This is definitely the best book I've read all year - boom. I do know it's only the 4th of January as I write this by a river at camp in Tasmania. But it's definitely going to be hard to beat this read.
Written in 2022, Noah Hawley's 'Anthem' is essentially a book about the end of the world as we know it - a world desperate for things to change. The author begins by addressing the reader directly, which he will do often during the novel. For example, he implores us to suspend disbelief, saying he knows the story is impossible, or tells us that his teenage daughter asked him how the story will end. We know that it is a work of fiction, yet he presents an America we can't help but recognize, post COVID, in the beginnings of what many speculate will be a civil war. Hawley is basically trying to make sense of a mad world in the best way he knows how - through literature.
His America is recognizable: one of opioid addiction, child sex slavery, film stars and movie directors with so much money they don't need morality, kids growing up with traumatized parents who seed the generations to come with trauma, all kinds of anxiety, climate change, sovereign citizens refusing the law because the law is not just, poverty versus the 1 percent, the lies of the media and the hysteria of the anti media, the bullshit people swallow to help them live through an apocalypse they know they are in but are powerless to do anything about, and so on.
All over this fictional America, teenagers are killing themselves, leaving the cryptic suicide note 'A11' - it's a disaster of unbelievable proportion. At the height of the novels chaos it's a death toll of something like 80,000 a day. The author will interject at some point again to say that history has many examples of people killing themselves en masse because they know the end is near, or that it's a world they don't want to live in. Can we blame kids for choosing death over the world we fucked for them? And perhaps it's wishful thinking on behalf of the author who has seen the world population double since his birth.
All through this book I had the last song in the recent movie 'Civil War' - Suicide's Ghost Rider. If you've seen this movie, this is the pace, tone and theme of the book - similarly, America's fall.
It's an absolute cracker of a read. There's scenes of absolute carnage and brutality, and scenes that are absolutely bonkers - wait til Louise, a teen victim of a guy loosely (or perhaps not so loosely) based on Epstein - steals an Amazon truck and tortures the guy who scouts young girls for him. She can only torture him, she decides playfully, with four of the boxes she finds in the truck, randomly chosen. One is coyote urine, another is a David Lynch novel, and another is a portable sauna. Yep. This novel needs to be made into a movie.
This is a book of many asides where the author interjects with biting cynicism of the state of the world, often backed up by simple math, as he suggests at the beginning. Did you know, for example, that Generation Z have never known a time without war? The author is present too as he invents characters who invent themselves based on books they've read, movies they've watched, games they've play. Pop fiction finds its way into this literary tome influenced, as he says, by Murakami, Kundera, and other greats, along with shades of Stephen King. One of the characters names himself Randall Flagg, obviously a nod to the last stand of humanity as they fight the devil in themselves.
As I read it I couldn't help but think this last stand is indeed where we are heading. We appear to be utterly fucked. As one character realizes, we are in the anger and denial stage of the grief cycle and the institutions that we are slave to keep us polarized and fighting so we cannot move forward. Perhaps the teenagers are the only ones awake, looking at those who came before them with sadness and revulsion. Most of them have fraught relationships with parents who have caused them multiple anxieties and psychological suffering - it is no wonder they turn from that to create their own possible solution, hunting down a man known as the Wizard who is keeping a young girl he impregnated captive.
There's really too much going on in this novel to adequately describe it. If you like contemporary cultural critiques, wild rides through a burning world and experimental fiction, this is for you.
I absolutely loved this book. Bring out the movie. It's fucking fantastic (Hawley is also responsible for Fargo and is the show runner for a series based off Alien). If you'd like another review, try this one that is considerably better and not written by a campfire on Samsung Notes with no reception. Reviews on the book are divided, and at times I believe unfair. Some people didn't quite understand it I think.
With Love,
Are you on HIVE yet? Earn for writing! Referral link for FREE account here