Jennifer Mills (1) (1977–)

The Airways is a book that rewards patience and some re-reading.  The reward is that the novel triggers some very interesting ideas.

This is the blurb:

I had a body once before. I didn't always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it.

I knew better than to wish for this.

This is the story of Yun. It's the story of Adam.
Two young people. A familiar chase.

But this is not a love story.
It's a story of revenge, transformation, survival.

Feel something, the body commands. Feel this.
But it's a phantom . . . I go untouched.

They want their body back.

Who are we, if we lose hold of the body?
What might we become?

The Airways shifts between Sydney and Beijing, unsettling the boundaries of gender and power, consent and rage, self and other, and even life and death.

It's only fair to warn you, however, that in the beginning, I could not make sense of it.  I read two chapters at bedtime, put it aside and read something less challenging, and started again in the morning.  Trusting this author whose work I've admired since I read Gone in 2011, I just kept reading and slowly the dual narratives came together to form an intriguing whole.

I hesitate to declare Adam the central character even though the narrative about his physical and mental states in Sydney and Beijing is central to the story.  That's because another narrative that runs alongside Adam's, features a presence in pursuit of him.  They are certainly not a 'character'. This presence is too corporeal to be called a ghost, too diffused to be nameable, and too nonspecific to have a gendered pronoun or one that's singular or plural. The reader learns that we do not need to know this but that we cannot assume that they are or were a non-binary human or even living or dead.

This presence moves among the people who cross their paths, entering strangers' bodies in various ways and gradually learning to master them in some ways, at the very least making them feel uneasy or dizzy without knowing why.  Are they benign?  It seems not.  Some kind of vengeance is in play.

The sequences in Beijing are superbly claustrophobic.  The air pollution we hear about is pervasive: it clings to skin and eyes and throat and airways and there is no escape from it.  Adam's physical vulnerability is exacerbated by his inability to learn even rudimentary Chinese; it makes him dependent on others.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/08/06/the-airways-by-jennifer-mills/… (mais)

I loved this book, and I'm still thinking about it. That's a sign that it has some important things to say, I think. There are also many phrases that I noted as worth re-reading, and adding to my list of cool things written by excellent authors.
The story in this novel is like a cracked mirror - there are shards of time and we don't always exactly know where or rather when we are - but every piece shines with reflections of reality that we almost recognise, but of course everything looks different now that reality has been broken apart and reassembled.
This novel charts the dystopian future of a careless Australia, where the environmental damage is so gross that there is no future to be had. The wondrous, worrying dreams of local girl Samandra (Sam) are dismissed as, Cassandra-like, she debates how much to tell the people around her, people who prefer not to believe. Her mother Ivy in particular is determine dto be head-in-the-sand, spending years trying to have Sam's migraines diagnosed correctly. The resulting pronouncement of 'dyschronia' never quite settles the question, for Ivy, of whether Sam is truly foreseeing the future or just dreaming vividly and strangely. The entrepreneur Ed (who is meant to be charming, but I have pre-raised hackles about this kind of guy) is a credible saviour-cum-villain - or is it villain-cum-saviour? - of the town. Sam's best friend Jill is probably the most likeable of all the characters. I loved the device of the 'chorus' of locals whose comments intersperse Sam's dreams and Sam's story.
Equally prescient of a dire future and nostalgic of the simple ignorance of the past, this elegant story of loss and the inevitability of bad choices deserves an enduring place among the best Australian books of recent years.… (mais)