Review: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

I have a slim bookshelf of plague fiction. It's an unsettling corner of my library, one that shines a light on human self-interest and indifference. Of course there's Camus' Plague and Saragamo's Blindness.  The Flame Alphabet shares a lot with these books - like them, it is full of things from the world we know. Telephones and copper wires. Cars, houses, trees, and children. But it also contains things that are not of this world - mysterious illnesses that stem from children's speech, holes in the woods that carry sermons to lonely worshippers.

As a work of largely experimental fiction (it's encouraging and a little hard to believe how many mainstream outlets blurbed the book), The Flame Alphabet suffers from a certain almost autistic emotional coolness. I found this much more readable than Marcus' earlier book, The Age of Wire and String, in part because the author does an astonishing job capturing the confusing, destructive love of parenting. Characters labor in ignorance long after you know what's causing their illness, and when ignorance no longer serves, they turn to denial for comfort.

For me, the passages in which the book treats language as a real thing are most engaging. For much of the second part of the book, we see minute descriptions of the act and effects of writing. These are captivating, and one begins to see the world slightly differently. The proliferation of signs and messages in the semiosphere takes on a quality of menace. William S. Burroughs described language as a virus and Marcus carries that idea to an extreme point, giving readers a world in which symbiosis is no longer the routine and where overexposure has catastrophic consequences.

What do we get from reading plague literature? From Camus, I got a strange reassurance of the agency and fundamental goodness of mankind. From Saragamo, I got horror - a sense of how we are ultimately wired to take advantage of any situation. From Marcus, I get a sense of the destructive power of love, of our unwillingness to leave a toxic situation long after it has begun to kill us. I could wish for an ending to the book, and for the resolution of many of its open questions about the motivations and outcomes of characters' actions, but I am satisfied with what I got: a thoughtful consideration of language, an allegory of parental misery, and a chance to ask myself, in a disaster like the plague described here, who which one of these characters would I be?