This book is difficult to describe or categorize. It could be seen as science fiction and/or dystopic fiction. Ok, its a zombie book. But don't let that fool you. Whiteheads writing is an incredible experience. His language is playful and clever without trying to be either one. His words brought me great joy, he is a writer I will be following.
The story itself takes place in a kind of post-apocalyptic setting. In this backdrop of the loss of everything humans have invented and all of human history, a unique window opens to look at the sublime and absurd world we have created.
"He remembered how things used to be, the customs of the skyline. Up and down the island the buildings collided, they humiliated runts through verticality and ambition, sulked in one another's shadows. Inevitability was mayor, term after term. Yesterdays old masters, stately named and midwifed by once-famous architects, were insulted by the soot of combustion engines and by technological advances in construction. Time chiseled at elegant stonework, which swirled or plummeted to the sidewalk in dust and chips and chunks. Behind the facades their insides were butchered, reconfigured, rewired according to the next era's new theories of utility." Pg 6
"Once inside, the unit wplit up and he swept solo through the workstations. The office furniture was hypermodern and toylike, for for an app garage or a graphic design firm keen on sketching the future. The surfaces of the desks were thick and transparent, hacked out of plastic and elevating the curvilinear monitors and keyboards in dioramas of productivity. The empty ergonomic chairs posed like amiable spiders, whispering a multiplicity of comfort and lumbar massage." Pg. 11-13
"A society manufactures the heroes it requires." Pg. 42
"The last time he was his childhood home was on Last Night. It, too, had looked normal from the outside, in that new meaning of normal that signified resemblance to the time before the flood. Normal meant 'the past.' Normal was the unbroken idyll of life before.The present was a series of intervals differentiated from each other only by the degree of dread they contained. The future? The future was the clay in their hands." Pg. 65
"The soldiers took longer rest breaks, devising new branches of gallows humor, jokes that took root. They knew they were being fundamentally altered, in their very cells, inducted into a different class of trauma than the rest of the survivors. Semper fi. Then they went inside." Pg. 77
"The insomniac's brutal scenario had become the encompassing reality across the planet. There were hours when every last person on Earth thought they were the last person on Earth, and it was precisely this thought of final, irrevocable isolation that united them all. Even if they didn't know it." Pg. 87
"Everyone he saw walked around with a psychological limp, with a collapsed shoulder here or a disobedient, half-shut eyelid there, and the current favorite, the all-over crumpling, as if the soul were imploding or the mind sucking the extremities into itself. . . Anyone with perfect posture was faking it, overcompensating for entrenched trauma." Pg. 92
"He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don't do it." Pg. 179
Book 69
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