Year one is sort of urban fantasy twist on “The Stand”. It tracks the path of groups of survivors of “The Doom”, a virus which kills anyone who is not immune. As billions die, some of the immune discover latent magical powers and find themselves drawn to The Dark or The Light.
It’s an easy to read entertainment that effortlessly manages the large number of characters and multiple initially parallel but eventually converging plot lines. The good guys are clearly drawn and instantly likeable. There are babies and a lab-cross dog. The bad guys are irredeemably evil and everyone else is either dead or consumed by fear.
Nora Roberts’ accomplished writing kept me reading, in much the same way that high production standards make it easy to watch “Chicago Fire” or “Rookie Blue” but the good guys didn’t become people I cared about and the bad guys seemed more like comic-book demons than people.
About halfway through, I realised that, although “Year One” was entertaining enough for me to stick with it to the end, something was preventing me from immersing myself in the story. It took me a while to isolate the cause: my lack of empathy with middle-class America. Most of the main good guy characters in this book come from privileged, sometimes very privileged, backgrounds. The Doom has destroyed their bright futures and now they have to adapt to survive.
It turns out that the secret to surviving the apocalypse is to band together with skilled people who embrace middle-class values, choose faith over fear, work together as a team and focus on “doing what comes next”. Of course, emergent magical powers are also pretty useful.
There’s nothing wrong with this. It might even turn out to be true. It’s also not so far from the message of “The Stand”. What spooked me about it in “Year One” is that Nora Roberts wraps such positive emotions around these values that they slid into my imagination already tagged as a Good Thing. Then I thought about the scale of loss, of the billions dead, of cultures across the world extinguished, of losing everyone you ever loved, of having the value of your previous life challenged or eroded and it seemed to me that the main characters react almost as if they’re on medication. Their ability to focus “on what needs doing” is certainly a survival skill but the ease with which they do it, the unthinking adoption of the “I’ll protect Us against Them” mindset and the strong link Nora Robers makes between this stance and The Light made it difficult for me to empathise with or care about these people.
Later, I struggled with Nora Roberts’ obsession with the idea that some things are “meant”, that they’re part of a “destiny”, that it isn’t enough for people to be attractive, privileged, educated and have magical gifts, they also have to have some kind of pintable-tilting agents of fate on their side. This began to feel like the dystopian urban fantasy version of meeting Mr Right.
At about the same time, we got the sex scene between the Alpha witch couple, Max and Lorna, the two “good guys” that I liked least, and it surfaced everything I disliked about the book: the sex was glossy, the sentiment was saccharine and the allegedly spontaneous vows that followed were so cliché-filled and delivered with such self-absorbed seriousness that I felt I’d dropped into the middle of a romance novel. I have less trouble accepting a world-ending-virus and the emergence of latent magical powers than I do believing that people actually talk to each other like this when there’s no camera crew present.
I liked the end section of the book well enough, setting aside the drumbeat message about “doing what needs to be done”. I disliked that fact that not one of the bad guys was given any motivation other than fear, ignorance or just being born that way. The idea of a Messianic “One” sent to save the world doesn’t do it for me so I won’t be bothering with book two in this series.
If this book appeals to you, I recommend the audiobook version. It’s skillfully narrated by Julia Whelan. You can hear her work on the SoundCloud link below.
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