Thursday, September 19, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Suicide Club: A Novel About Living by Rachel Heng




Dystopian fiction is a classic extension of the SciFi/Fantasy Genres - for example, a quick search of my own book reviews just this year reveals 8 works with dystopian settings that I've read and reviewed this year, and I'm not exactly searching them out.  Obviously these settings allow for writers to explore futures that seem both horrifying and possible for us in our own lifetimes, and the stories within these settings, while sometimes still being fun to read, naturally can be read as messages to the reader - even more than how basically any fiction serves as a message to the reader.  If you're one of those people (sigh) who for some reason thinks "message fiction" is evil and is a problem, Dystopian SciFi is almost certainly not for you.

Suicide Club is dystopian Science Fiction of a most classic sort, leaning heavily into the horrors and hypocrisy's of its dystopia, with the main characters' struggles being against the bounds of this dark future rather than merely being set amongst it - a 1984 comparison here is not inapt, honestly, if you want a classic example of this type of book.  It has two strong lead characters, a plot that works rather well and will keep readers on their toes, and an interesting dystopian setting that will raise questions for any reader.  And yet....Suicide Club has so much in it, that its messages become kind of muddled, to the point where I'm not quite sure what the author was trying to say, and I suspect that readers of different political persuasions might have some very different takeaways from it, which isn't ideal.

I'll try to go more in depth on this after the jump.  Note that I read this as an audiobook, so if I get any spellings of characters/places/ideas wrong, that's why, but the reader was very good and is recommended. 

------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Lea seems to have it all.  A seemingly perfect record at age 100, a fiance who is beautiful and supportive and a job where she seems on the verge of the next breakthrough.  She follows all of the Ministry's guidelines for living to ensure a healthy mind and healthy body, and knows that when the Ministry announces the so-called "Third Wave" - the medical breakthrough rumored to be near that will allow people to truly become immortal.  Sure her mother died a few years back and her father disappeared 88 years ago, but everything seems good - despite Lea being discomforted by videos circulating recently from a group of dissidents of people taking a stand against the "live-loving" order and committing suicide.

And then Lea sees her father walking on the street in front of her one day on the way to work....and in attempting to follow him, Lea finds herself hit by a car, to no real harm thanks to her bodily enhancements.  And yet as a result she finds herself being observed by Ministry agents and forced to go to counseling for people who tried to commit suicide, despite her protestations she's not suicidal, and everything in her life begins to fall apart as the observers frighten away her clients.

And then there's her father, who reconnects with her, but seems involved with the very people who are making those videos - the Suicide Club.  Lea soon finds herself wondering about the very life she has spent the last 88 years trying to be perfect at and what its really worth, and what she can do about her father who seems destined to try and end it all....
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I compared Suicide Club to 1984 above because the parallels are pretty obvious and I suspect author-intended.  You have a United States in which control over individual lives - or more particularly how people live their lives - are run by a "Ministry."  That Ministry attempts to ensure people live their lives according to strict rules on healthy living, rules that may sound fine individually (taking a break from work to stretch every so often for instance), but when combined result in strict enforced mandates without any room for flexibility....and also includes rules that deprive people of pleasurable activities, such as singing (stressful for your lungs), eating pleasurable food instead of tasteless nutripacks, etc.  These things still exist to some extent, but they are so heavily discouraged that to partake in them renders you a social outcast if it becomes known, and the ministry will assign observers to watch you and put you on a list if they think you're performing activities that are "Antisanct."  And, if your body should fail for some reason before your predetermined life span, you are forced to be kept alive, or to be sent to a farm to have your body used for the purposes of others until your time is up.

The story shows us this world from two perspectives.  Our main character is Lea, who at first seems to be the ideal citizen of this world.  After her father left her when she was 12, she has spent the last 88 years living first under a mother who tried to strictly follow the rules of the ministry for longer healthier living, and then by herself after her mother passed, who seems to want simply to be the first in line for the Third Wave to immortality when it's finally here.  Of course, Lea's backstory as revealed shows us that she didn't always feel this way towards life, and as she interacts more with her father, and first tries to stop him and to get back into the good graces of the ministry, she finds that she has simply been rather hollow all this time living as required.

Our second major character is a woman named Anja, who is the opposite of Lea in that she has always known that the regulations are costing people things - her mother was a famous opera singer, with Anja a promising violinist, who came to this country from Sweden to ply her trade....only for her mother to follow the regulations and stop singing and now lie brain dead on life support in Anja's apartment, not allowed to die for another 50 years.  Anja is involved heavily in the Suicide Clubs for people seeking to control their lives, with the eventual goal of controlling their own deaths....but Anja can't bring herself to bring that same gift to her own mother.  She also is, unlike Lea, without much financial resources, so she lives in a lower class neighborhood and works in a diner with "sub-100s", people who at birth aren't deemed likely to live long enough to deserve the life-lengthening treatments of the Ministry and are treated as a lower class.

It's this last bit which raises some confusion in what this book is trying to say.  For the most part, I kinda felt like this book was trying to be a conservative - or maybe a libertarian - tract, mocking the liberal insistence upon depriving oneself of certain luxuries for the purposes of greater health - hell, at one point Lea pines for the days where as a young corporate worker she and her colleagues pulled constant late hours and all-nighters, and the comraderie among her coworkers she felt a little as a result.  The idea of replacing even seemingly healthy fruits with pre-processed nutripacks seems like a conservative parody of what liberals want for instance.  This is perhaps even more exemplified by the fact that the ministry officials and employees we all see are the biggest hypocrites of all - they're all slovenly people who seem to not be in the best shape like the people they're regulating, working long hours, and wound up in bureaucracy to the point of ignoring what would seem to be the biggest threats to their own regimes.

But then you have a few other elements which go in different directions - the first being that the Suicide Club itself is made up of generally richer socialites who are just as spoiled and ignorant as the lifers and ministry workers they oppose - these are idealists only because they're financially able to be so - as exemplified by their rich parties and Anja having to steal a dress in order to show up as a prominent member.  The second is that the book showcases a clear class conflict - of the people who are poorer and deemed sub-100s, who don't have a choice but to live in an underclass and be abused by the richer lifers and their privileges, which is not something I tend to think of as a libertarian or conservative ideal.  If I try to put it together in my head, it's more a critique of rich liberals who preach extreme solutions without thinking about the regressive nature of some of those solutions - thinking of things like Soda Taxes here.

So yeah, I guess this is kind of a libertarian small government critique of such things, when I think about it, although as I mentioned, this book isn't quite clear about it.  I suppose I should go beyond the message to some of the characters and plot elements, which are really strong elements of this book - the book's characters largely feel like real and understandable people, if slightly sociopathic (Lea is basically psychopathic, to be honest).  And the plot is hard to predict where it will be going, but never feels like it's pulling things out of its own ass - it all works, and is kind of compelling.  But well it's hard to talk about this book without talking about the message first and foremost, hence the past few paragraphs.

So yeah, Suicide Club is interesting.  A bit too muddled in my opinion, with a message I suspect will be interpreted in various ways based upon the reader.  But would I recommend others be those readers?  Not sure, you be the judge. 
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