In many ways, the worst thing about 2020 has been the helplessness. And The Life You Can Save is a book that persistently, repeatedly, point by point refutes all our justifications for helplessness. There are problems that seem so vast and confusing that we may want to believe they couldn’t possibly be our problems. But the challenges that the world’s poorest face — infectious disease, malnutrition, extreme poverty — are easy to beat if the organizations fighting them have the resources they need. And we have the power to help in that fight.
The giant sequoia. The Joshua tree. The coast redwood.
They are the three plant species in California with national parks set aside in their name, for their honor and protection.
Scientists already feared for their future. Then came 2020.
Today, the more vibrant strands of the genre have done a bit to distance themselves from this historical baggage. The “new music” scene, in particular, has thrived beyond the hallowed halls of Gilded Age propriety, gleefully juxtaposing Steve Reich with Radiohead and claiming, at least, to care little about ill-timed sneezes and people showing up to concerts in shorts.
Yet for the most part, classical music’s elite history and rituals are still very much with us.
It took me a moment to process this history of a food so familiar to me. In my half-Jamaican family, cassava—a white fleshed fibrous tuber with thick brown skin—is not a poison. It’s the main ingredient in a fluffy dessert pie. It’s the fried slices we eat with a garlic and vinegar sauce. It’s essential family food to celebrate a milestone or mourn a death or acknowledge gathering at the same table. It’s also the texture I crave when I’m feeling stressed or anxious, which right now is all the time.
Every day makes me aware of how it is a luxury to have time to take a stroll, to have a house, to share that house 24 hours a day with a husband I love and a one-year-old cat who arrived at just the right time.
I have no idea what history will make of 2020, but the only record I have kept of this cursed year are blurry photos of shrubs.
This is a dark, compelling novel about the only two things humans really have to fear: each other, and being alone. We are apex predators: if another creature kills you, it will usually be one of your own kind. But your own kind can hardly be avoided. A life outside society – no aid, no warmth, no walls, no one to share the labours of survival with – will be a short and unpleasant one. This irreconcilable need and repulsion explains how we come to find Duncan Peck at the start of this novel, an outsider in the mists of Dartmoor, running from people who terrify him, and towards people who might not be much better.
The most noteworthy element of Cooper’s book might be its reportorial ambition. Over 400 pages, she doggedly tracks down primary sources and digs for decades-old documents. It is a testament to her skills as a writer that she is able to connect the threads of the cold case to larger cultural issues, including the perceptual biases of archaeology, sexism in premier academic institutions and the narratives we project onto murdered women. Cooper has made a welcome entry into the annals of true crime — a genre glutted with amateur investigators, most of them not very good, inserting themselves into unsolved mysteries.
Why are we here? Or to give the question a slightly more modern spin, what sequence of events brought us here, and can we imagine a world in which we didn’t arrive on the scene at all?