Book Review: “The Future Future” by Adam Thirlwell
A Weird Tale
– Everyone says they don’t understand a work of art when they want to destroy it, said Celine.
– I don’t want to destroy it. Absolutely not, he said. — I just don’t get it –
– “The Future Future,” Adam Thirlwell.
Some time ago, I read Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman. It initially was a confusing work until all the strands of the stream-of-consciousness narrative started to come together and make some sense or order. I thought of this feeling as I read Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future– a novel that holds intrigue but is too scattershot and distant to be genuinely effective. Unlike Richler’s work, The Future Future never really comes together and gets more unbelievable as it goes along (some of it is set on the moon!). It’s a story concerned with the notions of power and how out of reach that might seem for the ordinary woman. While it has some intriguing things to say and does so in bite-sized pieces, the novel never indeed coheres. While it does get more readable as it goes along, sadly, there’s little that I can say to recommend it. I know I’m not the only one: as of this writing, the book has only a 2.93 rating out of five on Goodreads from more than 300 people who rated it. (I feel that if a book has a rating of under three, it is verging on the territory of the terrible.) I want to be charitable and say something good about this book, but it is difficult. This is a case of not judging a book by the contents of its cover art, which is striking in the paperback version.
The novel is about a woman named Celine who lived during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. At the book’s outset, she is concerned about pornographic tracts that are being published about her and sets out to host lavish parties to attract men who may be able to undo these libels somehow. (Think lawyers and politicians, mostly. However, it’s hard to tell because a raft of characters is introduced at a distance from the reader, making it next to impossible to differentiate between who’s who.) The story unravels from there as she’s forced into exile in America, but not before she is transported to the 22nd century and finds a rocket ship that will take her to the moon. There, she finds a colony of aliens that she doesn’t get along with or understand fully, so she returns to Earth and her earthly problems. Her husband is a brute, and she is in love with another woman with whom she’s slept. For some reason, the late 1700s and early 1800s, in which Celine lives, are populated by racing boats, cinemas, and other anachronisms. No explanation is given for this, and none makes any sense in the context of the book except to situate its themes in the present here and now.
Thus, it’s hard to conclude as to whether this book is brilliant or not. Are the anachronisms there to augment the text, or is it the mark of lazy writing? Is the reader supposed to be detached from emotionally connecting with Celine and her friends? What is the meaning behind this book? And so it goes. I must say that perhaps once I had given up on making heads or tails of the plot — if you want to call it that — the novel became more pleasurable to read. I’m not sure if that’s because my expectations of it were somehow reduced or the writing got a little better. (At least the trip to the moon was a little enjoyable.) Ultimately, The Future Future winds up being a novel that is both historical fiction and not historical fiction. It is also science fiction, but not science fiction. There is a tension at its opposites that eventually makes this work somewhat intriguing, but not enough, unfortunately, to make this a successful read.
Perhaps, though, the whole point of The Future Future is to, as the author puts it late in one of the book’s passages, make “no sense.” “It was a long message, and it took Celine a very long time to read it because [another character’s] handwriting was incredibly neat and microscopic.” Is this something that sounds like a reflexive self-aware comment that Thirlwell is making about his work? I don’t know. All I know is that I didn’t fully understand the nature of this novel, and, as such, it might have served better as a collection of linked short stories at a much pruned-back word count. But that’s me. If you’re curious about this one, I’m not stopping you from reading it. While The Future Future could have been so much more, it may tickle your brain in wonderment — wonderment at what is going on here within its well-manicured world.
Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future was published by Picador on October 15, 2024.
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