Book #8 of 2022:
The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier
There’s a fine sci-fi premise to this 2020 French novel (released in English translation the following year), but I don’t know — something about the enterprise just leaves me cold. Partly the problem is that author Hervé Le Tellier takes far too many pages to actually get to the point, and when he does, it’s not an especially unique one. As is often the case when a “literary” writer dabbles in genre fiction, it feels a bit as though he’s reinventing the wheel, bringing up the same philosophical questions that have long been explored, without pushing forward to any new insight or noteworthy twist. A few of the political sections read as overly-broad satire, too.
At the risk of spoilers: 200 people aboard an ordinary passenger plane travel through a storm of unusually severe turbulence, only to be rerouted and detained by nervous officials. Once on the ground, they eventually learn that they are months later than when they departed, and that a version of their flight has already arrived on schedule. Everyone now has a doppelgänger, and the original set have continued to live their lives like normal. As they are brought together face-to-face, Le Tellier asks: who has a better claim to be the real ones? And how will each pair split their existence and belongings and relationships now? Scrape away the showy airplane details, and you’ll find the same concerns featured in any story about cloning or transporter malfunctions written over the past half-century or more. It’s competent, but seemingly content to rest where a Stephen King or a Michael Crichton or any writer on Star Trek could have carried the concept much further, at least in this reader’s opinion. Even the suggestion of a most likely explanation behind the anomaly, that the characters are all programs in an advanced simulation of reality, is delivered without particular follow-through.
The pacing is off too, as noted above. The entirety of Part I, which is almost half the book, is given over to a sequence of vignettes about these strangers, connected merely by the tenuous circumstance of having shared a bumpy jet ride back in March. When the duplicates land in June, we then follow up with them and watch as they’re presented with how their opposite selves have changed in the meantime. Some have found fame, others have kindled or lost a romance, and one has even committed suicide. That’s the most poignant aspect of the title, and why I’m rating it as highly as three-out-of-five stars, but it’s too bogged down in less interesting minutiae to soar as it might have if the plot had started at the landing.
[Content warning for gun violence, torture, gore, homophobia, incest, and sexual abuse of a child.]
★★★☆☆
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