By Diane Awerbuck for The Sunday Times
The Three
Sarah Lotz (Hodder & Stoughton)
****
The philosopher Aristotle thought that the imitation of life – the sort that writers do when they write – was superior to history, which was a mere record of events. The spectators were to feel pity and fear as they watched characters succumb inevitably to their destinies. Readers of Sarah Lotz’s new novel will do the same.
Labelling a novel “horror” is one way for it not to be taken seriously, and this is a mistake. True, The Three is a slick – and serious – homage to all the creepy books and B-grade flicks in which Lotz has ever immersed herself. But it is also a structurally impeccable and note-perfect rendering of ordinary humans flailing in confusion at the fates which have been forced upon them.
Elspeth Martins is the unifying character, a journalist investigating the fallout after several planes crash almost simultaneously in different countries. When the obvious bogeyman of terrorism is ruled out, we follow the fortunes of the three (or is it four?) miracle children who’ve survived – and the increasing desperation of their relatives, who are interviewed by Martins or record their own experiences. In other words, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the novel is epistolary, and the first-person dispatches carry with them the wonder and fright that contact with the infinite brings with it.
Lotz’s narrators are North American, British, South African, Japanese, and that range is deliberately global for a book that deals with the Apocalypse. Her themes are also universal, and the teasing out of our (quite rational) fear of flying, with all the attached spiritual sensibilities, hits home.
But Lotz’s question is not, What if the plane crashes? It’s, What if the crash is only the beginning of the terror? She goes on to explore it all: fame, reasons to live, restoration after disease, proof that the End Times are nigh.
She is particularly skilled at hole-free plots and believable characterisation – the two most important locations of tragedy. There are a couple of stylistic cor-blimey moments that don’t ring true in The Three, but if that’s the filthiest criticism a novel gets, it has done what it came to do.
Most interesting – and most convincing – are Lotz’s Japanese sections. Narrated mostly by the pathologically shy Ryu Takami, who thinks of himself as existing only online as Orz Man, it is also populated with automatons (“surrabots”) and the ominously named Ice Princess, Chiyoko Kamamoto. Most movingly, it uses the real location of Aokigahara, a forest in Japan where the hopeless go to kill themselves. Lotz’s visit to the site imbues these last pages with the real pathos and horror of the book, and it is where she is most fully ensouled as a writer.
If Aristotle were still alive (and if Lotz’s major premise is anything to go by, he may well be), he’d recognise the mastery of form here. The Three links her to a long, ancestral line of writers and performers who meant to leave their audiences feeling cleansed and enlightened. She ends up siding with Shakespeare, in fact, who said that we are to the gods as flies are to cruel boys: They kill us for their sport.
Book details
- The Three by Sarah Lotz
EAN: 9781444770377
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