An eerie afterworld, linked to a dying earth

February 26, 2006|Gail Caldwell

The Brief History of the Dead
By Kevin Brockmeier
Pantheon, 252 pp., $22.95

Most cultures accept the fact of death by constructing a reality that evades it: the concept of an afterlife, the balancing of accounts by reincarnation, the resurrection of memory and thus of the life itself. All of these are challenging notions, of course -- the architecture of heaven has proved particularly flummoxing. But a little creative fiddling has always seemed preferable to the alternative. Better we should be wandering in a parallel universe, whether purgatory or Middle-Earth, than condemned to dust that has no meaning beyond loss.

Kevin Brockmeier displayed his bravery for such subjects in his previous novel, ''The Truth About Celia," which beautifully traced the emotional arc of a father who had lost his child. ''The Brief History of the Dead" is more far-flung in its imaginative leaps, going so far as to construct a world of recently departed souls as well as the reason that has placed them there. It is both an evocative novel and a fanciful one, both spooky and riveting. The world left behind is sometime in the late 21st century, a place of global pandemics and the final ubiquitous triumph of Coca-Cola. All the great mammals -- the whales and elephants and gorillas -- are gone. Now a fast-moving virus nicknamed ''the Blinks" has become airborne, and the headlines of what newspapers remain in print are variations on this: ''Incubation Period Less Than Five Hours . . . Two Billion Dead in Asia and Eastern Europe."