Review: Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam
Things We Didn’t See Coming
Author: Steven Amsterdam
Published by: Sleepers Publishing
The apocalypse figured heavily in 1980s social life. The stumbling hand of Ronald Reagan perpetually hovered over the nuclear kill switch; death through idiocy and ideology was imminent and unpretty. This fear of ultimate annihilation burst through in a number of different ways: the midnight clock, now closer than ever; implausibly good-looking schoolboy hacker Matthew Broderick foiling the greatest supercomputer in the world; and Russell Hoban’s book Riddley Walker, where the language has decayed like nuclear half-life.
Television’s The Day After gave us the long-hoped-for death of Steve Guttenberg by radiation, and British television offered Threads, in its bleakness a forerunner to torture porn. Midnight Oil provided enough dire end-of-the-world scenarios to almost vote Peter Garrett into the Senate. Children’s books even got a look-in with the nightmare-inducing Tomorrow, When The War Began. For a while the apocalypse was cool. When the Berlin Wall fell, it suddenly became uncool.
In its modern incarnation, the apocalypse has been more thrilling and varied. Gone is the single event; now we have a multiple choice question sheet’s worth of ways to end our time on earth. Wild weather, falling towers and Central America returning the favour of biological warfare. Melbourne imprint Sleepers, best known for its Almanacs of local writers, has released one of its first books on this very topic. Things We Didn’t See Coming looks at the world through the modern catastrophic lens and imagines a startling reality.
Through a series of interlinked stories, Steven Amsterdam traverses humanity’s possible end, and one man’s attempt to survive it. Despite assertions that the novel is in the same mould as Cormac McCarthy’s realistically grim The Road, soon to be released as a realistically grim film by John Hillcoat, it owes far more to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Atwood’s vision of the end of the world is incremental, with a lighter, more amusing touch.
Amsterdam, like Atwood, opens in our contemporary world – in this case, fear over the millennium bug – situating it comfortably in our common cultural memory. As a young boy, the unnamed narrator struggles to work out which parent to identify with: his weary mother or his slightly paranoid father. This section ends in a freezing wooded landscape.
The storytelling throughout runs in fits and starts, each story or section jumping ahead an unspecified amount of time. Each fits in with the next, but they aren’t necessarily linked. These are snapshots of the most important and relevant parts of the narrator’s life, without the boring bits.
The second story jumps forward to a world of haves (the country) and have-nots (the city). The worlds Amsterdam creates are not dissimilar to our own: disaster relief, batteries and abandoned mansions are central ideas and images for his characters. The government isn’t ineffectual, either; rather, it’s coping as best it can with the dramas of this new environment. A pleasing change from the tired “every man is an animal” and “governments suck!” of most crazed right-wing doomsday sagas. Amsterdam seems to be saying that even though our attempts to change the world are hopeless, it is heartless not to try.
What does this doomed world look like? Not unlike our own. It’s twisted by the environment: at one time it doesn’t stop raining, and another time it’s buffeted by winds. Thankfully Amsterdam doesn’t explain what has happened, leaving the reader to guess. (There are few things worse than several pages of expository writing, complete with authorial finger-pointing.) These disintegrating visions aren’t about people dying, but how people cope with a death that belies the happy promise of modern society.
The central idea of the book, though, is family and identity. Amsterdam’s protagonist engages in numerous acts of theft and destruction to try to work out who he is. Invented or stolen identities are the masks he wears to try to fit in. His father’s presence hangs over the book, forcing him to choose what sort of person he is. He plays well off his love interest; she revels in the shape-shifting aspect these brave new worlds offer people.
Above all, Amsterdam creates real worlds and real people. None of the characters or scenarios seem too far-fetched, nor do they lack human emotion. Towards the end of the book, the protagonist’s final decision about his identity seems true and real.
If this is what Amsterdam hopes the end of the world to be, I can’t wait.
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the rage/race against impermanency in a literary ghetto? oh, the mediations of the art-world! art must re-embed/re-embody; the novel once again dead – a head on legs (chlorinated-dioxin-pulp to boot)!
i’m sure this is a really great novel! my girlfriend said my first comment was mean. i apologise mr amsterdam. a cloud of venom came over me relating to industrialised art. there is of course a major problem with the industrial production of print based literatures, yet another unsustainable industry from a material perspective. an apocalyptic novel that materially participates in what it represents was what i was biting at.