by Liane Moriarty ★★★☆☆
Why is it so hard to write a great book that tackles the question of what people would you do if they knew in advance when they would die? Liane Moriarty's latest novel, Here One Moment, attempts to dissect the spectrum of emotions and reactions that would come with that knowledge, but this is not uncovered ground in modern literature. Chloe Benjamin's novel The Immortalists, which follows siblings who are told the date of their death by a circus fortune teller, and Nikki Erlich's The Measure, in which people received a package with a string whose length foretold the remaining duration of their life, both made an attempt at the topic. I moderately enjoyed The Immortalists; BarlinBooks' editor-in-chief Greg hated The Measure. In both cases, a really promising premise suffered from sub-par execution. I was optimistic that in Liane Morarity's skilled hands that the "knowledge of one's own death" question would be more deftly handled. It was not.
The premise follows the story of a delayed Australian flight from Hobart to Sydney. Once the flight is well underway and nearing Sydney an older woman, Cherry, the daughter of a fortune teller (and later known by the media as "The Death Lady") unbuckles her seatbelt and starts going one by one down the aisles prognosticating a cause and age of death for each of the passengers on the plane: "I expect Alzheimer's. Age eighty-nine," "I expect heart failure. Age eighty two." "I expect old age, age one hundred and one." Many people feel reassured by their rather long life spans. Others are shocked, angered, and understandably pained: "I expect assault. Age thirty." "I expect drowning. Age seven."
The first 20% of the novel covers the flight itself and jumps between a few passengers on the plane and Cherry, establishing background by giving us first-person accounts of why they are traveling, what issues they are facing in their life, and their interactions with each other on the plane. Once they disembark and are scattered across Sydney we continue to follow a select number of passengers and Cherry.
Most people initially brush off the incident as charlatanism, but then over the next year reports circulate on social media about a few of the passengers that met their end exactly at the age and in the way that Cherry had foretold. In an interesting twist, Cherry has no recollection of the event, and was seemingly in a trance during the flight, but we also learn that she has had similar visions in her past. A group forms online to unite and track the passengers. Some lash out, seeking to find Cherry and demand a new fortune. Others grapple with what to do with the information they now have. They wonder what steps they can take to prevent their seemingly pre-determined death, and many change the course of their lives.
The concept pulls you in and opens up so many questions and what-ifs, and Moriarty does her usual great job of getting into the psyche of the characters and adding few interesting twists. Unfortunately for me it wound up a bit flat. I'm between a 3 and a 4 on this, but I'll round down as I definitely wouldn't read it again and it wouldn't be a book I would likely recommend if asked for reading suggestions. Skip this one (and The Measure, and The Immortalists) and reach for Moriarty's Apples Never Fall instead, which I found to be a more compelling and complete novel.
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