SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
Okay, so by now if you are still reading this, I have to imagine that you either are familiar with this story already, or perhaps you do not mind the spoilers. Please just don't say that you were not given advanced warning.
Jason Tull, Jr. is the main character, and the narrator throughout the book. He is a young man, and the son of a rich and famous and powerful man. As it turns out, this gives him a sort of identity crisis, as he struggles to find out who he is. Also, he assumes that he is largely invisible, that he can do pretty much anything without anyone really observing or taking note. That will come back to bite him later on, although we'll get to that a little bit later.
Not really knowing what to do with himself, he winds up becoming employed - without pay - to an institute which researches a very rare phenomenon of people who have accidents or some serious trauma, and wake up as someone else. It fascinates him, and he delves fully into it. His family is less than thrilled, feeling that this lacks seriousness and initiative on his part. Yet his Uncle Harry (who may not fully be an uncle, but for all intents and purposes has been that to young Jason) is the one member of the family who seems supportive, although even he seems to believe that this is just a quirk which the young man will likely soon get over before pursuing something more serious in his life. Harry works for the military, and encourages Jason to examine the possibilities of a career with him there, although Jason seems lukewarm at best regarding that idea.
For the most part, work with the Institute is not fruitful. At least not until the case of Mallory Hastings, who has also recently woken up after being in a coma following an accident. Only, she has returned seemingly as someone else, and seems hostile to everyone who had known her before as Mallory Hastings. So Jason goes to visit her in Oneonta, New York, ultimately to try and root out any weaknesses in her story. In short, to find out if she is the real deal. We get the idea that there are very precious few "real" cases where people from the past suddenly find themselves in a new body, with a new identity. That such cases are maybe one in a billion, so very rare. But we find out that Mallory Hastings is one such a case. She really is someone from the distant past, going back two thousand years.
To this point, the story seems maybe a bit unorthodox, but not outrageously different than our world. There are just a couple of hints that something is different, such as Jason having a flat in Tunis, and describing some of that ancient city as having what we would identify as a Muslim feel, even though he takes care to note that it is, of course, not authentic. That in fact, it is a typically French city, other than this architecture, which has been rebuilt and does not date back to the Muslim times. So we know that something is different in this world, although we do not know yet what precisely what it is which makes it so different.
Mallory winds up being Gloria MacArthur, a young black woman who was an artist in her own time, which was just about two thousand years earlier. Also, by her own admission, she slept around quite a lot. But what is most striking is that she reacts to everything and everyone with seeming disdain. That includes Jason, whom she attacks by throwing things at him and accusing him - seemingly inexplicably at first - as being a murderer. We feel as confused as Jason does by this at first, until Mallory/Gloria shares her story.
As it turns out, Gloria was a young black woman in the post-war United States, at a time when that was a very dangerous thing to be. We learn that this world is very different from our own, that history turned out very differently. In the world which Gloria wakes up to as Mallory Hastings, Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany got the bomb first and won the war. He then managed to convince the Allies that the real enemy to fight were the Jews, who are wiped off the face of the Earth. Then they go after the "mongrel races," who also are eventually wiped off the face of this version of Earth. We almost get the impression that the people of this world - all identifying as Aryans in the Nazi German sense - do not even hate these races but just view them as subhuman and thus needing to make way for the superior race of man.
The world has somehow changed very little since then. There are precious few technological advancements, and life still looks and feels very much like it has shortly after the war ended. When Mallory/Gloria asks Jason about this, he explains that the "Aryan paradise" that Mallory has derided makes sense from their perspective. Things are made of top quality, and built to last. The cars and clothes and other aspects of that society which seemed so similar to the way that they were two thousand years earlier is just an acceptance that these were the best, and there is no reason that these post-war Aryans can see for changing them.
Mallory, now fully identifying as Gloria, takes Jason down to the underground (literally) of New York City. Here, she shows him her hiding place and tells him the real story of what happened at the end of the war, which we learn is viewed not as World War II, but as the second part of the Great War. Hitler has won and convinced the Allies nations themselves to weed out the Jews and blacks and other races identified as being subhuman. The process took approximately 700-800 years, and Gloria lived early on in that process, when it was successful in the United States. She was forced to go underground and wound up being one of the last two black survivors of New York City, until eventually, they are discovered. But they commit suicide before being caught.
Jason has discovered the real history of his world. It shocks him and rocks his world, if you will. He simply cannot go back to the comfortable and sheltered life that he has lived before. Yet, he feels an urge to do something, to share this knowledge with the world. He reaches out to a former high school classmate who now works as an editor for the Times and informs him that he has a major story. Also, he goes to an antique bookstore with a book which Gloria has given him from her time, two thousand years earlier. This particular book documents African Americans, and the professional book dealer looks at it and quickly dismisses it with disgust. Despite it being old, he says it has no value, treating it almost as if it were literal trash. Jason then requests to go through some of the other very old books which this book expert has and feels is worthless. After spending some time perusing through them, Jason finds some books which we in our own world view as classics. There is a book from Gertrude Stein, Erich Fromm, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. All of these works have either been dismissed or, in the case of the scientists, have been ripped off with the credit going to scientists who are regarded as Aryans.
Through all of this, Jason has assumed that nobody else is really paying attention, or views him as a threat, or anything. However, someone has been noticing, and it is none other than his Uncle Harry, who pays Jason and Mallory an unexpected visit. He accuses Jason of feeling that he is invisible, and of not knowing who he is. Mallory looks deflated, but Jason nevertheless remains clueless, until the next day, when he is abducted by Harry's strongman and taken to an undisclosed location in the middle of some desert nowhere. There, Jason is forced to stay in a building with no food and just a little water. The only way that he will be taken out of this makeshift prison is by correctly identifying three words to write on a chalk board to satisfy some invisible power that be (presumably Harry, or at least someone working with or under him). Eventually, Jason comes up with these words: No one cares. This new history may have completely altered Jason's world, but his attempts to wake the rest of the world up will ultimately fail. Harry is certain of it.
By the end of the book, we see that Jason still has not given up. He and Harry are sort of rivals, but more like what we would call frenemies. Jason has used his famous family name to open up a gallery-bookstore of art, which introduces the world to some professional photographs from Roy, Gloria's lover and an artist two thousand years earlier. Also, Mallory (as Gloria) is exhibiting her paintings. Finally, we learn that Jason has opened up a publishing house, although there are no original works which the world has not seen yet. All that Jason is doing is republishing long lost works from a world before the Aryans came to dominate it, and effectively becoming the only humans left in it.
The gallery-bookstore seems to be dismissed by most people. The material there is viewed largely as trash. The one seeming success is when somebody throws a rock through the window of the shop. It hardly seems like an obvious sign of success, yet it is proof to Jason that Harry was wrong. Somebody indeed cares. Harry visits the shop and congratulates Jason on this and then hands him a previously unknown notebook in a long extinct European language. He tells Jason that he can publish this, or discard it, whatever he feels is most appropriate. The extinct language ends up being Dutch, and it winds up being the notes of Anne Frank. Jason ultimately decides to have it translated into English and published, making it the first (and to this point only) truly original work which his publishing house has printed.
Of course, fans of Quinn's work will notice the similarities of the "Great Forgetting" in this fictional world with what he identifies as the "Great Forgetting" of our own world. These are ideas which he outlined in his most famous work, Ishmael, as a literally sick tribe obsessed with building walls and locking food and other valuables away taking over other tribes and absorbing them into their own. Effectively, a genocide of sorts. And this tribe, which he calls the Takers in that book, eventually comes to dominate the world, with precious few Leavers -the term he describes for the remaining tribes which resist the dominant Taker culture - left. This Taker culture ultimately evolves to become our own modern society. Quinn warns that this Taker culture is toxic, with ideas and practices which are simply unsustainable for this planet. Thus, we can identify the similarities with those ideas (which he also championed in other works, such as My Ishamel and The Story of B, among others) in this book, as well as the obvious differences.
Ultimately, this book was an enjoyable read and comes highly recommended. My assumption is that it helps if you are familiar with Quinn's other works, which helps to understand his perspective better throughout this book. Still, I suspect that it can stand on its own even if you have no real familiarity with his other works. An interesting read, which reveals another interesting possible reality of a post-war world in which Hitler and the Nazis have won and imposed their worldview on everyone. That is why the book has the title it has, as the new era is called "After Dachau," replacing our own "A.D.," or "Anno Domini" in our own parlance. This might be the most unique take on what a future world might have looked like in the distant future had Hitler won the war.
Take a look if you can. And if you do decide to read this one, I encourage you to share your own thoughts on it here with me.
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