How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Review by Jess Moody
How High We Go in the Dark is going to be called a lot of things. A pandemic novel. Cli-fi. Speculative fiction. An intergenerational mosaic of loss and love. In its form though – multiple interconnected stories of varying scope and length – we find a clue that it may simply defy categorisation.
Nagamatsu wastes no time (for there is no time to waste) establishing our premise. In the near-future Dr Cliff Miyashiro arrives in the rapidly melting permafrost of the Arctic, where his researcher daughter has died in an accident. He aims to continue her work, examining Neanderthal remains which hold secrets as well as an old and unknown virus. Even while Cliff worries at his colleagues’ lack of concern about potential contagion, the narrative focus is not so much on the drama of an oncoming plague, but on the quieter notes of mourning.
‘I set the phone down and returned to my work. I was living at the edge of the world and everything else seemed like a distant dream.’
This early study of a father trying too late to understand his daughter (and her own parenting choices) raises the question: how much connection should a person sacrifice to save future generations?
But then this family and its grief is lost to us. The next chapter leaps us years away, to a new protagonist: a failed stand-up comedian in an LA now full of children sick from the spreading plague. Then off again to a dying young man, his skin translucent with light as he falls into a coma. Another bereaved father harvests pig organs. A widower fixes failing robo-dogs, while a body-farm worker questions her failing marriage (‘It’s my job to study how we fall apart’).
A physicist muses on life with a singularity in his head. A granddaughter goes home to Japan. A grandmother goes to find a new Earth.
While all these people are subtly related, each story shifts us (not always in a linear way) across time, place, and concepts. The author takes a potentially dizzying array of speculative tropes (a pandemic, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, shared consciousness), and holds it all together in a beautiful centring of individual intimacy and loss.
This is complex and ambitious world-building through a cast of everyday individuals; sharing the weary normality and loneliness of life in never-ending catastrophe.
‘Every morning since leaving the hospital, I have woken up on my side of the bed and pretended my wife and daughter were at home. I make them pancakes like I used to years ago, close my eyes and kiss the air above the kitchen stools.’
People are people. They still have shitty or stressful jobs, they smoke out on the fire escape, they geek out over their favourite playlists from their hospital beds. This is a narrative of global crises which mostly avoids government actors, or exposition through media proclamation. The strange evolution of the plague – and the parallel climate emergency and funereal capitalism – is all subtle background conversation, rumours and resignation.
Which all makes the moments of real wonder so powerful. Here is imagery unforgettable and awe-inspiring. A pyramid of strangers climbing over each other in the darkness. Towers of the new ‘funereal capitalism’ soaring high over Tokyo. A telepathic-pig break-out. Plague-children shout-laughing as they ride their final rollercoaster at a euthanasia theme park. Murals painted in a sleeping spaceship.
We’re in an age where many are asking what is – or should – the speculative cli-fi novel be? There’s a balance needed to ground a story in recognisable calamity, yet remain open enough for the creative leaps required to refresh our empathy. Tonally too, it’s a challenge to shout without preaching or despairing in dystopia; to find a kernel of optimism without underestimating the hard choices needed (‘Maybe she’ll realize what I’ve done when I’m older and forgive me’). Plot-wise, will the reader believe that humanity can be its own salvation, or do writers rely on a cosmic deus ex machina?
There is power in speculative fiction which offers not only warnings but solutions; or at least, a kind of hope. Here Nagamatsu has crafted a dazzling work of ambition, compassion, and imagination that grapples with all these complexities. It offers a whisper of what might matter most, and how high we might go – together – in dark, dark times.
How High We Go in the Dark is published by Bloomsbury, 18th January 2022