Following her Miles Franklin-shortlisted Dyschronia, Jennifer Mills’s most recent novel revels in the ‘consciousness of the body’
One of the eeriest things about The Airways is how differently it must read now, in the middle of a global pandemic, than when it was first conceived in 2015. There’s a scene early on, where one of the novel’s protagonists, Adam, is on a crowded train in Beijing, and a man near him “hoick[s] wet phlegm” in the back of his throat. Adam wonders “how long it would take for a person to come into contact with every other person in the city” and “exchange” their viruses and spores. “It would be easy for an epidemic to spread”, he concludes. Adam has a long history of illness anxiety, a constant, background awareness of the small aberrations in his body. And he does “pick something up,” as he puts it, on the train that day – although it is far from the kind of contagion that he suspects.
Adam is ostensibly in Beijing for work – having taught English for a year, he now has a vague, marketing-related job in a company that “delivers bespoke global brand solutions” and is run and staffed almost entirely by foreigners and a handful of “international class” locals. His girlfriend Natasha is one of these locals, and she has recently left him after an unnamed transgression – without her he has few connections here, and no real friends.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3s8WhTy
via
0 Comments