Souls seething under the floor at the feet of those arriving.
The Queue between Batshiva and Eustace is that of our narrator Edi – there for 47 years now and always, still, looking out for the soul of her son, who was 7 when she died of cancer. Batshiva and Eustace look out for Edi, who has just been returned to Admin after an incident. We’re not told what happened at this stage, but she can’t afford another.
I can hear you ask, what does the job of Processing entail? Well, there is an HR questionnaire for the newly dead, and absolute truthfulness is required. To achieve that the souls must first strip themselves of all Delusion.
This is far more difficult for some than others.
An oily substance: Delusion must be coaxed out of all pores.
Once it has seeped out it will begin to coalesce quickly into a long eel-like form. […]
Once extracted it must be whacked (or wrestled) into a tray by its owner.[…]
It then flies through the X-ray machine towards Data Analyses.
If a person cannot extract their own personal Delusions – things do not go well for them.
That’s the only way folk get to Pass after their personal Questionnaire. Every day, the three Admins Process the newly dead. The irony is that they and their colleagues have not Passed. They got recruited before reaching that stage. After their shifts they off-load at the energy bar, or sneak off to contemplate the galaxy. Once in a blue moon, they accrue enough kudos to get to visit Earth again for a few hours, as a sort-off ghost. Edi is looking forward to her next visit, but she mustn’t draw attention to herself (she is a Glaswegian tattoo artist with a potty mouth when offended).
One day the Leaderboard stops working, Engineers swarm all over it, but Processing stops temporarily and the Queues are getting abnormally long. This is the start of something. Once Processing can start again, odd things happen – like one day the Queues are full of cats and dogs, the next whales and so on – as if they were systematically wiping out species on Earth. Are these the End Days? What is going to happen to our three Admin friends? You can be sure that Edi will tell us. The idea that the universe might get it’s own back on a planet reminded me of the Vogon’s plans to build a ‘hyperspatial express route’ through Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!
Fagan’s protagonist is an amazing character, if often tiring to be around! She details the minutiae of her job with bemusement, anger (at how she died), irritation (at HR in particular), but also empathy. Sometimes it’s drudge-work, but it can also be so rewarding. Maybe Fagan overdoes it a little, but we are working up to discovering what Edi’s ‘incident’ involved, amidst the ongoing acceleration of newly dead reaching Processing. But always at the back of Edi’s mind is the desire to be reunited with her son, who would now be in his early fifties. Fagan’s writing in Edi’s voice is very immediate; you need to put up with some typical Glaswegian swearing. But Edi is always questioning what is happening, and calling out HR when anyone will listen, which is probably what got her into trouble in the first place. Yet she is utterly professional at her job, as are her besties Batshiva and Eustace, who are also well-drawn, and really care for Edi.
There are a lot of capitalisations in the text: Processing, Queue, Admin, Delusion etc., which can make it physically more challenging to the eye, but there is a point to Fagan’s satire in getting at the corporate business that Processing is here. While I would be happy to see this novel win prizes for SF, it’s not really an SF novel, despite the galaxy on the cover. Edi’s clients may be the newly dead, but they haven’t lost their humanity, the good and bad bits, especially their delusions, and that dimension adds a lot. It’s not a novel that you can easily race through, yet it was never less than totally engaging in that mad way that reminded me of Nicola Barker, and I can’t wait to read more by Fagan, for I loved The Delusions and fully expect it to feature in my best of the year.
Source: Own copy. Jenni Fagan, The Delusions, Hutchinson Heinemann hardback, 320 pages.
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