07/18/2016
An experimental drug that enhances creativity propels the intricate plot of this ambitious but lackluster postmodern novel. Separated into three tangentially related sections, the story first follows Ali, the drug’s creator, who has retreated to rural Canada after learning that “Alph” induces suicide in its test subjects. The second section relocates to Rome, where Ali’s father has enlisted a type of literary detective, one of a pair of titular Jameses, to track down Ali by interpreting poems written by one such test subject. Instead of predictably combining the two threads, the story turns to Cecilia, a survivor of a miscarriage and the daughter of the subject likely to be the poet. Structurally, Cecilia and Ali are brought face-to-face too late; the narrative doesn’t fully cohere, though opacity and inscrutability seem to be part of the intent. The novel has flashes of brilliance, but they are few and far between, leaving the reader to wander about in a darkness that seems unnecessary. A formidable mind is on display in these pages, but it obscures the story’s heart. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Sept.)
"Helm's execution is so masterful that it made for one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've had in years . . . After James is a new high-water mark in Helm's already remarkable oeuvre, and solidifies him as one of Canada's most interesting and challenging novelists."
"Dense, fascinating, and genre-defying . . . [After James] not only raises profound questions about the nature of life and imagination in the modern world, but actually dares to answer them."
"Michael Helm’s dazzlingly creative work almost defies categorization. A novel in three distinct, seemingly (or not) unrelated parts, told from different points of view by unreliable narrators with waking dreams. I reveled in the language and the mystery and let it wash over me as I did Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life."
"In After James, Michael Helm brings his acute, soulful intelligence to bear on the question of how we live now. He powerfully evokes the isolation embedded in our relentless hyper-connectedness. He gives us his lonely, disappearing people through a dazzling and intricate array of fictional lenses. The global and the local collapse and expand again. Language reveals its particulate secrets. Patterns are noted (or imagined). He shows us the poignancy in our human need to make sense and the distortions that come from our endless desire for answers."
"Helm’s triptych of characters haunted by menacing intelligences that seem to read their minds at every turn is so menacingly intelligent that I finished it looking over my shoulder to if Helm was reading my mind. And then I turned back to the first page to start reading again. "
"After James is a weird, fantastical read which combines elements of science fiction, mystery, and horror and creates a wholly original and expertly crafted novel and easily one of my favorite reads of 2016."
"After James reminds me of the best of Hawthorne and Poe—Helm crafts a masterful novel with characters whose realities melt around them. Unreliable narrators are child’s play to him: what he creates so vividly are unreliable worlds, stitched together with the creeping assertion that the objects of our perception may be as deceptive as our minds."
"In this kaleidoscopic novel the real and the unreal spiral and collide to reveal just how thin the line between truth and fiction really is. Combining elements or horror, mystery, and sci-fi, Helm has crafted a literary wormhole. Let yourself fall through. You won’t be the same on the other side. "
"After James is a twenty-first century master class in the use of genre to explore our ever-changing, and ever-slipping, grasp on reality. Helm draws on a base of knowledge broad and deep, from etymology to neuropharmaceuticals, from poetry to cybersecurity, to craft three murkily connected tales that point toward the best kind of cosmic disquiet: beyond comprehension and just out of sight."
"By turns harrowing and memorable, Helm’s tales resonate in an age of Internet trolling and corrupt pharmaceutical companies, in which art and science blur ethical boundaries."
11/15/2016
A neuroscientist rebels against her role in the creation of a new drug that boosts creativity with unfortunate side effects and disappears to a remote cabin, where her spooky neighbor may or may not be a dangerous killer. At loose ends, a graduate student manqué accepts a job to become a sort of literary detective, mining a somewhat controversial poetry website for a scholar obsessed with the disappearance of his daughter. A virologist working for a big corporation visits her archaeologist father and is upset to find him obsessed with religion and in thrall to a wealthy artist whose works intrude on her own life. VERDICT Hard nuts to crack, these thematically linked pieces don't resolve easily but form a disturbing triptych of our hunt for answers that turn inevitably into more questions. An inventive and intriguingly demanding work for sophisticated readers from Canadian author Helm (Cities of Refuge).
2016-06-22
Helm (Cities of Refuge, 2010, etc.) creates a claustrophobic atmosphere of surreal unease and technology-fueled horror.The three parts of Helm's novel each present a distinct storyline related tenuously, perhaps, to its neighbors, but they share a vivid tone and an unsettlingly malleable reality. This sense of a world in which science and technology have delivered on our most paranoid imaginings, but in a way that makes life more susceptible to strangeness instead of less, has the odd effect of sealing the narrative tightly inside each protagonist's head. Ali is a scientist who has retreated to an isolated house to work up the courage to blow the whistle on the flawed "creativity drug" that she helped design. James is a failed poet who finds himself hired by a mysterious man and sent to Rome to investigate the meaning of a series of poems posted anonymously on the internet. Celia is a researcher for a drug company who discovers that her scientist father has undergone a conversion to a vague spiritualism at the hands of a manipulative conceptual artist. The details of their stories seem like material for a science fiction thriller, but each character is mired in existential confusions brought on by personal trauma, and the reader is trapped alongside them, in prose that is sometimes excessively reflective and gestural. Despite having murders, geopolitical strife, hacktivists, and secretive anarchist groups, the novel muffles any suspense and momentum. The characters think so hard about their feelings that they don't feel them with any conviction, though Helm often strikes upon perfectly selected details of human interaction. A novel that seems to aspire to a consciously literary emulation of William Gibson but struggles with upsetting passivity.
