Jenni Fagan: The Delusions book review – Erudite world-building
The author of Hex and The Panopticon returns with a darky comic, bleakly bureaucratic vision of the afterlife
In life, Edi was a street-smart Edinburgh tattooist and single mum. Now, as the narrator of Jenni Fagan’s latest novel The Delusions, a scatological Scottish The Good Place with Orwellian overtones, she is an afterlife Admin, processing the newly dead and relieving them of the delusions they held in life. These Delusions are extracted in the form of an eel, some with teeth, then slapped into an airport-style tray to be scanned. It’s Alien set at airport security, with particularly sweary staff.
If you can’t face up to yourself, you are zapped (Edi enjoys this, especially for politicians, billionaires, sex pests: no Great Beyond for them). Forty-seven years dead, and Edi remains sarky, with a core humanity that’s slowly revealed. She died when her son was seven and looks for him in the Queues every day. In Fagan’s dystopian afterlife, there is no watching over loved ones from the clouds. No harps either, Edi quips: ‘Not even a shitting banjo.’ Fagan is not the first to depict the next world as bureaucracy, but she leavens it with trademark humour. Edi and pals Eustace and Batshiva are snorting-level funny.
Humans, and now animals, are arriving in the millions. It is a deluge, a mass extinction. When a blue whale floats into Processing, the symbolism is clear. Fagan breaks no new ground with Edi’s character: we have met iterations in previous novels. Nevertheless, it is an exciting, ambitious departure. The Scottish novelist has long demonstrated a gift for articulating slippery facets of humanity: spirituality, end-of-times angst. Now she is universe building. The narrative has loose threads and Edi can repeat like a nippy pal, five pints in. But overall, this is tender and philosophical, a meditation on living and dying; the responsibility we have for ourselves and the planet. The Delusions is a wild cosmic ride and, if you can hack the sweary narrator, it’s one well worth joining.
The Delusions is published by Hutchinson Heinemann on Thursday 19 March; main picture: Mihaela Bodlovic.