The Singer’s Gun by Emily St John Mandel

The first we hear of Anton Waker, he is presumed dead.  The murderer, probably,  is his cousin,  Aria Waker– so close as to be almost his sister, older by six months, and his idol growing up. We discover, moreover, that they had worked together selling counterfeit American passports, and this passport business probably had something to do with a girl who was found dead in a shipping container.

The Singer’s Gun is Mandel’s answer to the challenge of writing a travel novel after 9/11 – “the travel book you read while making your way through this new, alarming world.” Mandel’s last novel also had an element of danger in it, but this time around, the danger is palpable from the very beginning. What is constant between the two books is the notion that by leaving some place, it is possible to leave behind who you have always been. It is a romantic vision of what travel could be like – from before when international air travel became commonly available and therefore banal – but also starkly terrifying.

The novel beings with Alexandra Broden’s recorded phone call. Within a few pages, Anton’s marriage with Sophie falls apart spectacularly on the second to last day of his honeymoon. The story unfurls, without any linear timekeeping to keep it together, but rather as one idea leads to another. Each new episode answers the one preceding. Themes and images float back into view with new focus, as if Mandel had strung together the story like a series of free jazz solos.

On top of the masterful pacing is Mandel’s superb command of voice. The writing sometimes sees into the Elena’s mind, often into Anton’s – so much as to slip into his first person at points – but keeps its distance from Sophie, Aria, and Broden, as sensitively portrayed as they are. The reader learns to love or feel indifferent to Sophie – or love or hate Aria – the way Anton does, but learns to love Anton as Elena does.

For this is also a love story. There is of course the murder/mystery/thriller about which I will give away no more, but it is above all about what it means to be who you are. It is a story about identity told about a man who used to sell forged identity papers, and hangs a fraudulent degree from Harvard in his office. For love in this story is being able to explain without artifice what it was like when you grew up, and with the expectation of being understood.

And it struck him instantly as the most obvious, possibly even the most important question you could ever ask anyone – How were you formed? What forged you? – but nobody had ever asked him that before, and for a second he found himself flailing in the dark. It was corrupt. It was beautiful.

And so here Anton falls in love.

The Singer’s Gun really turns out to be about everything – everything in the Spinozist sense, where God hadn’t so much created everything but simply was everything – everything in the broadest possible sense of the word. There is Anton’s mother teaching him Spinoza’s [assertion] of the holiness of everything. Elena had come to New York in the first place to study astrobiology. There is a meditation on the killing of a 4900-year-old:

Elena’s mind wandered. Four thousand nine hundred years ago, glass had just been invented in western Asia. The first cup of tea was being brewed in China. … A pine cone fell to the ground and produced a minute sapling in the mountains, and you can count the rings yourself – four thousand nine hundred years after the pine cone fell, a tiny dusty slice of the trunk hangs in a bar in Nevada.

After reading that passage, I would follow Mandel’s prose anywhere, through any story. Together with her spectacular prose is her Nabokovian command of detail in her world-making: the state of decay of New York City’s water system; how a shipping container is modified to smuggle young women across the Atlantic; the color of a cat’s fur in one light or in another.

What is at stake in The Singer’s Gun is not only the present but the past and the future, the living as well as the dead, the light as well as the darkness. The sense you get from this unusual travel novel, this mysterious mystery, is how wonderful the world is. That there may be myriad compromises and disappointments, but the overwhelming sense of it is that everything is beautiful and worthwhile.

Reviewed by James Liu

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St John Mandel
Unbridled Books, 2010
Cloth, 287 pp, $24.95
ISBN-13: 9781936071647