SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett

 

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Elysium: or The World After by Jennifer Marie Brissett: https://t.co/TBeprzcXH7

Short Review: 10 out of 10
1/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) January 5, 2021

Short Review (cont): A story of 2 souls, Adrian/ne and Antoine/tte, beloved to each other across different times and settings despite alien & human caused destruction, as a Machine attempts to make sense of it all. A tale of empire conquering, of love, of memory, and more.
2/3

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) January 5, 2021

Elysium is one of the more interesting novels I read in 2020 - no, strike that, one of the more interesting novels I've read since I got back into reading 5 years ago.  It's a short novel and one that is absolutely not interested in explaining what it's doing to its reader: it trusts the reader to figure it all out, but a beautiful and fascinating exploration of characters and love throughout history and time and the many forms that love takes.  It's also a story about the effects of Empire and colonialism on history and memory, on the stories that get told, and how people survive...and don't survive through it all.  

People who follow me may see the above description and think that well, you've read a number of books tackling those themes and that's true.  But I can't think of any that do it like Elysium, in a powerful tale that transcends time periods, genders, and peoples, from beginning to end.  It's making this review especially difficult, but I'm going to try and explain a bit better after the jump, I promise.

NOTE:  I read this in audiobook, so if I get some names and spellings incorrect below, that's why.  The audiobook reader is very good, especially in how it reads the computer text sections (I'm really curious how those are done in print) as being so jarring and changing as well as in voicing the characters in various ways as they change throughout, and so I'd recommend the book in that format.  One Warning about the audiobook though: for some reason the audiobook begins by reading the excerpt from the book that is contained on its first page (or perhaps on the book jacket) rather than from the start of the novel and doesn't explain that it's doing so, leaving me confused for a while whether that excerpt was the actual start of the book or just an excerpt (especially since with the book's non-linear-esque storytelling, it totally could have been the start of the novel).  

Normally, this is where I'd drop the plot summary portion of my book review, but with Elysium, I would suggest instead most readers go into it blind (the plot summary given with the book doesn't really spoil much but doesn't really describe anything either).  The book is not told in a straight forward linear fashion, with it following two people who love each other from beginning to end, but those two people change along with the story's setting and everything else between chapters, or just between individual pages.  Our main character is sometimes named Adrian and sometimes named Adrianne and their beloved, whether that be their sibling, their child, their parent, or their lover, is sometimes named Antoine and sometimes named Antoinette.  And as the story gets told, and as things happen to the two of them, a computerized voice speaking sometimes in 1s and 0s and other times in words interrupts the narrative - rejecting it as ERRORs or for other unclear reasons, often resulting in shifts in how the story is told....

The result is a story with some really interesting dynamics, but throughout it all - throughout strict rules of society that brutalize people, throughout unfortunate instances like disease and accidents, throughout the destruction of a war brought to home soil by an invader, by an alien race from space.... - one constant is that people connect with others in love, a concept that cannot be understood rationally by an outside observer (and this is shown by the machine voice repeatedly BREAKing the narrative whenever such moments of love and grief transpire).  And the bonds of love can form in many ways: between lovers, between siblings, between parents and children....etc.  No matter what happens to Adrian/Adrianne and Antoine/Antoinette, whether they live or die, whether they're man or woman, that bond is real and means everything to them, and when one is forced to be without the other, everything is somewhat less.  Sure there are other people to love out there, to form slightly lesser bonds, but they cannot compare to the true things shown here in these many many ways.  

And these loves are tested constantly - by disease in one time period, by a strict Roman-like Vestal Virgin setting that rules against relationships in another, by conquerors and colonizers who come to take without thinking what they are destroying in the process.  And yet they remain the strongest driving force and element, one that is remembered throughout history, even as the forms of these bonds change, and humanity is challenged.  Again other lesser bonds exist, those of unrequited love, those of understanding, those of common cause and intellect, and these matter too, but over and over again Adrian/Adrianne and Antoine/Antoinette come together because it is how things must be.  

There are a lot of other fascinating dynamics in this book here, such as dealing with race and discrimination, the effects of colonization, etc.  One in particular that I found fascinating is the idea of memory and history and the loss of same after colonization and conquering.  Readers will notice certain parts of the narrative recurring: the number of people involved in certain tasks, how they are described in addition to their names, the roles they play, etc.  And yet the earlier parts of the story, especially one segment that seems to go back to a setting in which merges the idea of the Vestal Virgins with modern day living, feature more and more interruptions from the machine voice, as opposed to the later parts, which features more consistent narratives.  And there's a reason for that - the further back in the past one tries to look, the harder and less accurate one's information can be, and the more the past narrative is poisoned by one's understanding of the present.  This is especially the case when the remembering is done not by the people who lived it, but by the conquering people, who destroyed those histories and can only try and remember it from their own experiences.  It's a fascinating way of portraying this dynamic, and it all comes to a head in the final piece of the narrative, in which the one behind the machine voice and the our characters themselves come to a head.  

I could talk a ton on this book and write whole essays on it and if you want to see a better more cohesive discussion of it, I recommend looking at Nisi Shawl's take in her series on a History of Black Science Fiction.  I'm almost certainly also missing the relevance and impact of parts here too - as the Adrianne herself says in a final part: This history is "not for the likes of you" and while that's addressed to a non-human character, an alien attempting to research the distant human past that his people destroyed (and thus who cannot understand the true emotional devastation caused from his own point of view), it very much applies to people who are descendants of the colonizing majorities, and I'm a white guy, even if Jewish, and so I kind of am such a person.   But even if you're like me and you may not be the exact person the author is writing to, I strongly recommend you try out Elysium - because even with missing things there's so much here to explore and discover in how these characters and their love survive and how much is lost from their destruction.  

Just a remarkable work.