The Age of Miracles
Karen Thompson Walker
Random House
This was the book so far this summer that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.
The Age of Miracles is the story, told in the first person by 11-year-old Julia, about the circumstances of her life, and the lives of the rest of the world, when – for unexplained reasons – the Earth’s rotation begins to slow down. The effects are omni-present and omni-directional: sunrise and sunset take place at unexpected times; days go from 24 hours to 32 to 48 to whatever; gravity deepens resulting in birds falling from the sky and, less importantly (or more, depending on your inclination), baseball turns into lawn bowling; whales and dolphins beach themselves in what could be mass suicides due to the shifting of currents and magnetic fields; trees and plants die, and this includes crops.
But while the macro view is incomprehensible, the micro is perfectly understandable.
Julia is becoming an adult and, against this seemingly cataclysmic backdrop, is concerned more about boys and friends. Her parent’s marriage is slowly disintegrating as the struggles of daily life and the enormous pressures of what could be end days grind them to powder. As Julia frets over her wardrobe or her response to potential boyfriend Seth’s sullen demeanor, the adult world is dividing between those who want to live their lives according to the new circadian rules and those who want to stick to the old 24-hour clock, the “real timers”.
Julia’s immediate neighbourhood is the microcosm for the macrocosm. The few folks who decide to become “real timers” are ostracized. They can be seen tending to their gardens or soaking up the sun’s rays while the rest of the neighbourhood is ensconced behind the blackout drapes, pretending that it’s night in the 24-hour clock. Yet Julia discovers, thanks to the telescope her scientist father gave her, that her Dad is having an affair with her piano teacher across the way, the woman from whom Julia is taking lessons – a crunchy granola, back-to-the-earther who lives (or doesn’t) to regret her choice.
My first impression as I waded into this fairly short novel was that Julia’s voice seems strangely familiar. Then I realized why. It sounds very much like the narrative voice of Alice in The Good Bones, that kind of innocent openness that just begs for someone to say, “Wake up! This is not what you think it is!” But that impression fades fairly quickly and you can’t help but find yourself drawn into the world that Karen Thompson Walker has created.
Like The Good Bones, it’s impossible not to see this becoming a movie at some point, but that’s almost incidental. Some books are written expressly to become movies, this one wasn’t. At least I don’t think it was. And, of course, there’s not a happy ending. Bruce Willis doesn’t arrive to stop the asteroid. Chris Reeves doesn’t fly backwards around the equator to speed up the Earth’s rotation again. But the narrative and it’s inevitable ending will still engross you without the suicidal feelings that were engendered by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Check out the promotional video, which quite brilliantly pulls the precise excerpt from the book and nails the face of Julia (I think, at least):
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