An incomplete list of recurring motifs found in the novel Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins
- A woman growing a beard. Caught on camera or seen in person, the act is impossible to believe, but its method cannot be understood, by viewers or by the reader. There is weirdness in the world, and we must simply accept it.
- Miracolo. Miracle hands. Hands that make miracles. Art is a miracle. Sport is a miracle. Science is a miracle. All the things that humans do, that touch one another, metaphorically and literally. The urge to reach out a hand to those around you, the only possible reaction to the knowledge of the inevitability of death.
- Tree of heaven—a real type of tree, which I had to look up to be certain of. So much in this book is invented, but feels real, I began to doubt myself on all manner of things. It is an invasive species in the US, fast-growing and hardy, and it outcompetes local species to take up space and resources. The book is set across a huge span of times, thousands of years, on Earth and Mars, but so much of it is in the near future as we see resources dry up and competition become fiercer, and the things that thrive within that environment are not always beneficial to those around them.
- Anne Frank. Subtly at first, and then with strangeness, and then understanding upon which the novel pivots.
- This one weird book about a droplet of water in an arid, dried-up future Earth. The droplet dies at the end, but that ending is considered happy. How people respond to the book, the art they make themselves after having read it. The life of the author, and what that drove him to, the rippling effects on his family down the years, and the people they interacted with, spreading out and out across geography and time.
- Tattoos. Medical tattoos, weird tattoos, tattoos that are art and books and crimes and innovations. The body as a canvas and a battleground. Who owns the body? No, really, who owns that one specific body they want to drop into the sea for science?
- Weird art. Sometimes on bodies, living or dead, but not always.
- An address in New York—7 Tailor Lane, the Diamond Exchange, which I don't know if it's real or not. I don't want to look it up. I want to preserve some of the mystery, knowing as I do that the author has inserted so many absolutely plausible bits of fiction, alongside the obvious truths and obvious lies. But seeing one physical location recur, even as its occupants are recorded over and over in obituaries, makes them more poignant, and even more so when the building, as a sidenote in another story, gets its own obituary of a sort. Death comes for things beyond the living.
- The tree that falls in the forest with no one to hear it. Is it a tree of heaven? Any kind of tree, really. The witness of a human to its suffering is not required for that suffering and death to matter, or be real.
- Witness and martyrdom. Witnessing in all the senses. Obituary is an act of witness, speaking for those who can no longer speak for themselves. It reminded me of, in The Goblin Emperor, the witnesses vel ama, whose role is to speak for people and things, whether the dead or the inanimate, whose voices matter within a particular frame of reference, but who cannot speak for themselves. But the reader is also the witness. Obituary is a reflexive verb; the subject becomes the object eventually. Memento mori is also memento testis fieri. Testis, testis (n.), witness, but also just a third party, as we are to the story, as we must become, through the passage of time. We must all bear witness.
- Etymologies—are these real, or very well faked? I don't know. Does it even matter? They felt real, and more critically, after we are given each thematically appropriate etymology for the moment in the story, we get examples of sentences in which the words are used. In these sentences, we find the only examples of the voice of Peregrine, searching for her daughter, and then simply for meaning. As if meaning can be found in looking back through time like that, simply cataloguing fleeting moments of existence and pinning them down to the page. Wait. Am I talking about obituaries or etymologies?
- The fictional virgin Wilgefortis. Is she real-world fictional, or fictionally fictional? Does this matter? I suppose that's becoming a theme within the themes—it is increasingly difficult, as the story progresses, to unpick which pieces the author has invented and which have been pulled from history. It would be possible to look them all up, as I did for quite a few in the beginning, but I decided the story is better if I believed in all of them, even the ones I knew were false, as long as the narrative wanted me to. Stories do not need to be gutted and pickled, each organ in its own labelled bottle of formaldehyde, and some stories yearn to live in their own mystery more than others. This feels to me like one of those stories. It does not resist explanation, but perhaps resents it. It didn't need to be explicable to have meaning that mattered to me as a reader.
- Art as meaning, or lack of meaning. The relationship it has with the artist and the
witnessobserver. It makes sense that so many of the people discussed in the story would be artists—they seem, more than many, to be whom we expect to see memorialised. They matter. Even the small ones whose art touches only a few lives. Art weaves itself through the story, constantly, but especially art being destroyed, lost or found again. Art as a vector for ideas of memory and legacy, and being forgotten. There is something particularly poignant in the art being found of a child taken too early, whose gift was unknown to everyone around her. Her loss is in the loss of the art she did not create. - The having, or not having, of children. Who can have children, whose womb can be used to bear children, in whose body, being a transgressive act. This feels apt right now, but has always been. It made me think of Dreams Before the Start of Time by Anne Charnock, imagining changes in reproductive science and the culture around it in vignettes going on into the future. This may be a story told in death, but aren't we always concerned with whom the dead do (or do not) leave behind them. She is survived by her parents. His husband. Their many friends. Her daughter. Obituaries are, so the story says at one point, for the living after all.
- Forgetting, being forgotten, leaving nothing behind. Because in a story about the ways we remember, there is naturally the negative space in which we consider what has been lost.
- Memorial/legacy are the natural contrast, of course. And it goes without saying that a book written in obituaries is concerned with memorials. The Latin "mori" again, in there though it's not related (sometimes what looks like etymology is just a coincidence, and not all puzzles have such easy solutions). The very earliest snippet in the story is not an obituary at all, but a collection of translated Roman tombstones, just as heartbreaking as ever they are to read. People have always been people, and always grieved the dead. It is always useful to remember that some things do exist that connect us through time like this. They reminded me of Three Eight One by Aliya Whiteley in that there's no commentary on those tombstones, but their position within the story feels very pointedly to say part of what she does in her story, that connections exist, reaching backwards and forwards through time. But the absence of commentary reminds us that we are, sometimes, on our own trying to understand them, and we cannot verify if our connection back to the past is truly the one we believe it to be.
- Obituaries. The previous point being said, very nearly the whole story is told through obituaries, of people connected to other people connected to other people, all through history. They are the real story; this is a book about people. But in the background as well, there's another story, a mother/a machine/a monster on the run, hunted down by law enforcement and fanatics. A mother who has lost her daughter, and is hunting for her too, even as she is hunted. At every moment in the book, the focus is only on someone no longer living. How can a story have action, if all the participants are dead? But maybe stories don't need action, and the three-act structure is so passé. We're not so gauche as to need any direct actions, and can subsist quite happily instead on remembrances, if done well. The kind that tell us not only about the deceased, nor even just about the person who writes about them, but about their world, and about the perceived reader. Worldbuilding relegated to the margins of an often marginal form of writing—in the assumptions the reader would surely already have, and the gaps we see formed by those assumptions in our own understanding. Infodumps and exposition are surely even more passé than action?
- Flowers. Poppies. Where has Poppy gone? Peregrine is searching for her daughter Poppy, who committed suicide and then ran away. The image of the poppy, a symbol of pain and war and death, often paired with the rose and all its many meanings and associations. But the poppy is also life coming out of death, when the flowers grow on the churned-up mud of the battlefield. Symbols (or motifs) can have multiple meanings.
- Femininity. Or rejection thereof. Women through history whose place was forged in pain and determination. Throwing piss out of windows and being run over by a hansom cab. Deliberately having a sex scandal with a politician and getting oneself arrested just to get the publicity to keep your business afloat after a strange stage artist does a magic trick that didn't make any sense and ruined the whole act.
- Absence of understanding, in which is contained, right in the middle of the story, a dramatic crux that passes by almost without fanfare. One of the most dramatic, obvious unrealities of the story, that makes you sit up and ask "wait, what?" is the product of that misunderstood artist, a stage magician doing real... well, not quite magic, or maybe it is. We'll never know, after she was booed off stage. But her art, magic, science, whatever it is, changes history. Except that, once it got changed, history had never changed at all, because no one remembered the difference except her.
- Escape, of all kinds. The physical, the emotional and the metaphorical. Peregrine escapes capture and danger again and again, in the margins and the background of the story, back and forward through time.
- Faked deaths are a subset of the above, as a kind of escape. But at least one of them is also a kind of performance art.
- Real deaths. Likewise.
- Escaping, or at least postponing, death. Which is only possible up to a point, as per the book's title.
- Grief, which is inevitable, after that inevitable death. It can't be avoided, only understood. Perhaps by looking at etymology after etymology, trying to sift meaning out of the building blocks of human understanding.
- Acceptance which comes after the process of grief, though probably not as a direct result of any specific activity, just through the passage of time.
- Inevitability. That passage of time, for one. But, as the cover says, of death.
- Uncertainty, which is at odds with that inevitability, but when so many people manage to fake their deaths, you can never quite trust the particulars, even if, broadly speaking, we know it comes for them eventually. Obituaries are written by people, and so are flawed as they are, whether by bias, misunderstanding or a lack of complete facts.
- AI. Maybe I should have said this one sooner, given how central it is to the plot, and that it's right there on the back cover blurb. Peregrine, who has lost her human daughter Poppy, is an AI. How does that work? Well, that takes quite a few obituaries to explain, but is well worth the explanation when you get there. And it's more satisfying to learn piecemeal, at least in my opinion, as each detail falls into place when linked to the person who made it happen. Peregrine and Poppy's lives are a tapestry of many, many threads of connection with all these (dead) people, and can —or perhaps should— only be understood by witnessing them as individuals, whose brief moment in the spotlight recognises them as the main character in their own story, not just a bit player in a wider tale.
- What does it mean to be a person? Who gets to be one? AI stories always tackle this one, but it's not just the AI we're examining that about here, and not just in the trite way of turning it on its head and asking what truly makes us human. Everything Eden Robins does, through every part of this book, turns on subtlety, and no more so than here. This is a question without a clear answer given in the text, and all the better (as most things tackling the big themes are) for not presuming to have one at all. Experience Peregrine's life, and the lives of those around her, and decide for yourself.
- The relationship between humanity and mortality. Which is critical to that above question. Is mortality necessary for the definition of humanity? It's a thesis put forward, and not a novel one, though one worth considering all the same. By telling a story in obituaries, by putting death and the finity of life front and centre, the story considers that these lives can only be told in their absence, that their completion is critical to the telling.
- And so, the ending. All endings. The story ended before it was begun. All action was viewed from a detached future point of resolution, and it was all entirely gripping nonetheless. It takes a skilled author to handle something like this, and keep each individual text worthwhile and still a meaningful piece of the whole, but Robins manages it all the way through. She plays with format, prose style and voice constantly, and is willing to let meaning take its time to develop, without the last quarter panic crescendo common to so many stories. Every single obituary is a full text, and forms into a sum greater than its many, many parts, that is well worth the time spent reading it.
Reference: Robins, Eden. Remember You Will Die [Sourcebooks Landmark, 2024].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social