“It was very possible that the true subject, the way it always was the true subject… was language.” Coming not for the first, or indeed last, time in Adam Thirlwell’s new novel, this turn-to-camera by its socialite protagonist, Celine, hints at what heart there is to the matter.
The Future Future is the fourth novel from Thirlwell, twice a member of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists list, and known for his willingness to experiment with instability, unlikeability and other means of testing readers’ patience. It’s nominally set in revolutionary France, a world of scandal and salacious pamphlets that turn Celine – a fictional figure but with several parallels to the real salonnière, Juliette Récamier – into a “celebrity”.
In response, Celine throws parties and cultivates her own influential backers including colonists, financiers and playwrights, hoping to develop a new kind of soft power and arrest the lies being told about her and her sex life.
As she begins to gain a reputation as a hostess, she’s transformed – after a fashion – into a figure to reckon with, one who can entice Marie Antoinette to join a live performance and get previously-banned work greenlit. As predicted, however, after the – largely offstage – revolution, the ruling class changes and Celine becomes newly vulnerable. In ever-more outlandish and esoteric circumstances, she seeks new means of surviving, such as travelling to the Moon on a boat covered with metal balloons.
The anchor of Celine’s character is her obsession with language, with the premise – hammered relentlessly home – that “power [is] all verbal” and that “the true art of language [isn’t] literature but translation”. In this, Thirlwell’s novel becomes, to turn its own gun on itself, a “vortex of entropy”.
It’s riddled with quirky anachronisms, immobile debates about semantics, and a tendency to editorialise rather than demonstrate its action. Despite constantly reassuring us of how globally pivotal its events are, its plot seems elsewhere and low-stakes. Whenever a central character is killed or in some other way liquidated or banished, we often learn about it in an aside, or afterthought.
The lurches of Celine’s heart are similarly affectless and erased: the nearest she comes to a potentially innovative version of love is with her friend Marta. Some kind of recognisable humanity briefly promises to break out, but it’s all tidied away hurriedly, like toys at bedtime.
Celine becomes pregnant and their union is broken: what “once felt so unique and so exciting” dissolves into “slight ennui”. Later, when Celine’s thoughts turn to this lost love: “Sometimes [she] thought about Marta every day… Then sometimes she didn’t think about her for a month.”