The Flame Alphabet is a very hard book to recommend. I want to recommend it to you all, and since I'm writing this I suppose that I am. But, unlike Feed or The Magicians, I don't for a moment believe that this will have the same universal appeal.
The Flame Alphabet's plot is this: There is a plague striking the world, or at least America. The speech of children is striking those that hear it ill as well as leaving a salty residue that spreads in the wind and strikes bare the soil. As time goes on this plague gets worse until the very foundations of communication may become poisonous to all humans.
That doesn't sound too depressing. It's a new take on the apocalypse In fact, it's a Jewish apocalypse story and it's reflected throughout. There are issues of community through ideas, independent reflection and the meaning of community. It's explicitly Jewish, though some aspects are very twisted to the point of grotesquery and horror.
But it's also a story of a world where isolation not only tears people apart but also makes them confront how alone they are to begin with. That's the scariest part of this book, which isn't explicitly horror though I did find it genuinely scary. The seeds of the main character's sadness and existential dread get traced back to his family before they are split apart by this disease. Think about it, if the speech of children is toxic then how long do you think parents would be able to stand the proximity of their children? How long could children stand to stay and slowly kill their parents? But also, upon reflection, once you can no longer talk to your family- what if you find that your relationship doesn't change as much as you feared?
That's all in this novel. Ben Marcus, the author, does perhaps too good a job at reflecting these themes in the tone of the book. By the end of the novel I was reading chapter after chapter in a single sitting, gnashing my teeth. But early on I had the hardest time getting into the prose. It's dry and depressing and more than slightly sickening. The text felt like the salty air in their world, slowly pulling the moisture from the air and hurting you from the inside. I kept wanting give up on it, rereading the synopsis, and realizing the concept still intrigued me. It took about halfway through before the book and my mind synced up and just clicked together.
So I do recommend this book. Highly. As soon as I completed it I was happy both to be through with it and to have the ideas it planted sitting in my head. In a way it's almost the antithesis of the movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". In that movie the writer set out to create a script that showed two close friends that would ultimately become aware that they don't and can't truly know one another. By the time the writer finished the script he had a story that showed two people who did know each other and he had to reverse his thesis. In The Flame Alphabet we see that not only do some people get pulled apart by the enforced lack of communication but perhaps they were never even close to knowing each other even when they did talk.
I promise the next one will be a lot lighter in tone.
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