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The Age of Miracles
by Karen Thompson Walker (Goodreads Author)
by Karen Thompson Walker (Goodreads Author)
Age of Miracles is the story of a slow, melancholy apocalypse. Unlike most of the apocalyptic genre, there's no action, no politics or conspiracies, and no final judgement or moral. The premise of the novel lends itself to dreamy exploration of the endtimes: for inexplicable reasons, the Earth's rotation begins to slow. The days and nights get longer, first by minutes, then by hours. The apocalypse comes neither because of humanity's hubris nor as a divine punishment. It just happens.
Walker explores the effects this gradual slowing has on both the natural and human world through the lens of her narrator, who is eleven years old at the beginning of the end of the world. There's an obvious line being drawn between the Julia's loss of innocence and the bewildering changes in the world. Julia falls in love, deals with capricious friends, suffers at the hands of bullies, and uncovers uncomfortable truths about her parents. Meanwhile, birds are dying off, the magnetosphere is being stripped away, and the world's food supply becomes ever more precarious. These things are presented as equally devastating to her sense of stability.
There's a dreamy quality to Walker's writing, reminiscent of a lullaby that's soothing, save you don't listen too closely to the lyrics. This is a lovely, quietly devastating book.
My issue with Age of Miracles is actually a pervasive problem in the entire apocalyptic genre: that is, telling a global story through a narrow, prosaic lens. Out of everyone in the world, Walker, like many authors before her, chose to focus her story on a white, middle-class, suburban family. Not to say that this isn't an interesting story to tell, only that it's been repeated ad nauseum at this point. You'd think the apocalypse only ever occurred in the suburbs, to families with 2.3 kids and one television per room. It's telling that this has so strongly entered the cultural landscape of white America, and probably worth of a book in its own right.
On the whole, Age of Miracles is worth reading. But there's nothing daring about it, and very little that's unique or new.
Walker explores the effects this gradual slowing has on both the natural and human world through the lens of her narrator, who is eleven years old at the beginning of the end of the world. There's an obvious line being drawn between the Julia's loss of innocence and the bewildering changes in the world. Julia falls in love, deals with capricious friends, suffers at the hands of bullies, and uncovers uncomfortable truths about her parents. Meanwhile, birds are dying off, the magnetosphere is being stripped away, and the world's food supply becomes ever more precarious. These things are presented as equally devastating to her sense of stability.
There's a dreamy quality to Walker's writing, reminiscent of a lullaby that's soothing, save you don't listen too closely to the lyrics. This is a lovely, quietly devastating book.
My issue with Age of Miracles is actually a pervasive problem in the entire apocalyptic genre: that is, telling a global story through a narrow, prosaic lens. Out of everyone in the world, Walker, like many authors before her, chose to focus her story on a white, middle-class, suburban family. Not to say that this isn't an interesting story to tell, only that it's been repeated ad nauseum at this point. You'd think the apocalypse only ever occurred in the suburbs, to families with 2.3 kids and one television per room. It's telling that this has so strongly entered the cultural landscape of white America, and probably worth of a book in its own right.
On the whole, Age of Miracles is worth reading. But there's nothing daring about it, and very little that's unique or new.
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