I don't know much about Michael Cunningham beyond the fact that The Hours was one of my favourite books last year; I was impressed that he'd elevated Virginia Woolf fanfiction into a publishable art, and thoroughly enjoyed the book. Specimen Days is quite similar to The Hours in some ways: it's about three people with intertwined fates, it tells three stories set in three different time periods, and it's tightly woven around an existing text. In this case, however, it's not Mrs Dalloway that forms the thematic heart of the story: it's Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
The three stories that make up this book are not told side-by-side, but in succession: first the one set in the nineteenth century, then the one set in the present, and then the one set in the future. All three use New York as their setting in a way that turns the city into the fourth protagonist (the fifth one, of course, being Whitman's poetry); I've seen this done successfully for London -- China Meiville does it all the time -- but never for an American city, except in the realms of television. (It could be that I just don't read a lot of American literature.)
The three protagonists -- Luke, Catherine and Simon -- do not appear in one narrative each; all of them show up, in different bodies and situations, in all three stories, although they take it in turns to be the central character. Luke's story is that of a boy who becomes convinced that his dead brother is speaking to the world through machines. Catherine's is of a forensic psychologist trying to prevent the actions of a child suicide bomber. And Simon's -- my personal favourite -- is of a man who's not quite human, on the run with a woman who's definitely an alien, in search of answers and a future. The three characters are always linked together by some form of love or other, and the poetry is always there, always spoken, always vitally important. Each of the book's sections could stand alone as a story, but it's only when they're lined up and you can see the people and objects and motifs that connect them that this becomes a novel rather than a collection.
As you might expect from the use of Whitman, this is by and large a book about poetry, and about the idea of America. It's about the isolation of individual lives, and about the interconnectedness of the world. I love the way Cunningham writes; his prose is beautiful without ever feeling heavy or overdone, his worldbuilding is wonderful to experience and his characters are complex and engaging. I wouldn't call it a page-turner and I certainly wouldn't call it uplifting, but it's a good book for reading slowly and just letting the ideas at the heart of it spill over you.
The three protagonists -- Luke, Catherine and Simon -- do not appear in one narrative each; all of them show up, in different bodies and situations, in all three stories, although they take it in turns to be the central character. Luke's story is that of a boy who becomes convinced that his dead brother is speaking to the world through machines. Catherine's is of a forensic psychologist trying to prevent the actions of a child suicide bomber. And Simon's -- my personal favourite -- is of a man who's not quite human, on the run with a woman who's definitely an alien, in search of answers and a future. The three characters are always linked together by some form of love or other, and the poetry is always there, always spoken, always vitally important. Each of the book's sections could stand alone as a story, but it's only when they're lined up and you can see the people and objects and motifs that connect them that this becomes a novel rather than a collection.
As you might expect from the use of Whitman, this is by and large a book about poetry, and about the idea of America. It's about the isolation of individual lives, and about the interconnectedness of the world. I love the way Cunningham writes; his prose is beautiful without ever feeling heavy or overdone, his worldbuilding is wonderful to experience and his characters are complex and engaging. I wouldn't call it a page-turner and I certainly wouldn't call it uplifting, but it's a good book for reading slowly and just letting the ideas at the heart of it spill over you.
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