Heather's The World Is Too Much With Us, Lady Soon

Heather's latest effort, The World Is Too Much With Us, Lady Soon, is a compellingly bizarre novel. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, The World follows Maruyama Natsue, a lecturer in poetry at the Federal University teaching an introductory class in "pre-Restoration poetry" (that is, poetry dating from before the permanent re-establishment of national-level governments in the Western Hemisphere, commonly dated to the Mexico City Conference). Scattered through the book are the poems that Maruyama teaches her students, and it is obvious to the reader that the poems have been handed down through some sort of oral tradition that has allowed errors to creep in. Heather gets a lot of mileage out of the difference between the poems as we know them and the poems as Maruyama teaches them—sometimes the changes are slight, but inevitably meaning is both lost and found in the new poems, sometimes to an astonishing degree. Her students have delightfully idiosyncratic and amusing reactions to the texts, usually awkward and forced, but sometimes containing rare insight.

Interspersed with classroom scenes are passages from an extended conversation Maruyama carries on with an unnamed interlocutor. Walking through Hyde Park, by turns they discuss deep questions and bicker like old friends. Maruyama is taking some sort of personal risk by talking to the man, but we never learn the source of the risk or why she accepts it. Is he a lover? A relative? A political dissident? Merely a friend? The conversation meanders and loops back on itself, giving a sense of stasis and futility. There is something they cannot bring themselves to say, and so they circle it endlessly. What is it that has left them without the words, or without the will to say what needs to be said?

I felt like a detective as I sifted through Maruyama's syllabus looking for clues. But nothing is ever resolved in The World, and when Maruyama and her conversational partner finally make their way to a Tube station, they get on trains going in opposite directions, whisked away from each other in a world struggling to find its way, by flawed memory, in the dark.