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Jenni Fagan’s satirical fifth novel, The Delusions, opens with an epigraph from the Kurt Vonnegut-inspired science fiction curiosity Venus on the Half-Shell by Philip José Farmer. “The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.” The afterthought leaks back into the original statement, underpinning and undermining everything.
Infinity and eternity are both unavoidably present in The Delusions, which takes place in a vast anteroom to the afterlife, “the largest soul terminus in existence”. It’s the metaphysical equivalent of a big-box store, where they help you sort your false perceptions of yourself from what you actually were, before you’re Processed and sent on to whatever comes next (or, should you fail the Questionnaire, Dissolved on the spot). Though to be honest, no one in Processing is certain what that next thing is.
The queues have always been long, volatile of temper and, like life, full of the angry, the entitled and the afraid. But lately things are getting worse. It’s possible the wider universe has grown sick of the human race, and the Earth is being wound down. In consequence, ribbons of dead people wind across the infinite floor of Processing; unable to cope with the overload, the Leaderboard goes mad and can’t be fixed. Something is happening, up here, down there, and in the broader continuum. The Processing floor is suddenly full of a million cats, and things are increasingly not what they seem.
The Delusions fizzes with impatience, invention and humour. Fagan’s targets are exactly what we’d hope: greed, politics, celebrity. Smartphone culture. Fantasy culture. The billionaires, the media, the “conversation”. Always and especially, anyone who thinks that by giving themselves up to the digital simulacrum they can evade not just inevitable death but actual life. The process of expelling delusional systems like these is grotesque. They must be wrestled out of the victim’s body in public, as live and slimy eels. Instantly, everyone else in the Processing queue knows who you are: mass murderer, rapist, corrupt CEO, procurer of underage girls. They know what you did, and how you hid it from yourself. And that’s before you’re asked the really embarrassing questions. So, Processing isn’t heaven. It’s more like a cross between Heathrow security the day before Christmas and a job centre on a damp Monday somewhere in Wolverhampton.
The staff, however they feel about the work, haven’t time to interact with you. Your Processor, or Admin, is called Edi. Edi died of cancer, and she’s been working here ever since. Her advice to the newly dead is to concentrate on identifying their self-delusions, and not to waste time – hers or that of the applicants in the queue behind them. Don’t ask your Admin if she’s watched your favourite film. “I haven’t but if I did I’d probably think it was shit.” Edi’s been here a long time, she’s easily irritated and all she cares about is her own son. “He was my life, my heart,” she says – because admitting who you are and owning it are the central issues here – “the better part of me by far.” He’s still alive down there, she firmly believes, and he’ll soon be in the queue. It’s a major breach of Admin protocol to keep an eye out for him, but how can she not?
Edi is doing her best as a narrator, but she can become a little tiring. Her monologue is all we have, and it is so rammed with information about everything, from the details of Admin organisation to the ambivalent wooshy structures of the Universal Beyond. She has to act as agent for the author’s whole worldbuilding effort. Consequently, other characters can feel a bit thin and transparent, even for dead people. As earthbound readers, not even dead yet, we’d sometimes like Edi to take the odd breath, be less hectically determined to put everything into words, show us something we could look at directly. It would be easier to process it all. But generally we’re laughing or wincing too much to care.
At the beginning, it’s difficult not to think of The Delusions as a version of the Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death, its paternalistic values and hierarchies slyly reversed. But soon the values of the afterlife, as Edi describes them, begin to seem delusory, a spectacle managed by shady, hypocritical overlords. As below, so above. Later, a kind of celebratory pathos replaces satire as the main engine of the novel, and we’re left with a momentary feeling that Edi has never been what she thought she was, and her delivery, with its rants and repetitions, has been the cleverly simulated monologue of a restless spirit who hasn’t yet cast off her own delusions. We’re uplifted, but it’s part of Fagan’s genius to make even the uplift seem fragile, uncertain, wishful.
The Delusions by Jenni Fagan is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
