Our Life in the Forest

Marie Darriuessecq, translated by Peggy Hueston

Text Publishing

Otago Daily Times, September 15th 2018

Although award-winning French author Marie Darrieussecq’s work encompasses multiple genres, it is united in its exploration of identity, belonging, metamorphosis, absence, and loss. In Our Life in the Forest she offers us a disquieting glimpse of a society in people are provided at birth with genetically cloned body ­– a half – as a source of replacement organs if and when needed, and how such a commodification of life might influence our concept of self and other.

From earliest childhood, the narrator, a psychologist whose job is to help people manage sudden and traumatic change, has struggled to make sense of the relationship between herself and her half.  From a young age, her clone’s fate has become the most important thing in her life. Despite medical assurances that it has no awareness, she cannot help but regard the half as an extension of herself, a sister/twin with whom she shares her life.

Consumed by guilt for the organs that she has already received (although is many years before she questions why none of the transplants seem to have taken properly, or how her half can remain unblemished while she herself bears the scars of multiple operations), the narrator eventually joins realizes there is a rebel group determined to free the halves from their medically-induced slumber. But once awoken it is clear that that there is no empathy or shared identity between the halves and far from being alternative, future selves, the clones live entirely in the present, “with no political sensibility at all, no metaphysical yearnings, no impetus towards the future”, and it falls on the dying narrator to make sense of their lives and document the truth for future and escape the society that created them in the first place.

The eventual revelation that the writer is herself a clone comes as no surprise, particularly for anybody who has read Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. Darriussecq is much more interested in the effect this discovery has on her central character and her evolving relationship with her other half.

 The story’s strengths lie in its exploration of the narrator’s journey of self discovery (the rambling, discursive nature of the writing reflects Darrieussecq’s own belief that freedom comes not from lessons in school or life but through psycholanalysis), and in the fragmentary glimpses it offers of a populace kept in a state of permanent apathy by a combination of drugs in the water supply and implants that that disconnect the prefrontal cortex from emotional and flight-and fright and centres of the brain.  It is all to easy to imagine a future in which people spend their days training AI programmes in cognitive association, where every single movement is networked, recorded, archived and indexed, and the divide between the 1% and the rest is so sharp that the former are nearly invisible.

This is not a book that will appeal to everybody, but for those interested in the philosophical questions it poses, Our Life in the Forest speaks to heart of what is to be human.