Total Oblivion, More or Less, Part Two

In Part Two of Alan Deniro’s novel Total Oblivion, More or Less, Macy has reached post-apocalyptic “Lou,” (formerly St. Louis) with its broken arch, and is sent down the river by her father.  She manages to escape being enslaved, once very narrowly—and emerges at the end of the novel triumphant, riding a horse, wearing armor, rescuing all of her siblings, and in command of technology that even the newly-established American “Empire” doesn’t control.

Jodie, my partner who is also discussing this novel at Bookgazing, asked me more questions about character, some that I didn’t answer last time, because you find out more about Ciaran and the dog Xerxes in Part Two.  “Are they evil? Are they just insane….Do you think Ciaran has a bit of the traditional cruel, but disturbingly playful trickster spirit about him?”  Well, yes, Ciaran is a witheringly intelligent fourteen-year-old boy. I’m living with an intelligent boy who recently turned fifteen, and if there’s anything I can say for sure about boys of that age, it’s that you can’t predict how they’re going to react to anything.  Even the kindest of them can be cruel at times, because they’re learning how to flex their literal muscles and reach the limits of what power they can command.  It’s an explosive age, and would be literally explosive in a world where boys of that age are treated as men.  Ciaran chooses a side and fights for it, with all his cunning and bravery.  It’s an ironic detail that the object he is smuggling is encased in a volume entitled The Children’s Book of Heroes.  He wants to be a hero, but like the world, the rules keep changing.

Despite how realistic I find Ciaran’s character, though, he works partly as a plot device, as Macy says “I didn’t want to be like Ciaran. More than that, I was afraid I already was, and that nothing could stop me from sliding deeper into numbness and violence.”

And about Xerxes—he also turns out to be partly a plot device. He’s a dog until something impossible happens, and then it doesn’t really matter, at least to me, what motivated him as a dog.

But the plot is the most interesting part of this novel, so it was fine with me if some of the characters seem to have been created mostly to move it along, especially in the second half.  The ineffectiveness of Macy’s father, so formulaic in a YA novel, becomes part of the plot once they reach Lou.  As astronomer in his previous life, he has to adapt to the changing world, even at its most fantastic:

“Dad had set up his telescope in the attic. Wearing his overcoat and gloves, at night he would search the stars, the constellations that were unfamiliar to us. The sky had changed.”

When Macy gets all the way downriver to Nueva Roma, she has emerged from the sense of oblivion that has (both literally and figuratively) enslaved so many former Americans. When she gets on a platform in a tall building, Macy asks “how do these run?” and her guide replies:
“hydraulics or slaves or something.”
“What? I said.
Hydraulics or—
I heard you, I said. I’m just a little shocked—“
That Macy is now capable of shock shows what a long way she’s come towards what adulthood must now be, in such a world.  One of the things she discovers is that family loyalty can be enough to motivate good actions; that saving the world can be a side effect of doing the right thing for a person you love.

And this is what her father has taught her.  He has not protected her.  He has armed her with the kind of knowledge she needs to do more than just survive, and she uses it to make her part of the world more of the way it should be.

This is one of the best post-apocalyptic novels I’ve read in the past decade, because it can also arm you, the reader, with the kind of knowledge you need to live some version of Aristotle’s “good life” in the increasingly weird world of the future, which is rushing at us, sometimes too fast for us to process without help. This novel can help even those of us who are already adults to keep choosing the right role in our own story, which is like the first one Macy’s Dad tells, a story for which we have to decide on a satisfying ending.