Warning: here be spoilers
America, sometime in the near future. Astrobiologist Theo Byrne raises his son Robin alone after the death of his wife. He feels like he’s doing a terrible job, especially when Robin is sent home from school for smashing his only friend’s face with a thermos. Robin is a complicated child; intelligent but suffering from Aspergers, ADHD, OCD and probably a few other things. Theo is weary to accept the decision; Robin’s school, meanwhile, is pushing him to put the boy on psychoactive medication, something Theo is unwilling to do. When we meet them they are vacationing out in the Rockies, camping and stargazing and having a blast, but the moment when Robin will have to go back to school is never far from Theo’s mind. Robin, meanwhile, misses his mother. His behavioural issues spiral out of control, so when a fellow scientist offers to put Robin on an experimental treatment, he consents.
On their drive back from their vacation they listen to Flowers for Algernon, so any attentive (or sentient) reader will know how the book will end. In other words, fuck this book.
It’s not just that I hated the ending; there are many things here that I didn’t enjoy. It’s fairly sentimental, which is not my cup of tea to begin with, but that’s personal. I did, however, expect better from a Booker Prize nominee. The characters aside from Robin fall weirdly flat. That is to be expected in a novel that focuses him, but not to this extent. Theo’s entire character description is ‘father’. He’s weary, he misses his wife, he struggles with making child care arrangements. He’s constantly worried about doing the wrong thing even though he never loses his patience (and Robin, trust me, is exhausting). The late wife, meanwhile, is one of those annoyingly perfect women. I guess she would be because we see her through Theo’s eyes only, and he misses her dearly, but it’s still annoying; even objectively speaking she’s so morally outstanding that she just pissed me off.
Then there’s the political aspect of the book, making a case for climate change. I can appreciate that because it’s an important message, but it’s done in such a ham-fisted way that all subtlety is lost. It’s strangely coy about including real people; the oafish president says the exact same things Donald Trump says but is never named as such. Greta Thunberg is now called Inga and is from Switzerland instead of Zürich. Since neither characters are in any way slandered in the novel, why not call them by name? It’s weird and distracting. Even TedTalks gets a new name.
And then there’s Robin himself. He’s the emotional heart of the book. He’s grating and exhausting. He’s supposed to be the latter; I’m not sure about the former. Worse, he never feels like a real child. Writing children can be a tricky thing to pull off; either they’re too infantile or too grown up. Robin cares deeply about the environment, mostly because his mother did so too and he misses her, wants to be close to her. But Robin is also nine and feels like whatever he does, it is not enough. People don’t take him seriously. His teacher punishes him for the charity drive he organises at school because it goes against the rulebook. Robin is baffled; in his eyes, he’s trying to save the world and he doesn’t understand why others are getting in his way. Most of the book is a lather-rinse-repeat of this process, mixed in with the experimental treatment. If you know what happened to Algernon, then you’ll know what happens to Robin.
Ultimately the book let me with a bad taste in my mouth and I wish I hadn’t read it. It felt exhausting and it never seems to go anywhere. And that’s a shame, because the premise is good and in the right hands, the story could have been amazing.
