A Review of Ling Ma’s “Severance”
Sever All Ties to the Past
Ever since Station Eleven was such a breakout hit a few years ago, it seems that publishers are hitching their wagons to any post-apocalyptic flu-virus story in the hopes of recapturing lightning in a bottle. To that end, Ling Ma’s delightful (if you can use that word in reference to a book about the end of the world) debut novel Severance fits the bill — at least, on the surface. Yes, this is a work of dystopian fiction. Yes, it involves an epidemic of epic proportions. However, all comparisons really end there, because this is a work of fiction that just doesn’t merely borrow images from Station Eleven (a trait that this year’s earlier The Wolves of Winter was guilty of), even if it does ape that novel’s “jump around time and space” structure. Severance is its own entity: an end of the world novel with two or three other novels bursting at the seams to break out. In Ma’s hands, that’s a good thing.
Told in flashbacks and flash-forwards, Severance is the story of Candace Chen, a desk jockey who works at a specialty publishing house in New York City that sells Bibles scrounged from parts manufactured in Southeast Asia, who is thrust into a nightmarish world when a deadly disease that is essentially Valley Fever on steroids takes hold. Adding to the angst is the fact that her boyfriend Jonathan has just left her to get the heck out of Dodge before the going gets too rough, and this is before the epidemic even really hits. Eventually, as things go from bad to worse, Candace winds up joining up with a group in the woods outside the city basically trying to survive without drawing the ire of the group’s leader, Bob. She has a secret that she’s keeping from the group because, once they find out what it is, her life and that of one other could be in jeopardy.
And so is the basic premise of Severance, which is ultimately a novel that asks the question, “Is it the end times, or just another day in the rat race?” The novel goes to great lengths to show that people are reluctant to let go of their materialism even with the apocalypse breathing down their necks. In a rather George A. Romero-esque move, and this is a slight spoiler (so skip ahead a few sentences if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing), some of Severance’s action even takes place in a boarded-up shopping mall. The fever that grips the denizens of this world, by the way, is one whose symptoms include a fatal nostalgia for the past. With radio stations in the here and now dedicated to nothing by solely ’80s music, for instance — which I happen to indulge in listening to, by the way (really) — Severance is a novel about how we, as a society, are slavishly affected and consumed by the touchpoints of our youth to the point where it might as well be the end of the world, as there’s no untethering ourselves from the past in the present.
What helps elevate Severance beyond being just another Station Eleven knock-off or clone is that this book, unlike Station Eleven, is humorous in a deadpan sort of way. In one of the book’s earlier passages, Candace is charged with the task of shooting a sufferer of the fever in the head to put said person out of their misery, but Candace — reluctant to take on the job in the first place — totally botches things by shooting the person in places where the damage wouldn’t be fatal repeatedly, before managing to get things finally right. The humor is a touch of levity in what would otherwise be a pretty grim read, and it works. There were places in reading this darkly comedic novel where a chuckle or two escaped from my mouth and abdomen. It’s good that Ma doesn’t take things quite so seriously, as she probably is aware of the impossible task of trying to write dystopian fiction in the shadow of that other book I’ve talked about.
Ultimately, though, Severance is its own beast of a tale because it’s about something, and isn’t just another slash and burn survival of the fittest story. This is a book about severing all ties to family and friends in becoming your own person: you have to shed your parent’s expectations of you (and this is doubly important given the Chinese ethnicity of the author — you know, tiger moms and all) and you have to live life in a way where you’re not just holding down a job simply for the money. In fact, Candace stays at her job when the world goes to hell in a handbasket for the promise of an astronomical pay raise. Of course, as the book subtly chides, what would you even spend it on when stores more of less cease to exist or function — along with the rest of society? The moral of Severance is to spend more time developing a passion and connecting with the people who are of value to you. And if they’re not of value, it may be best to let them loose.
In a few words, I found Severance to be a dizzying, monumental read. It’s funny, it’s sad — and sometimes both at the same time. The only real weakness of the book is the ending, which not only ends on a bit of a cliffhanger but is the result of painting the main character into a corner in which the only way out is rather too pat and easy. (I could only wonder what someone like Joe Hill could do with the ending of this book, but he would probably just pad things out another 300 pages. So maybe the ending as it is is OK after all.) Severance is immensely well written and tightly plotted. It is layered like an onion as converging storylines eventually intersect and the past gets peeled back. Overall, Severance is the nearly perfect cautionary tale of consumer culture and society’s fascination with the not so distant past. It may remind you of other works of cinematic and literary fiction, but it is ultimately its own thing and is it ever quite the whale of a tale. As Severance points out so acutely, we’re already living through a sort of disaster if we know it or not, and every day just looks like the one that came before it. Put another way, Severance is all about what we’re doing just to survive and function. It’s also just a really fun read with literary panache. For either reason, this is a novel you should sit down and spend some time with. You won’t regret it, even if you’ve already read Station Eleven and have had it up to here with all of the copycats. It’s that good. Really.
Ling Ma’s Severance will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 14, 2018.
Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands icon below) and share it with your followers.
Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
