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There is something farcical – grotesque, even – about life played in reverse. A child falling into a tree. A sandwich emerging from a mouth, bite by reconstituted bite. A doctor unstitching a wound. The world is strange in any order, but rewind helps us notice – makes the ordinary absurd.
Novels that pick a fight with forward momentum tend to harness this absurdity, revel in it. In The Cockroach (2019), Ian McEwan gives us a sneering Brexit fable about political nostalgia. If voters want to turn back the clock, let them. He unleashes “Economic Reversalism”, which sees employees pay for the privilege of work, and every pound sent back to where it came from. In Time’s Arrow (1991), Martin Amis inverts the Holocaust. Just imagine it, he dares us: a network of sanatoriums instead of death camps. A vast machinery of reparation run by benevolent Nazis. How monstrously laughable.
Joining this backwards bunch is Chloe Benjamin with her third novel, Under Story. It conjures a universe that mirrors our own (a “duoverse”), populated by doppelgangers; a place where the past might be undone, because it hasn’t happened yet.
Here are the fictional facts. In the duoverse, ordinary human life begins underground. Mycelium grow a corpse from rot, like a 3D printer for gizzards. A heart starts beating, for reasons, and a fully grown human crawls up from the soil riddled with elderly ailments, but with a box-fresh brain. Once they’re cleaned up and DNA profiled – the work of “overtakers” – these new/old people are delivered to their children, but in the postal, rather than the obstetric, sense. The doorbell rings.
Brains grow older; bodies grow younger. Cancers unbloom. Cataracts fade. Children raise their parents until they’re spry enough to cope on their own. Nursing homes are convalescent kindergartens. And down at the other end of life, kindergartens are dementia clinics full of geriatric toddlers. Death is birth: neonates are shoved up their mothers in maternity morgues, swallowed by the amniotic dark.
It’s ghoulish stuff, body horror territory: wards of women surgically forced to eat their babies with their hungry vaginas. You might expect – even hope for – some literary depravity: Benjamin Button reimagined by William Burroughs or Agustina Bazterrica. But Under Story is a love story. We follow a forward-born couple, Laurel and Eli, who are grieving their son, Silas. Could a round trip to the duoverse summon him back? Might it also help them to forgive one another? What follows is a 500-page melodrama of parental devotion and quantum hokum. Imagine Orpheus and Eurydice meets Interstellar, but starring Tom Hanks from Big.
Using a combination of speculative physics and prophetic dreams, Laurel and Eli find their way to a portal under the ice of Antarctica and into the duoverse. They adjust quickly to its topsy-turvy logic: September follows October, Obama follows Trump, and the analogue revolution is under way (the record player has just been invented). Handily, the climate is also unravaging – extinct species popping up from the ground like the mushrooms that remade them.
The key to it all is entropy: “this universe moves toward the Big Bang, and entropy is reversed,” Eli explains. He’s a physicist; Laurel is a mycologist. They’ll both do a great deal of explaining.
There can be no life without entropy, but that’s not the problem here. Plenty of imagined worlds are nonsense, and gloriously so. The problem is that Benjamin keeps drawing our attention to her shonky narrative machinery. She answers questions we’d never thought to ask. We learn that “Christmas exists here, even though Jesus won’t be born for two thousand years” and that reverse folks can’t choose to procreate, because the decision is already waiting for them when they grovel out of the placental dirt.
Benjamin’s last novel, 2018’s The Immortalists, was also about foretold lives: four siblings who learn the dates of their deaths from a fortune teller. But the point – and lure – of that novel was doubt. Was the prophecy real or self-fulfilling? Is there a difference? Benjamin left those questions with us. In Under Story, she seems unsure her cosmic premise can carry its own mysteries. But the more we learn, the more distracted we are. And that’s before Benjamin busts out some last-act theatrics – mystical anagrams and fortuitous gadgetry – or subjects us to a death-birth. It’s hard to trust a novel that doesn’t trust itself.
Part of the problem is length. Rewound life is a gimmick, a thought experiment. The books that do it best are wry, incisive and short (the anticlockwise archetype, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, is a fleet 40-page story). The longer Laurel and Eli stay in the duoverse, the more contrived it all feels, because the more contrived it has to be. It’s hard to live backwards with dignity, and Benjamin knows it. And so she picks and chooses which bodily functions work in which direction. People walk and talk normally. Have conceptionless sex. Breathe and eat and excrete. It’s entropy galore, except for the life cycle. The author has her backwards cake, and eats it too.
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But there are much easier ways to meddle with the past and its sorrows (see Scott Alexander Howard’s The Other Valley or Aja Gabel’s Lightbreakers), which makes all of Benjamin’s picking and choosing feel particularly gruesome. Her duoverse has been elaborately rigged to produce a scene of filial reunion. She has violated the laws of physics, reanimated the dead and turned women’s bodies into tombs all in order to weaponise parental grief.
It’s meant to make us weep, to rouse mighty questions about ageless love, free will and our intimate connection to the planet. But here are some of the questions I scribbled in the margins of Under Story: if every fossil is a future creature, are palaeontologists dino-killers? Will the suffragettes fight to relinquish the vote? If vaginas work backwards, are penises the same: meaty little vacuum cleaners, hoovering up sperm? Once you’ve written a line like that you know your suspension of disbelief has well and truly snapped. And maybe something else has too.
