We are all going to hear a lot about The Flame Alphabet and its author Ben Marcus in the coming months, which in my opinion is very good. Because this is the kind of book that gets hotly debated in bars. I anticipate controversial reviews. Not unlike those of one of the authors whose blurb graced the back cover of the very beautiful jacket, Thomas McCarthy. McCarthy’s Remainder and C spawned the kind of attention, controversy, and excitement that I envision surrounding The Flame Alphabet. In fact, I compare Ben Marcus to McCarthy enthusiastically, they both write vehemently interesting prose in which artistic adventures of diction take the passenger seat to the plot and characters. But Marcus seems to have an ulterior motive, and he seems more serious and intense. He seems to believe wholeheartedly in the worlds he builds; his investments seen in The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and even more powerfully so, in The Flame Alphabet.
The Flame Alphabet is about an epidemic whose cause is traced to children’s language. Kids can literally kill with their words, and once the link between the rampant illness and their vocalizing is established, they rove the streets in packs and gangs, mercilessly stalking adult prey and assaulting them with sound. They watch the adults wither, powerless. Eventually, a quarantine is enacted, and parents are forced to leave their children behind, or put them on buses. We experience the chaos through Sam. Without Marcus’ unique voice or intensely skilled writing ability, this book would be a good idea and could be turned into an M. Night Shamalyan movie. But Marcus is the ultimate experimental writer of our time, and he never lets The Flame Alphabet surrender to its apocalypse bent. He keeps Sam strange, determined, singular. He keeps Esther’s flaming beauty compelling, her tenderness for her mother a flaw in her own ideal self. Clare’s willfulness and love for her daughter, while killing her, also keep her self-aware. Each paradox makes its owner seem weak and almost hateful. Along with evoking sadness, we experience the most complex feelings that the lowest of humanity inspires, like pity and revulsion.
The triumph of The Flame Alphabet is actually the unquestioning way we witness the unreal events unfolding, the way we trust Sam, his honesty and his ugliness in his struggle to survive. While Marcus is claiming language is poisonous, he’s also showing us the truth of human nature within Sam’s character with the last breaths this reviled language has left. Sam becomes uglier as the book continues. He reverts to a naked animalism, he becomes selfish, violent, and impossible. He does all this because he becomes obsessed with this family, unable to process the idea of their individualism or the possibility of their deaths. Sam fixates on reuniting his sundered, dying, pathetic family, and commits false, disgusting acts in order to do so. Marcus is showing us something twisted and sickening about human character; the poison of words is meanwhile simplifying and purifying the surroundings, making it seem as though Sam’s obstinate refusal to let go of language is a basic betrayal, an almost counter-evoluntionary defect.
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