In 2042, everything changed: one scholar’s fascination with the seemingly impossible lifespans of the Old Testament led down a massive, discipline-spanning rabbit hole. The result was the discovery of “shay ross”: a rare plant that contained the secret to “more or less immortality.” After this miraculous year, every human lifespan could now be expanded from years to centuries. But what effect would this hypothetical discovery have on the modern world?
In THE ALLURE OF AN ENDING, R. Henry Price explores this on both a micro and macro level. Half family memoir, half scrapbook of a fictional future, the novel follows one family from its early days as a growing bakery empire to its place in the post-Anmir world. (“Anmir” is the miraculous year in which the drug known as DRST began to lengthen lifespans.) At the center of this narrative is Yusuf, the son of Punjabi immigrant Harbir. Before DRST, Yusuf’s life was one of academia, love, and loss. And, at the back of his mind, there was his father’s search for “immortality”: the desire to keep the family name and family business going for as long as possible.
But in his later years, Yusuf finds himself essentially immortal. A long-time widower raising a son of his own, now with grandchildren of his own conceived through previously uncommon means, he watches the world evolve around him. Families change shape as the meaning of age begins to fade and married couples wonder if maybe a few centuries is a bit too much. With all the time in the world on his hands, Yusuf chases down a new meaning for immortality.
As a fictional history book, THE ALLURE OF AN ENDING is stunning. Price brings to bear more than just philosophical conundrums. For example, how does one control the population to fend off starvation? How does industry keep running when the retirement age is now centuries off? Who is acceptable to date? Through fictionalized reports, books, and transcripts, these questions are approached and—as in life—answered with dubious degrees of satisfaction.
Sadly, Price’s exceptional skills at writing fictional academia do not transfer well to dialogue. The characters’ conversations come off as somewhat robotic, even fake. In a novel where the micro-level of the human condition is meant to offset the global issues at hand, this leaves the human story feeling like little more than a branch of the academic material. But none of this changes the fact that THE ALLURE OF AN ENDING is a brilliantly plotted-out novel with a great deal of thought and care behind it.
While occasionally stilted in its dialogue, the narrative, structure, and concept of THE ALLURE OF AN ENDING are compelling: a truly well-thought-out speculation on the nature of life, death, and immortality in a modern and post-modern world.
~Kara Dennison for IndieReader