The Book of Two Ways

Jodi Picoult

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, October 24th 2020

Described on the cover as “a stunning novel about life, death and missed opportunities”, Jodi Picoult’s twenty-eighth book features a twisting strand of possibilities reminiscent of Lionel Shriver’s Double Fault and, despite a shaky start, is sure to delight her many devoted followers.

The story’s narrator, Dawn Edelstein, is a death Doula. Just as a midwife leads her clients through the process of pregnancy and childbirth, she accompanies the terminally ill on their journey out from life, providing the practical and emotional support they need to set their affairs in order and prepare themselves for death. It may be far removed from the career she originally envisioned for herself (her mother’s death having forced her to abandon her PhD in Egyptology to care for her baby brother), but it is a vocation at which she excels, and she seldom wonders what might have been. Then a confluence of events – an act of emotional infidelity by her husband Brian and a near-fatal plane crash – leave her deliberating between two different futures: one in which she returns home and attempts to repair her faltering marriage, the second in which she discards that life in favour of the one she walked away from fifteen years before. The consequences of each of these choices play out throughout the book as two divergent timelines that eventually coalesce, leaving Dawn facing the same impasse as before, a choice that she has no option but to resolve one way or the other this time.

A project ten years in the making, The Book of Two Ways takes its title and themes from the ancient Egyptian coffin texts that were the subject of Dawn’s unfinished thesis. The original Book describes the route the deceased must travel to reunite body and soul to attain eternal life, and Picoult’s contemporary reimagining of it is very much a novel of two halves. The story is clearly based on extensive research, and the early sections are rather more tell than show. There are copious details on ancient Egyptian history, culture, iconography, theology and cosmology. The chapters detailing Dawn’s alternate trajectories are subtitled ‘Land’ and ‘Water’ after the ways by which the dead can traverse the underworld. Similarly, her flight to Egypt in pursuit of her own desires reunites her with a former lover, the passionate, volatile Wyatt Neville, while her return home to the emotionally muted but dependable Brian and a life where the interests of her family and clients take precedence over her own. And just in case we have missed the point, Brian is a physics lecturer with a particular interest in quantum theory, ensuring we are treated to explanations of Schroedinger’s cat and the many-worlds hypothesis. By the time of the first major plot twist midway through the book (a revelation I saw coming well in advance) I was starting to wonder whether Picoult had lost her touch, only to be completely blindsided a few pages later by a second, brilliantly-executed volte-face. From here, the story catches fire, moving inexorably towards a resolution as brave and satisfying as any I have read in a long time.