Under the Blue

"This came out around the same time as Dreamland, and I think it’s a brilliant novel. I’d been in a bit of a reading funk—my attention span felt really shot post-pandemic—and this was one of those books that I picked up and just blazed through. The whole day disappeared. It’s the dual narrative of an artist called Harry who—thanks to a combination of grief and absorption in his painting—doesn’t realise that a pandemic is happening around him in London. He emerges from this ‘deep-dive’ into a devastated landscape, and, later, embarks on a cross-Europe road trip, as he tries to reach Africa with two fellow survivors, who are sisters. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This narrative is interwoven with the story of two researchers in the Arctic Circle discussing an artificial intelligence thy have developed. They’ve been providing this AI with information about human history and culture, in order for the AI to predict the future. There’s a race against time, as these two stories happen simultaneously. There’s not a false note. It’s so well done. Beautifully written, filmic. I’m not an AI scientist, but it feels very convincing to me. The discussion takes the form of instant messaging, kind of like a Gchat transcript, between these two researchers. And it feels very human, very sure-footed the whole way through. I think another quality that unites all these books that I really love is how they find ways around exposition. Because there is no quicker, or more sure-fire, way to kill socially-realistic dystopia than with heavy-handed exposition. As a reader, you want to feel like you’re really in a world in which this has happened. Aristide’s really good at that too. Another theme that runs through a lot of these books—that I guess that feels natural for writers tackling what the end of the world might look like, or the beginning of the end of the world—there’s a real questioning of: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to make art as a human? That’s dealt with very head-on in Station Eleven too. These are the themes that emerge, and in the best examples, are dealt with so dextrously. It can feel very natural. What I love about good dialogue is that it often cross-hatches and doesn’t quite make sense. That’s what real dialogue is like. With instant messaging, if you read the transcript, it’s always a bit off. Totally! And totally realistic. So again, I think that fits my theme—what I love in all these books is that there’s a texture of a life we know and realism. It’s that, which allows all the other things in the book feel entirely convincing."