Paul Di Filippo Reviews I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger

I Cheerfully Refuse, Leif Enger (Grove ‎ 978-0802162939, hardcover, 336pp, $28.00) April 2024

Brian Aldiss famously coined the label “cozy catastrophe” to designate such books as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, wherein civilization crumbles, but our protagonist manages to carve out a relatively safe and rewarding existence for himself and his posse, a harbor from the storm. Aldiss characterized the plot and atmosphere of such novels in a rather snarky fashion, saying, “The essence of cozy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time … while everyone else is dying off.” But viewed more charitably, such tales foreground hope and resilience amidst disaster and chaos. They speak of new beginnings, even if those phoenix revivals lie far in the future from the action of the book.

I’d like to separate out a sub-category of the cozy catastrophe, a kind of story where Armageddon has not yet quite arrived in full dress, and thus a kind of story where the hero’s niche of security and happiness looks not quite so privileged or implausible. A “demi-geddon,” if you will. This scenario is not “apocalypse now,” but rather “apocalypse arriving someday soon, maybe.” Alternatively, we can call this mode “after the collapse.” Or, as Ron Goulart put it in the title of his small masterpiece, After Things Fell Apart. This is a world where some systems of control and authority, of commerce and civic cooperation remain intact, even if in fragmentary form, distributed across the landscape unevenly. Maybe we can think of Delany’s Bellona: cocktail parties are in full swing in the penthouse, while the Scorpions are battling in the streets. A recent well-known example is Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, while Liz Hand’s earlier Winterlong trilogy occupies a lot of the same territory.

This kind of partial TEOTWAWKI seems excellently congruent with our current situation in 2024, and thus highly illuminating of Clutian “real year” conditions. We have electricity, but there are brown-outs. We have elections, but they are contested. We have borders, but they are permeable. All the old systems—churches, courts, entertainment, military, family—threaten to disintegrate at any moment, but somehow we soldier on. As the Police sang, “When the world is running down/You make the best of what’s still around.”

All this long preamble brings us to Leif Enger’s fourth novel, I Cheerfully Refuse. It is the best instantiation of this trope and theme that I have read in a long while. It is chockful of wistful melancholy, sad wisdom, shadowed sunshine, lambent darkness and salvaged treasures. I was put in mind of such classics as John Crowley’s Engine Summer, Edgar Pangborn’s Davy and Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow. Ironically, the book even rubs shoulders with Brian Aldiss’s own Earthworks.

We are at some unspecified near-future year, on the shores of Lake Superior, in a little community called Icebridge. There lives our narrator, a big gentle giant named Rainy (a Crowleyesque cognomen if ever there was one), with his beautiful wife Lark. Lark runs a used-bookstore, while Rainy plays the bass at local events and otherwise makes himself useful and productive. Life in Icebridge is not pre-technological, but still reverting to older ways. Scavenged steel is cut up and repurposed; non-local foodstuffs are scarce; communications with the world beyond the immediate region are sparse. Nationally, the rich elite—dubbed “astronauts” for their distance from the hoi polloi—control many resources. Indentured laborers—“squelettes”—live in pitiful conditions and often run away from their masters, provoking bounties and hunts.

Lark and Rainy are ambling along pretty happily, content with small pleasures and each other’s company, when a fellow named Kellan appears. He sells Lark a book she has been searching for for decades: I Cheerfully Refuse by the cult author Molly Thorn. Kellan, mysterious about his goals and origins and plans, is looking for lodging. Lark is so pleased with her treasure that she agrees to put Kellan up in their home, and Rainy gamely consents.

This is the undoing of everything. Kellan is a squelette on the run, pursued by a monstrous man named Werryck. And when the vengeful and insatiable Werryck arrives at Icebridge, Rainy’s world implodes in violence and destruction. Kellan escapes his pursuer, but before you can say “Odysseus in search of Ithaca,” Rainy finds himself also on the run, in his little sloop Flower, cruising the alternately tempestuous and idyllic waters of Lake Superior in search of justice, soul balm and his lost happiness. This odyssey brings him to many exotic little settlements, each one beautifully limned, full of colorful characters who flesh out the portrait of the post-collapse planet. He encounters dangers and friendships, and, most impactfully, semi-adopts a young girl orphan named Sol. Now a duo, the pair continue their quest, never reckoning that menacing Werryck is waiting in the wings.

Although Enger exhibits immense skills of plotting and invention and description—his patterning of incidents and personages and threads is meticulous yet surprising—the true triumph that drives the book is Rainy’s first-person voice. The man was always a creature of instinct and emotions before he met the literate Lark. Once their lives were bound up, he began to learn to love books. But his particular latecomer intellectual take on life and literature is forever contoured by his early basic nature. Thus his slightly off-kilter observations and apercus manifest a startling poetry—not faux naïve, but truly primal, a tiny bit like the Peter Sellers character in Being There, except more self-aware and contemplative.

You understand I didn’t truly know my voyage had begun. Maybe I still thought there was a choice. Maybe because I’d imagined the kind of departure described in salty memoirs where the sailor stocks the galley with tinned meats, and four dozen eggs properly cushioned, and triple-wrapped bricks of cheese, and as much fresh produce as they can get through in a week (after which they rely on canned), and as many bottles of wine as will fit in the cool dark bilge of a pocket cruiser. Nor did I get to make a brave soft speech of goodbye or hand my house keys to whomever might agree to stay there and keep it warm and safe. I’d told no one about my plan because I knew how it would sound and was afraid that voiced aloud I wouldn’t believe in it myself. Would I have gone through with all this if not forced out? Even now I held in reserve the chance of going home.

Carried along by this empathetic and lovable voice, the reader will endure privation and threats with equanimity, and receive the moments of jubilation and reward with joy. Sketching out this utterly believable world of shards and flinders, so alike yet so different than ours, Enger replicates some of the surreal vibe found in Josiah Bancroft’s New Weird fantasies, while remaining rooted in the quotidian soil of George Stewart’s Earth Abides. Rainy’s hegira offers love and hate, frustration and catharsis in equal measures.

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