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Besides being an interesting read, prolife readers can use Magary’s dystopian novel to illustrate how traditional Jewish and Christian beliefs about life and death survive despite catastrophic events.
In the dystopia of Magary’s future world, genetic research has stopped the aging process. Although people can still die of natural causes or accidents, their bodies will not age, hence the title where “postmortal” indicates that someone has taken the “cure” to stop the aging process and ostensibly to cheat mortality. John, the main character, who took the cure at age twenty nine, will look like a twenty-nine year old forever.
The social consequences of postmortalism are enormous. Few are getting married (because the potential spouses are unable to think that their love for each other would endure more than the usual forty or fifty years). Religious institutions collapse, apparently, because, as one line from a Church of Man flyer reads, “The old religious dogmas have outlived their usefulness in a world where people can live hundreds and thousands of years” (132). As a further example of social collapse, governments nuke their own people to reduce population.
Beyond these mere plot points, though, the reader would have much to enjoy in a novel whose characters inescapably realize the significance of Western values and traditions. Readers will find it especially pleasing that the presence of these values occurs in a novel approved by the politburo of censors in New York publishing houses who despise those values.
Thus, even though Magary’s dystopia could utterly depress any reader, the seeds of hope germinating in the postmortal world will encourage him or her to read to the end.
For example, while John explains that he wants the cure because “I’m terrified of death. I fear there’s nothing beyond it and that this existence is the only one I’ll ever possess” (8), by novel’s end John, whose religious education consisted only in watching television preachers (13), offers the following acknowledgement of, if not faith in, eternal life to a lover:
“I know there’s no heaven. I know it all turns to nothingness. But I fear there will be some remnant of me left within that void. Left conscious by some random fluke. Something that will scream out for this. That one speck of my soul will still exist and be left trapped and wanting. For you. For the light. For anything.” (342)
John isn’t the only character who is aware and hopeful for life after death. His father reacts angrily to the possibility that his beloved deceased wife may no longer exist:
“Oh, so it’s supposed to comfort me to know there isn’t a better place after this? Is it really supposed to make me feel better to know that your mom has evaporated completely? That she never had a soul? That her love for me died with her? Is that supposed to make me feel all happy inside, John?” (98)
Evidence that John is a dynamic character is obvious as his ideas progress about another major principle of Judaism and Christianity, the foundations of Western life: marriage. Early in the novel, John reduces the sacrament of marriage to what reads like a mere contract of nursing home services, as when he told one lover that
“People got married before because they knew, deep down, that there would come a time in their lives when they would become too old, too ugly, and too infirm to have anyone care about them except their spouse. You needed someone to change your bedpan and help tie your shoes and all that. That’s all gone now, Sonia. All that fear is gone. And whatever urge there is for people to find a lifetime companion…I don’t have that anymore. Every guy I know feels the same way” (79; ellipsis in original)
By novel’s end, John’s view of marriage conforms, albeit imperfectly (remember that the character has had no religious instruction) to the sacramental definition of marriage as a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman who can enjoy sexual activity and must remain open to the possibility of reproduction (the two purposes of sexual activity): “I want to marry you. I want to marry you and be that child’s father. You don’t have to agree to it. I just wanted to say it to you because it feels good to say it” (344-5).
Of course, the reason why I read this novel was that it was tagged as a work of fiction pertaining to the life issues of either abortion, infanticide, or euthanasia. The novel is replete with euthanasia elements obviously; one cannot write fiction about a future world where death has been “mastered” without delving into population crises and voluntary euthanasia which ineluctably becomes involuntary euthanasia.
Magary’s work is ample fuel for the prolife position that human life must be protected and not killed. I am surprised that the leftist and woke editors—even of 2011 (the time of the novel’s production)—did not alter the life-affirming views of this fictional work.
For example, even though John seeks a job as someone who will be “basically [a] half angel of death” (181), where killing people is called “end specialization” (184), and even though John’s killing people is more a perfunctory litany of legal form than the death of a fellow human being, as John kills them, he becomes aware of their “souls” in a near-fantasy passage:
As I finished, I could feel the ghosts pressing around me. I looked up and envisioned myself at the bottom of a vast ocean floor, white phantasms densely packed above and around me, like swarms of giant jellyfish. I imagined them multiplying by the second, an army of the dead ever growing and compacting in the emptiness. Frenzied. Screaming. Moshing. Coiling around my body and constricting it. Slipping into my mouth with every breath. They were screaming silently at me, as if I were staring at them from a soundproof room. They crammed in tighter and tighter. (317)
At first, I thought it was odd when John tells his last lover in the novel that he quit his job “Because they want us to kill the elderly” (341). After the near-fantasy passage, however, his reluctance to kill the elderly demonstrates that his awareness that the people whom he killed had souls (“ghosts” or “phantasms” in the above passage) probably indicates that he is nascently aware of a foundational Jewish and Christian principle: human beings are not merely the highest creature on the food chain, but persons created by God. endowed with a soul.
Perhaps the most life-affirming statement in the novel—life-affirming in that it counters the contemporary push for assisted suicide and euthanasia, both forms of killing people—comes from John’s father, suffering from pancreatic cancer. His father’s epideictic is a judicious distribution of life-affirming statements because, if the following was uttered by John, the novel could fall victim to becoming a preachy discourse by a super-righteous character:
“I’m not killing myself. This doesn’t count as suicide. Suicide is when you stick a gun to your head. I’d never dream of doing that. You have to understand: I made a mistake getting this cure. I don’t want it. It’s not that I want to die. It’s that I’m at peace with the idea of it. It doesn’t bother me. I’ve had a good life. I saw my children grow. I saw my grandchildren born, including your son. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. And then some! For God’s sake, they found a cure for aging! Isn’t that stunning? I can’t believe I lived to see it. There’s just no way the world is gonna progress much further than that. This is the top, as far as I’m concerned. No, I’ve had a good life, and I’ve had more than my fair share of it. I’m not some depressed old man trying to hang himself. I’m just looking for a gracious exit. A way back to your mom. And here it is. A tumor. A big, fat, lovely tumor. I could kiss the damn thing.” (150)
Magary’s novel has a little bit of everything: romance (to appeal to the women folk), father-son bonding (to appeal to the men folk), warm and fuzzy scenes where grown men handle newborn babies (to appeal to the women folk), shootouts and action scenes (to appeal to the men folk), nuclear blasts (to function as deus ex machina maneuvers to extract characters from dire situations), and the obligatory sex scenes of a main character who has failed to master chastity and is therefore unable to control his sexual urges (to appeal to American readers who cannot read anything unless there’s an orgasm or two somewhere in the fiction. Mature readers, whether aged twenty or sixty, will find that John’s doggy- or missionary-style sex or sodomization scene (it’s unclear which sexual activity is occurring) with a prostitute before he euthanizes her merits a chuckle or two for being a bizarre way to kill a fellow human being.
In summary, Magary’s 365-page novel is a delightful read, accomplishing both the entertaining and the didactic purposes of literature, on what could happen if a society loses its understanding of death as a transition from earthly life to an eternal one. Unless the reader is a student writing a literary analysis essay (or a happily-retired English professor reviewing ficitonal works on the right-to-life issues and thus taking a break from wrapping Christmas gifts to grandchildren), the novel can be enjoyed within a day or two.