Andrew Forbes' ​The Diapause

Reviewed by Nicole Yurcaba

(Invisible, 2024)

Andrew Forbes’s novel The Diapause is one of those books one begins reading and does not stop reading until way past their bedtime. In its foretelling of climate change’s irreversible ravages, a pandemic’s fracture of society, and economic and political upheavals that forever reshape the globe, The Diapause is terrifyingly and chillingly prophetic. In fact, one might read it and think that, in his own way, Forbes is offering humanity a warning, a training manual, and a preparation guidebook conveniently disguised as speculative fiction. Nonetheless, whether one reads The Diapause as a forewarning or a foretelling or simply as yet another work of dystopian fiction, one thing is certain. Readers will not quickly forget the myriad of ways climate change, pandemics, uncertain political and economic turmoil, and humanity’s endless pursuit of survival will reshape not only the landscapes humanity occupies and claims, but also the individuals one holds closest to them.

The Diapause is the story of Gabe, who at age 10 escapes to his grandfather’s long-abandoned cabin to wait out an unpredictable pandemic. Gabe enjoys the freest summer of his life and, unbeknownst to him, his parents’ marriage begins crumbling. Eventually, his mother’s decision to leave his father behind at the cabin and return to the city despite the unknown dangers has lifelong consequences for Gabe. He finds himself unfocused and adrift in his twenties, first working as a food delivery driver and barely earning enough to pay his rent. Eventually, he finds employment in Canada’s cobalt mines, where humans barely touch the rocks they are mining. In his forties, Gabe learns about his father’s death from his father’s widow, a woman so unlike Gabe’s mother in every way imaginable. In his later years, he confronts his own mortality by facing his mother’s mental decline, and as he recognizes how vastly the world changed during his lifetime, he returns to the memory of the day he and his mother departed the cabin, leaving Gabe’s father behind.

Interestingly enough, Forbes’s novel feels the most prophetic in its predictions about US-Canada relations. During that summer at the cabin, Gabe recalls his family’s visit to Florida, when they travelled from Canada to the American South by car. However, Gabe’s father, Art, comments, “‘We won’t be going to the States anymore, that I can tell you. It’s awful. They’re done. The whole country is done.’” Art does not explain to young Gabe the reason why the family will never return to the States, and it is only during Gabe’s adulthood that he offers a deeper insight into the speculative American situation: “Democratic assemblies from the UK to Denmark, Australia to America had slid into constant states of deadlock, with populist obstructionists at last open about their sole objective: to fuck everything up.” Later in the novel, Gabe reveals that America has succumbed to an event known as “the American Economic Collapse.” He also alludes to other large-scale socio-political disasters—a default of the federal government, extreme domestic unrest, the dissolve of the judiciary branch, and massive storms that claimed the Pacific Northwest’s forests. The scenarios are dystopian, hopeless, and dysfunctional, and in some ways mirror the current political circus unfolding each and every day in American headlines.

Nonetheless, despite Gabe’s constant focus on the past, The Diapause bears a stark warning about focusing too much on returning to the past. At one point, he reflects, “And this: despite all our desire to return to the past, there is no repeating it, not really—and to immerse yourself in it risks death, be it psychic or physical.” Thus, The Diapause is really a novel that challenges readers to consider the future’s potential dystopia in order to not only cope with the present, but to also work toward preventing the future of Forbes’s novel from ever happening. Gabe does not place individual or collective blame for the horrific environmental quality and broken political and economic systems in which future humans must live. In fact, in this regard, he is rather short-sighted, because in any of the novel’s given scenes, Gabe is most directly focused on the immediate. In this way, he is almost symbolic of current populations in first-world nations who thrive on instant gratification and materialistic and consumerist immediacy despite the demands placed not only on society, but also on the environment. This adds to his complexity, who at many instances during his adulthood seems basic and superficial, but by the novel’s end he has broken this unfortunate interpretation.
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Gabe’s post-pandemic world, too, is rife with technology. Houses speak to their owners via intricate—and intimate—computer systems. Customers at restaurants order their meals and drinks via screens and pay for their goods via retinal scans. Certain service jobs—like food workers—have been replaced by complex robots. The future depicted in The Diapause is strangely inhuman, yet Gabe remains stalwartly human in the face of tech. He finds meaning in simple human interactions, including—in one of the novel’s most memorable scenes—when another man, Dean, attempts to take him home. Rather than take offense, Dean’s actions affirm his humanity:

I was too full of life—from feeling those feelings, being in those feelings, being outside and looking at those feelings. Of magnanimity. Of having forged and been forged by connections of chance and choosing. Of being here, pulse in my throat, rain on my face. For now, if not for long: here.

In the briefest of moments and in some of the most poetic of lines, Gabe reaffirms the priceless nature of community and social interaction, and he also captures the essence of life’s wild crapshoot which shapes an individual’s experiences.
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The Diapause is a novel that stands with other dystopian fictional works like George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides, Alison Stine’s Trashlands, and Emma Pattee’s Tilt. Intriguingly philosophical and subtly political, it is a call to action that demands reading and discussion because the message it bears is timeless and worth hearing.

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Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press, Lit Gazeta, Chytomo, Bukvoid, and The New Voice of Ukraine. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is the Humanities Coordinator at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books. Her poetry collection, The Pale Goth, is available from Alien Buddha Press.