The Postmortal
Ratings50
Average rating3.5
The main character as an average joe is one lens to view agelessness through, but it is not very compelling. John feels relatively uninteresting and unlikeable. He is often sexualizing the women in his life, and it never amounts to much depth between the characters. One John ends up with his childhood crush and acts like a general douche I completely gave up my attachment to him as a character. I found myself jumping entire paragraphs to get to the parts about post mortality in the society.
As I enter Part III of The Postmortal I am at peace. John has just begun offering end services for postmortals, people who want to commit assisted suicide. I too am ready to give up my life in John's world. It isn't a terrible book, it's just not a stellar one.
The setup and premise are interesting. At first, I got a World War Z vibe because of the “on the ground, as it happened” style. Unfortunately, where World War Z branched out into many different sources and perspectives, here, it's limited to the journal of one person. Because of this, the characters in John's life become vehicles to express how the postmortal cure would affect different slices of society.
E.g.
The father: an older person.
The sister: a married person with kids.
The mother of John's child: a person making the decision to have kids.
The new girlfriend: a person making the decision to get married.
Nobody feels real, and their conversations often sound like philosophical debates.
Pros: thought provoking, philosophical without being moralistic, good mix of personal intensity and world affairs, good mix of horror and humour
Cons:
This is John Farrell's account of the years during which the cure for aging is legalized. It is discovered several years after the cure (and most documentation regarding that period) has been destroyed. This frame story gives the novel a similar feel to Max Brooks' World War Z. The reader knows how the book will end, and wants - desperately - to understand how the world came to this horrible place. And don't let the cover fool you, this book has more in common with Cormac McCarthy's The Road than it does with Christopher Moore's humorous satires.
Farrell is 29 when he gets the cure, and for the next few decades parties and enjoys life. He's a lawyer when the idea of cycle marriages (which end after 40 years) become the vogue and is often at the wrong place at the wrong time when it comes to protests and reactionary thinking. Because not everyone thinks the cure is a good thing. And the novel is VERY clear that the wrong place is everywhere. Farrell's experiences are not unique.
From protesters who want the cure legalized, pro-death terrorists, trolls who decide the internet isn't good enough for mischief - they want to maim those who are crowding their space-, to cure hotels in Vegas and the very real consequences of a population that can still catch diseases and die, but can't age beyond their treatment dates, this book covers a lot of philosophical issues. It's impressive that Magary manages to not pass judgement on his characters, showing the different sides of the cure and how humans react to it - or even the promise of it. On occasion Farrell will do roundups with internet links to news articles that mention how the rest of the world is coping with the cure: China bans it, Russia forces its military personnel to get it. He'll also add interviews with pertinent players, like the cure's inventor, or pamphlets, like the one handed out by the Church of Man.
The cure affects every aspect of life, and as the book progresses, the dry humour of the first section slowly vanishes, as Farrell realizes that a life of partying gets old, even if his body doesn't. And when he decides to do something worthwhile with his life, fate steps in.
Magary uses expressions and new language with no explanations (like plug-ins for electric cars), which adds authenticity to his well realized future.
Postmortal is a book about the best and worst aspects of humankind, a novel that will make you question life, the universe and everything. Ultimately, it's a novel about hope, and how we can't live without it.