The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's 1969, and holed up in a grimy tenement building in New York's Lower East Side is a travelling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the date they will die. The four Gold children, too young for what they're about to hear, sneak out to learn their fortunes.

Such prophecies could be dismissed as trickery and nonsense, yet the Golds bury theirs deep. Over the years that follow they attempt to ignore, embrace, cheat and defy the 'knowledge' given to them that day - but it will shape the course of their lives forever.

Quite and unusual and intriguing book; if you could know the date of your death would you want to and if you did would it change the way you lived your life? Four bored siblings (Simon, Klara, Daniel and Varya) visit a fortune teller at the end of a boring and uneventful summer holiday and learn the date of each of their deaths. Each sibling is told separately and they don't confide in the others. We are then transported several years into the future when the children are teenagers and follow each one of the siblings until their death.

The first one we follow is Simon the youngest child and he runs away with Klara to San Francisco where he is able to live the life he wants as a gay man and she can pursue her dreams of becoming a magician. Simon confides in Klara the date of his death but only when its imminent, the reader does not know any of the predicted deaths of the characters. Both Simon and Klara are estranged from their mother Gertie, and other siblings because they ran away and this lack of contact with the others forms the basis of guilt for the other two.

The first story is essentially about Simon but because he is with Klara they do overlap in parts. Simon lives a somewhat hedonistic lifestyle to the point where he is almost out of control, sleeping around, taking drugs and drinking, seemingly intent on experiencing all that life can offer. Klara is self-absorbed in her own desire to become a famous magician/illusionist and although the siblings are together their paths go in different directions.

Daniel is the third story we learn (he has become a doctor and works for the military assessing the fitness of recruits) and the struggles he faces along with his difficulty in absolving himself of any responsibility over the deaths of his siblings. His eventual search for the fortune teller in an attempt to reverse the predictions and the eventual outcome are quite sad. Varya is the last story she is a research scientist and we follow her until the end of the book. All the siblings seemed to have psychological issues, perhaps these are hereditary or because the predictions have shaped them.

It was an interesting idea but I felt that because we didn't really get a good idea of the relationship between the children up to the point we follow each one, it was difficult to form attachments to them to give the right emotive quality to the stories. I liked some of the characters a bit and the others I didn't really care for but because I had no real emotional attachment to them or their relationship with each other it just didn't have the desired effect at the end. Each of the stories could easily have been stand alones because the lives of each sibling are quite separate and don't rely on what's happening in their brothers and sisters lives to have an effect on their own and their eventual outcome.

The story is about choices, mortality, grief and relies on a superstitious belief in what a gypsy has predicted and how this affects the siblings as they lead their lives. If they hadn't had this information would they have lived their lives differently? Did the predictions make them take the life choices they made? If they had ignored the predictions would their lives have been better for it?

A thought provoking book pitting fate and prophecy against each other and reinforcing that perhaps ignorance is bliss. I can't say I liked the book, it was interesting but not altogether convincing on many fronts but unusual enough an idea with a couple of curve balls thrown in to keep me reading until the end. I would give this 3 stars for it's originality.