Essay Questions

What was the War of Rebellion?

The novel offers an alternative timeline of post-Civil War American history. To begin with, it is not referred to as the Civil War or the War Between the States or the War of Norther Aggression or the War to End Slavery but the War of Rebellion. Even so, there was still a President Lincoln and the Union still came out the victor, but the aftermath is all haywire. The Confederacy remains in secession, although they are now simply known as the United Colonies. That doesn’t mean America is divided in two, however; it is split into multiples: most of New England comprise the Free States (with the notable exception of the Republic of Maine), and then there is the Western Union and in between the bulk of the midwestern states have become the American Union. Oh, and then there’s the Kingdom of Hawaii which will play a major role second half of the middle section of the novel.

The official publishing blurb for the novel promises that its three sections “are joined in an enthralling and ingenious symphony.” Are they?

Even the most positive reviews of the book eventually succumb to the inevitable truth: if there is a symphony being played here, it is one by John Cage. In other words, that sound you hear is the music of potentially every reader on the planet but the person who penned the blurb struggling mightily to find a connection between the three (really four) utterly distinct, disjoined, and non-cohesive sections of this book. The term “book” is being used here purposely instead of novel because there is really no logical way to suggest this is a novel in the traditional sense rather than it being three novellas packed into the same book. Much has been made of the fact that different characters in each section share names but nothing else of significance and how this choice seems to be a gimmick used by the writer to create some semblance of coherence. There may be actual coherence, but if so, it is something more akin to the harsh notes of dissonant jazz rather than a symphony.

Could the lack of connectivity across the multiple sections of the novel actually be the whole point?

Dissonant jazz is actually a much better metaphor than symphony for what the author may be attempting. Understand, this is just a theory to be tossed out there and the author herself has made no comment suggesting it. Dissonance is defined as a lack of harmony among musical notes. One could argue that characters in a fiction are like musical notes in that they usually work in harmony with each other to produce a pleasingly coherent story. Having multiple characters sharing the names David, Charles, and Edward across three different periods of history as well as having two different epidemic playing major roles is actually a truer reflection of reality than most fiction.

Fiction is the domain where unlikely connections are made between unrelated people sharing names. And while the AIDS and the devastating flu which brings on a dystopian future may both be epidemics, that is pretty much where any similarity begins and ends. It may just be that the near-universal dissatisfaction with the lack of a coherent connection between the three distinct sections of the story has completely missed the point and the whole point of the book is that such connections are almost never to be found in real life.