Ian Mond Reviews The Ragpicker by Joel Dane

The Ragpicker, Joel Dane (Meerkat 978-1-94615-459-0, $17.95, 290pp, p) July 2024.

If you believe the advertising campaigns from Meta and Apple (especially Apple’s slick ads for its Vision Pro), virtual and physical realities will harmoniously exist together. It’s a utopian attitude that conflicts with the often dystopian vision pre­sented by the genre, where VR, with its immersive pods and body suits, is a means of escaping the harsh realities of a broken world. Recent fare from Grace Chan (Every Version of You) and Adam Roberts (The Real-Town Murder’s series), for example, reinforces this idea that people, in thrall to the fantasies generated by VR, have turned their backs on social and environmental issues like climate change and economic inequality. JoelDane’s disquieting new novel, The Ragpicker – the fourth he’s written under the “Joel Dane” pseudonym – takes it a step further, imagining a postapocalyptic Earth where an event called the “Bliss” wipes out the vast bulk of humanity addicted to their virtual worlds.

The Ragpicker is set a century after the digital apocalypse. What’s left of humanity, including teenager Ysmany and her father, have established small, agrarian communities where life, for the most part, is good. You can still die from an in­fected wound, but the Earth has replenished itself with plenty to eat and drink. Ysmany’s village has the added advantage of being protected by a “twitch” named Server (a tip of the hat, I assume, to the incredibly popular live-streaming app), one of the few who survived the “Bliss,” forever trapped in their military grade “secondskin,” a self-healing VR body suit. Unlike the rest of the village, who have always feared the enigmatic twitch, Ysmany has never been scared of Server. From a young age, she has worked with the Twitch constructing a lampstack (“a thousand cords dan­gling from the rafters, joists, and beams of empty house frames, each cord knotted with dozens of hundreds of objects”), a representation of the nodes and networks that no longer exist. But then Ysmany discovers that Server has abducted an infant, having killed the child’s family, a group of travellers passing through town. Recognising that Server will eventually kill the child, Ysmany decides to run away with the baby and find it a home. What she’s not expecting is assistance from another twitch: the titular Ragpicker. Haunted by obits – “programmed personifications of the beloved dead” – Ragpicker is on a mission to find digital fragments of their husband. Together with the baby, they travel across a lush, deserted Earth, confronting the gruesome remains and strange totems left by the “likehunters,” twitches who have turned slaughter into installation art.

Dane isn’t interested in spoon-feeding his postapocalypse to the reader. What we learn about the world before the Bliss is limited to the impres­sionistic perspectives of his two protagonists. Ysmany only knows what she’s been told by her father, other villagers or Server, all of which have the quality of legend and myth. Ragpicker should be a more reliable source, given they survived the digital catastrophe, and from time to time, they do deliver snippets (such as the neat fact thatcockroaches had a massive die-off following the Bliss). But mostly, they’re barely lucid, thoughts overcome by a stream of mostly unhelpful advice from the obits. The closest we get to exposition is a single chapter devoted to “The Pedestal”, a play written by the resident of another village. But even here, Dane plays with our expectations, presenting us (with what I’m imagining is a cheeky chuckle) an overwrought Greek tragedy, a fanciful distor­tion of the truth. I loved it.

But if the worldbuilding is opaque, the novel’s theme couldn’t be more apparent. The Ragpicker reminds us that the most important relationships are the ones we have in the real world, not the virtual. One thing we discover about the world post the Bliss (aside from the near extinction of cockroaches) is that the survivors didn’t turn on each other but rather “formed packs, relentless roving packs who bonded together to scour the buildings and basements for people who needed help, needed food, needed company and caring.” It’s a clever subversion of the violent-gangs-roving-a-broken-world trope, reinforcing this idea of community and togetherness. It’s telling, then, that the greatest threat to this utopia is the twitches, a legacy of society’s dependence on VR.

I do have grumbles about The Ragpicker. As much as I enjoyed “The Pedestal”, the play comes too late in the narrative, interrupting the novel’s climax. I also found that while Ragpicker could produce these moments of pure poetry (“We died of rapturous immersion in our reciprocal connec­tivity” and “I am a troubadour of wreckage, I am beautiful in the eyes of the ruins”), the discordant and fractured nature of their thoughts at times kicked me out of the story. In the end, though, The Ragpicker is a postapocalyptic novel striving to be different and mostly succeeding; one that argues that no matter how much work Apple (or a Meta) does to blend both realities, it’s only when we look up from the screen that we truly connect with the people we love.

This review and more like it in the July 2024 issue of Locus.

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