It isn’t clear when this happened to her; perhaps it happened to everyone at once. But at some point the internet became more real than the physical world. There was a time when it seemed like a dream – an implausible thing with uncertain implications. And then suddenly it was everything. There are people, she knows, who don’t use it, who have no presence on it, who can’t be searched for, who can only be accessed by going to their house and knocking on their door. But these people are the dream now. They’re like ghosts. (Familiar p50)
Reading these words so soon after ‘Memory Palace’ felt strange and completely appropriate. J. Robert Lennon’s new novel Familiar is the story of Elisa Macalaster Brown, a woman who believes she has somehow crossed the boundary into a parallel universe. As a serious exploration of an inexplicable event, this is a speculative novel of rare quality: mysterious and unsettling, rendered in a clear and pragmatic language that acts as a perfect counterpoint to the inherent weirdness of the story.
Yet Familiar is also Familial – and Lisa’s story works just as effectively as a novel of family, as an account of a family falling apart. That Lisa is finally unable to distinguish which of her existences is in fact the ‘real’ one is a persuasive and elegant illustration of both the concept of inviolable selfhood and the inevitable and corrosive forces of entropy.
A short, powerful, beautiful and compelling novel of character that deserves to become a science fiction classic.
