A pair of dice, an elusive Japanese prophet, thousands of packages of ramen and an unshakeable family curse are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Nicolas Dickner’s charming Apocalypse for Beginners.
This is the second novel from Dickner, whose debut, Nikolski, was the upset winner in last year’s CBC Canada Reads competition. Like Nikolski, Apocalypse for Beginners is a novel preoccupied with the interwoven threads of destiny and genealogy; here, however, the future of the world is at stake.
In the summer of 1989, 17-year-old Hope Randall arrives in Rivière-du-Loup, Que., along with her mother, Ann, who is convinced that the end of the world is nigh. Ann is the latest victim of a crippling family curse: The date of the apocalypse is mystically revealed to a Randall, who immediately goes insane when the date in question passes without incident. As a result of her mother’s affliction, Hope has spent the better part of her life rallying against the spectre of the family legacy, grounding herself in pragmatism, mathematics, and logic to avoid her birthright.
When Mickey Bauermann meets Hope, ironically named and electric-eyed, teaching herself Russian on the bleachers of the municipal stadium, he is immediately smitten. The two teens form a fast friendship, spending their days and nights hibernating in the basement of Mickey’s bungalow – a structure half-underground and isolated from the elements, and thus a natural place in which to await impending doom.
One day, however, a series of mathematical equations reveals to Hope that the end of the world will occur on July 17, 2001 – a prediction substantiated by the expiry date on the thousands of ramen packages her mother has accumulated and by the proclamation of a Japanese writer, advertised in an old comic book. From here, Hope embarks on a spiralling odyssey of self-discovery that leads her first across the continent and then across the Pacific to Tokyo – a city that itself “harbours doubts about the future of the planet.”
The novel twinkles with the same idiosyncratic rhythm that made Nikolski such a delight, offering just enough detail to spark the imagination, but exhibiting an admirable restraint that prevents it from getting bogged down in existential melodrama.
That said, the quirkiness is underscored by melancholy. Hope, an enigma to both Mickey and the reader, is detached from the world, feeling no sense in setting down roots or returning Mickey’s affections because, well, the world’s going to end. But she is by no means a passive vessel of fate. For the protagonists of Nikolski, destiny is a means of self-actualization; for Hope, it is a hair shirt, trapping her within a cycle of thwarted possibilities.
Dickner infuses his world with a number of clever apocalyptic images: Hope, who lives in an abandoned pet shop, has visions of exotic animals filing in, as if it were Noah’s ark. Meanwhile, she and Mickey watch zombie movies in their bunker and work at his father’s cement plant, where the breakdown of automotive detritus leaves “scraps of a civilization that is consuming itself.”
But the medium through which the forthcoming apocalypse seems most imminent is the television, which emerges again and again as a microcosm of mass devastation. The late 1980s and early ’90s were a time of heightened paranoia, magnified to even more catastrophic proportions by virtue of being broadcast into living rooms – and basements – across the continent.
As Hope and Mickey munch on nachos and do their homework, images of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first Gulf War, David Suzuki and the destruction of Pompeii are projected across their faces. The TV is a magic mirror, revealing a more gradual kind of apocalypse wrought by modernity. As Hope puts it, TV provides “an enlightening snapshot of North American civilization on the eve of its annihilation.”
The novel, by turns sharp, thoughtful and sweet, does lose momentum as it barrels toward its conclusion, ending with somewhat more of a whimper than a bang. But perhaps this is its way of telling us that life goes on, even after the world ends – and with a writer as nimble as Dickner in our midst, here’s hoping that doesn’t happen any time soon.
Emily Landau is a writer, editor and reviewer in Toronto. She plans to be out of town when the apocalypse hits.
