Whenever we consider what the end of the world might look, or at least the end of the world in the form with which we are most familiar, we think of it in epic, sweeping ways, a period of time writ large with destruction, loss, pain and immeasurable grief.
All of those things are very much present and accounted for in Sequioa Nagamatsu’s beautifully uplifting and damningly disquieting How High We Go in the Dark but woven in and through them, and dominating in the most welcome fashion, is a searingly intimate humanity, the kind that takes the overwhelmingly big and renders it accessibly and affectingly small.
Because when you think about it, that is precisely what overarching times in human history come down too – people of all shapes and sizes and lived experiences, doing their best to grapple with the unimaginable, the horrific all while trying to find a way through them and find some sort of meaning in them.
It’s not an easy journey and Nagamatsu makes that palpably and movingly clear with a series of interconnected stories, all occupying the same event in one form or another, with some spilling ever further forward to a future which no one expected to have and which is shaped, and being shaped by what people in the mid-ish 21st century present have gone through as an ancient virus rewrites not just human DNA but what it means to be human.
“I had been trying to land a paying stand-up gig in Los Angeles when the Arctic plague arrived in America, infecting the children and the weak. For almost two years I paid the bills as a sanitation worker, cleaning abandoned offices and shuttered schools, while at night I tried to fill dive bars with laughter in exchange for drinks. But seriously, folks, I’d say. Tough crowd. Patrons would applaud out of politeness, to maintain the illusion of keeping them whole.” (P. 31)
Timely to an eerie degree, How High We Go in the Dark takes us into a world riven by pandemic, one in which a virus found in the oddly-arranged bodies of cave people in Siberia, their final resting place revealed by climate change-triggered tundra melt, is let loose again, causing untold havoc in a world not prepared for it all.
Quickly spreading from Russia to Japan and onwards, ever onwards, in a way that everyone who has lived through the COVID pandemic will be hauntingly familiar with, the virus dares humanity, already struggling with the existential threat of climate change, to find ways to not simply survive it but to live through and with it.
It is not, as you might imagine, an easy thing to do.
As first children, and then adults succumb to a virus that long defies analysis and cure, humanity must confront the fact that life as they knew it is over, that society is no longer going to march to the same beat as before, its people fractured and broken, not simply by the loss of much-loved family and friends, but the surety that comes from a status quo that seems able to resist the worst that can be thrown at and emerge triumphant.
It can’t, of course, and as How High We Go in the Dark progresses in a poetically confronting fashion that prioritises small but emotional impacting stories over big, bold narrative brush strokes, we come to understand that the bulwark strength of civilisation may not be so strong after all.
Going this existential ordeal of viral fire are a diverse group of people, some closely connected, others only tangentially so, all of whom have to find a way to make this new, often frightening world mean something, a challenge in the face of a virus that seems to act and strike without meaning.
In intricately woven stories, pulled close together by characters who either appear directly from a previous tale, or are referred to in passing, Nagamatsu, we meet an aspiring comedian who has failed at life, in his eyes and that of his family, but who finds himself makes the final days of terminally ill children at a theme park designed just for them, much richer and better than they might otherwise be.
As he undertakes this role, one that comes with strikingly intense emotional impacts, he meets the mother of a child who is full of life even as the virus seeks to take it from him, and forms a relationship that defies convention but which is what both of them need at that point in time for reasons likely they can’t even articulate.
We also come to know a scientist who groundbreaking work growing organs for transplant into ailing children gives rise to a talking pig who is more human than many of the people around him, and a previously introverted man who takes it upon himself to reconnect his block, now composed of neighbours who are the lone survivors in each of their families of the plague.
Finally too, we go on a vast and strangely moving journey with a widow and her teenage granddaughter out into the far reaches of space where humanity hopes to find a new home far better than the scarred one left behind.
“But for now, I return to the lab, put on my headphones, press play on Laird’s playlist before heading out to the field. An album for the last of his entrails, a power ballad for the final bits of flesh, ambient electronica while I preserve the virus inside him, a love song as I place his bones in a drawer and close it shut.” (P. 174)
All of these elements may seem increasingly and audaciously over the top, a tapestry of oddity that might seem to be inimical to any kind of rare and bonding intimacy.
But Nagamatsu infuses every lyrically-conceived page of How High We Go in the Dark with a beauty so affirming and hope so enduring that you are left, even in the most wildly inventive passages, with a sense that, even with all the wacky elements and the darkness of a civilisation-wrecking pandemic, hope and resilience are somehow still in evidence.
By all rights they shouldn’t be; humanity should be collectively curled up in the foetal position waiting for the end to come, overwhelmed and unable to take any further steps forward as life and death combine to make progress untenable.
And yet somehow people keep taking steps forward, not in the way a shrieking life coach and inspirational speaker might deliriously encourage, which always ring of rank inauthenticity anyway, but in quietly profoundly ways, one that speak to the innate inbuilt ability humanity has always possessed to endure when everything says we should not.
How High We Go in the Dark is one of the most beautifully affecting ruminations on the end of all things you will likely ever read because it dares to think, in the middle of the very worst of times that the best of times, or at least better than the worst of times, are still possible; the future won’t necessarily be a trippy happy lala dance into a golden promised land but it has the capacity to be good, something the novel celebrates in ways big and small, hopeful and resilient, and which it holds up as a way forward when everything seems to suggest the path is blocked forevermore.