A neuroscientist switches off her daughter Lyra’s life support in the girl’s sixth year, and for the decades that follow she refuses to accept the parting. Working from the brain data preserved at her daughter’s death, she gathers, assembles, sacrifices — trying to bring Lyra back inside a new body.
The novel is built from six chapters, scored as a polyphony of six voices. The first and the last — Genesis and Ascension — both belong to the consciousness of that six-year-old girl: at one end her dying in a white hospital room, at the other her final release and rising, the two ends closing into a single circle. The four middle chapters are given to four different “I”s. Paradise Lost is the account of the mother, Dr. Demithysia. The Burnt Offering comes from Gabriel, the young man who lies down on the pyre of his own accord, willing to be sacrificed. The Passion is told by a vampire who watches, quietly. And Resurrection belongs to the newborn consciousness — moving upstream through Eve, Cain, Icarus, and Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, recognising in layer upon layer of blood the same atrocities staged again and again.
One sacrifice, told over by each of these voices: Gabriel’s willingness, the mother’s fixation, the vampire’s watching, the newborn consciousness’s seeing-through — all of them falling on the same mountain, the same transgression, corroborating and dismantling one another, none of them ever holding the final word. This is a novel about desire, death, and transgression. The mother’s decades of fixation are traced back to the oldest human impulse: reaching for that divine boundary which shows itself only when it is transgressed; and everything she does in the name of love is precisely the one thing her daughter, dying, begged her not to do. Beneath a thin shell of science fiction, the book uses its six chapters — Genesis, Paradise Lost, The Burnt Offering, The Passion, Resurrection, Ascension — to work on ancient questions: possessive love, atonement and redemption, and how a created thing might be allowed to rest. Until, at last, the letting go.
White.
White everywhere, the walls, the sheets, the ceiling. This white is colder than ice; sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s me shivering, or the room shivering along with me.
The lamp on the ceiling is never switched off. Every morning, when I open my eyes, it’s the first thing I see. Its light is cold too, white, a little tired-looking. I stare at it for a long time. I like to think there’s a bird living inside that lamp. A very old bird, shut up in a glass jar, who can’t fly out, who has forgotten how to move its wings. Its heartbeat is slow, then slower, then slower still, and any moment now it’s going to drop right out of the ceiling.
I’ve waited and waited. It never has.
I think white is the colour of sadness. It presses down on me so heavily that even breathing takes effort. I can’t remember anything from before I came here. Mama says I used to live at home, that I had my own room, full of colours, full of toys. I believe her, but I can’t remember any of it on my own. I feel like I was born already living in this white box. Born just like this, white, thin, with little blue lines under the skin. The nurses say that’s where the blood runs around inside.
Sometimes the nurses give me a mirror. There is a girl inside the mirror; when I look at her I feel like the two of us don’t really know each other. A lot of her hair has fallen out; what’s left lies flat against her head, damp. Her lips are as white as paper. Two grey patches under her eyes, as if someone had pressed there with dirty fingers. I smile at her, and she smiles back. But her smile looks worse than crying. So I stop looking at her.
The room smells white too. A little bit of dust, and a little bit of something like rusted iron. The nurses say that’s the disinfectant, that it’s there to chase the bad things out of my body. When they say this, their eyes drift somewhere else; they don’t dare look at me. The smiles on their faces look as if they have been glued on, never quite smiled all the way up into their eyes.
The sadness in their eyes is more honest than the words coming out of their mouths. So I figured out very early that the bad things aren’t going to be chased away. They have moved into my body for good; probably they have even planted some flowers, opened the windows, and got themselves a cat. On this one matter, I am either smarter than the grown-ups, or I am more honest than they are. Either way, I won.
What I have won, I tell only Mama. Mama is the only colour in this white world.
But Mama’s face I can’t read. The nurses’ faces I can read; they’re worried, they’re tired, they’re afraid I might suddenly ask something. All of that I can see. But Mama’s face is different. Mama’s face is like a book too thick for me, with words inside that I haven’t been taught yet. Sometimes when she looks at me, I get a little frightened. I feel like she is standing too high up, high like one of the cliffs in the picture books, and I am the one rope still holding her from falling off.
But I don’t care. When she comes, I’m happy.
When she comes, she carries the smell of the outside on her. It’s a warm smell, the smell I’m almost forgetting now, a little like earth after the rain, a little like the dust that flies up when an old book is opened. She sits at the edge of my bed and holds my hand. My hand is always cold, like a stone left out on a window sill in winter and forgotten. Mama’s hand is the only sun warm enough to make that stone warm again.