To Paradise: Winding road to utopia is riddled with dead ends – Independent.ie

In its tale of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist convicted of paedophilia, Hanya Yanagiharas first novel, The People in the Trees, introduced her as a novelist with a gift for the subversive. But it was her second that took the Hawaiian author to a different plane.

A Little Life told of Jude, a successful New Yorker who could never overcome the effects of his childhood trauma. Some found the book overly gratuitous, others darkly beautiful. It was celebrated by some as the great gay novel, criticised by others for its omission of 9/11. Nothing impeded its Booker shortlisting, or its route to million-copy bestsellerdom. These days it is enjoying a resurgence on TikTok, where users record their swooning, tearful, angry or admiring reactions. Ive never wanted to unread a book more in my life, claims one TikTokker as she sobs before camera. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is my favourite book, says another.

It is hard to imagine similarly charged responses to Yanagiharas third book, To Paradise, which, at 700-odd pages is almost as long but nowhere near as emotionally rousing as her last. The three parts that comprise the book read like three separate novels, with oddly placed linking elements. Its mayhem, so buckle up.

First, were in an alternative version of America in 1893. New York is part of the Free States, where homosexuality is the norm, but only white people can live there. A stilted old-fashioned register introduces David Bingham, a still almost-young man who is heir to the Bingham fortune. He has been promised to a suitor much older than him, but when a poor music teacher enters his life, everything he believes about the world is thrown into disarray.

Layered with allegory

Next, we are in 1993 Manhattan. Another David (or is it the same one, reincarnated? Perhaps its a descendent of our first David, though we are told he descends from the last monarch of Hawaii) has just received a letter from his long-lost father. He defers reading it out of dread, or more likely because the plot demands such deferral so we can be filled in on his relationship with an older man whose former lover wishes to be euthanised.

The Aids epidemic is alluded to repeatedly but never really affects the storyline. For the reader (at least for this reader), the feeling that there is something we are supposed to be getting, but are not quite, is a constant. When we finally get around to the letter, it tells of Davids childhood, the colonisation of Hawaii, his fathers mental decay and a doomed utopian project to live off the grid in Lipo-Wao-Nahele. Its layered with allegory but is too chaotic to impart its meaning successfully.

Finally, the third section is set in New York at the end of this century. Climate disaster and recurring pandemics have led to totalitarian rule. There are curfews, checkpoints, containment camps for those with diseases. We follow Charlie, a young woman who lives in Zone Eight, and C, a government scientist.

The book seems to play with the butterfly effect: examining what the world might look like if small tweaks were made to history. (Or, in the case of the third section, focusing on how certain elements of the present might define how the future looks). Naturally, a lot of artistic licence is employed. The main through line is the theme of utopia. Paradise recurs in various guises. To some, it is freedom, to others safety, touch, love, wealth, death, legacy, a fresh start, a suicide bomb. In some ways, the utopian impulse was also explored in A Little Life, as its characters danced around the ephemeral notion of happiness. But To Paradise comes at it in a decidedly different way. It almost reads like 18th century satire. Like Voltaires Candide or Swifts Gulliver, a young naf goes out in search of the best of all possible worlds and discovers it is always beyond reach: one persons utopia is anothers dystopia. As in these Enlightenment texts, the characters and storylines feel more like vessels for ideas than real people and stories.

Unfortunately, this storytelling mode obscures most of what makes Yanagiharas writing good. The book felt beefy and convoluted and it was not until the third section that I felt drawn to read on.

Charlies sections are narrated in the first person. The tone is detached. She has experienced an illness that altered her brain chemistry, so she finds it hard to feel. The state, in any case, does not allow for individual expression. She wonders if it was possible that I was actually not who I thought I was.

But through her emotionless register, humanity creeps through. She is certain she will never be loved, and will never love, either. But then a man (named David, of course) enters her life and the feeling I had when I stood at the north of the Square, watching him wave awakens something in her. Was I able to feel it after all? she asks herself. Was what I had always assumed was impossible for me something I had known all along?

The book attempts to interrogate the bind between humanity and idealism but the third section is the only one that does so effectively. It is Charlies voice, and the irony of her emotionlessness inspiring emotion in the reader, thats the kicker. Had the book consisted of this section alone, it would have made for a decent work of speculative fiction. As a whole, though, To Paradise demands far more from the reader than it gives back. Like all ambitious, utopian projects, it feels nothing like Utopia, really.

Fiction: To Paradise by Hanya YanagiharaPicador, 720 pages, hardcover 16.99; e-book 9.99

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To Paradise: Winding road to utopia is riddled with dead ends - Independent.ie