By Juliette Hughes
FICTION
Here One Moment
Liane Moriarty
Macmillan, $34.99
There are two encouraging epigraphs at the start of Here One Moment: one by Stephen Hawking on fate and caution, and the other – that famous one – from Samuel Johnson about a man’s mind being wonderfully concentrated by the knowledge he was to be hanged in a fortnight.
What would knowing the exact time of one’s death do to the average person? Only a few ever have that privilege – condemned prisoners and Dignitas clients, perhaps. The rest of us muddle through our lives not knowing, and generally preferring not to know.
The reason I was encouraged by the epigraphs was that they hinted at a philosophical and intellectual depth that one normally doesn’t find in your ordinary potboiling blockbuster. The premise is enticing: are readers going to have their ontological frameworks shaken or merely stirred?
As in all things, it depends on what you’re looking for. After all, The Da Vinci Code sent many fans questing obsessively for the secrets of the Priory of Sion. Whether it actually mattered if the historical Jesus had offspring and descendants was another question altogether.
So, as far as this latest offering from the wildly successful Liane Moriarty is concerned, I won’t be surprised if the likes of psychics/astrologers/mediums see a boost in their incomes; whether this novel can be said to be the cause of windfall profits for charlatans is going to fuel many a book club discussion, this latest Moriarty being the most likely choice for at least the next few months.
Here One Moment opens with a shocking incident on a plane flying from Hobart to Sydney. A middle-aged lady of unremarkable appearance suddenly stands up and announces to each passenger in turn, their time and cause of death. General panic and consternation ensue; as we often see with Stephen King’s books, the focus pulls back to detail the commentary on the incident that blows up in the wider world; in Here One Moment we are plunged into the familiarity of online commentary and tabloid speculation.
Author Liane Moriarty.Credit: Uber Photography
For what we or any novelist, psychic or scientist, predict about our future is fraught with uncertainty. Prediction is a money-spinning career choice for a wide range of professionals, some worthy of respect for their rigour. On the left-hand path, psychics use cold reading, tarot cards, I Ching, tea leaves, palms, while astrologers use planetary movements. But such practitioners still, like conventional scientific predictors, use some observable phenomena to springboard the precious insight that will give us the advantage of knowing what hasn’t happened yet.
But the book begins by asking implicitly, what is the meaning or significance or reliability of an urge, a materially unassisted and overwhelming sense of certainty of a future event? How does anyone cope with this lightning bolt of inspiration, whether it is the individual so suddenly gifted/burdened with knowledge, or the object of the revelation? (There is a fascinating non-fiction book by Sam Knight, The Premonitions Bureau, which explores these questions based on a historical event and the actual Premonitions Bureau set up by the British government after the 1966 Aberfan tragedy, when a mountain of coalmine tailings collapsed on a small Welsh village, killing 144 people, mainly children.)
Moriarty follows her usual formula of giving the back stories and continuing lives of a varied cast of characters: a honeymoon couple, a teenage girl, a pregnant woman, an engineer, a businessman and several more, even the flight attendant herself. Will she die of self-harm within a year? Will the teenager die in a car accident? Will the pregnant woman’s child die of drowning aged seven? Can you treat the prediction as a warning and avert a tragedy?
The character who becomes known online and in news outlets as “The Death Lady” says to each person she targets: “Fate can’t be fought.” But the Hawking quote at the start might disagree.
The book is long and detailed, especially as we get to know more about The Death Lady. Most of the questions I’ve asked here are raised in the plot. Whether one likes the answers will be debated vigorously in book clubs, where, no doubt, people will have their own stories of premonition to relate. And many of those stories might even be true.
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