REVIEW: THE MARIGOLD
As a classification within popular culture, "dystopian" is crumbling like a hastily built condo. Rising in popularity since the turn of the millennium, dystopian fictions were beloved as grimy sets of binoculars through which to view possible, far-off futures that were a culmination of our contemporary ills. Future-set disaster fiction offered a way of considering our own demise and collapse in a way that allowed for both escapism and earnestness.
We've arrived at a place, however and unfortunately, where worst-case scenarios feel more imminent, if not present. Dystopian, colloquially a term to describe fiction, is being used to describe reality. In the same way that things got bad enough with language for "literally" to absorb "figuratively" into its meaning, "dystopian" is more and more just resembling our everyday.
In Andrew F. Sullivan's new novel, you could cut into a soup can and then slice a tomato with how sharp the line between dystopia and reality is. Set in a "near-future" Toronto where abandoned automated streetcars lurch through the city, where the only jobs not in tech or real estate or online cam work are driving for ride or delivery apps, where sinkholes swallow whole communities, where racoons are biding their time on the fringes of domination, where human sacrifice is an essential step of groundbreaking, where a deadly, consuming mold--called "The Wet," when it's talked about at all--is growing and thriving in new and neglected condo towers, The Marigold is a sort of doomed Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and deserves a place beside that chestnut as a portrait of Canadian life. This is how life is here now.
For all the far-out horrors on offer here--horror fans, get on board for what will surely be a standout of the year--Sullivan grounds his book in the surrealism of our confirmed, shared reality. Second to an epigram from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, he sticks a quote from ex-mayor of Toronto Rob Ford, which may as well be an epitaph for the city, or Ontario, or Canada, or for culture on the whole: "Everything is fine."
Of course, the thing about dystopias is they're the result of someone's attempted utopia, degradations and destruction of the whole that stem from the interest of the few. The spread of rot and corruption is both literal and figurative in The Marigold. For all the oozey C.H.U.Ds within, there's nothing far-fetched here.