In classical Greek tragedies, choruses use a collective voice to comment on scenes and provide the audience with insights. The distinctly futuristic and nonhuman chorus that sings through Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California operates in a similar way. When I conceptualize this voice as a reader, I think of scenes in movies where a robot begins to break down and its malfunction splinters its voice into multiple dissonant octaves.
Blackburn’s chorus opens the novel with a peculiar declaration, just as a voice-over might begin a movie: “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot. She just discovered her brother dead in his apartment.” Faced with the main character’s grief, absorbed into the chorus’s viewpoint rather than Coral’s, I immediately feel the responsibility as a burden—placed in the shoes of the collective voice, who am I to tell someone else’s story, to herald someone else’s heartbreak? But as the chorus goes on to narrate the series of events, giving us what amounts to a play-by-play of the main character trying to process the aftermath of her brother’s suicide, I find myself lulled into an unusual kind of witnessing that is unconcerned with emotional responses.
As the book progresses, the chorus’s observations become markedly scientific, lacking sentiment and entirely observational, concerned with understanding not only Coral but also human nature more broadly. When Coral hides the truth of her brother’s death from one of his romantic interests, for instance, the chorus comments with detached curiosity—“We do not understand self-manufactured suffering as much as we study the concept. We begin as good researchers always begin, with compelling points of inquiry: Why did humans cause so much unnecessary pain?” Blackburn’s chorus self-identifies as a group of researchers, and Coral is the latest subject in the human experiment.
For me, viewing Coral through this lens proves to be necessary—Coral is a frustrating and confusing character, not likely to be a reliable narrator. We watch her lie to her brother’s daughter, lie to friends and family members. We observe the thrill she experiences when she narrowly avoids being found out. We watch her teeter between panic attacks and an eerie calmness. If this story had been told from any other perspective, I would have found it nearly impossible to root for Coral or find her likable. I imagine reading Coral’s internal thoughts as she sends texts from her dead brother’s phone; I’m sure that her thoughts in those moments would make me furious with her. But Blackburn’s analytical chorus trains me instead to study her—my moral compass is muted, switched off. She becomes a specimen under the microscope that I scrutinize, and when grief is added to the sample, I merely take notes on how the new addition alters her chemistry.
The narrative distance of the chorus constricts my emotional space as a reader, but it also finds another way to surprise and startle. The chorus doesn’t abide by the same rules of time and space, toggling seamlessly among the past, present, and future, sometimes causing different moments to collide or overlap. At one point, I think to myself, “I’ve seen this before.” And I have. Black Mirror, season 1, episode 3, “The Entire History of You”—almost everyone has had an implant installed that enables them to scroll through their memories and play them back for their own viewing or the viewing of others. During the episode, the characters are plagued with an obsession with the past that feels unending as it intrudes on the present. In one scene, the main character and his wife have sex, but they achieve orgasm only by replaying past sexual encounters on their memory implants; the overlapping of the past and present obstructs true human connection.
Something like Black Mirror’s memory-scrolling occurs whenever Coral’s mental and emotional states break down. In moments of panic, or even when Coral’s psyche is so fractured that she is visited by the ghosts of dead loved ones, Blackburn’s “system” of time also glitches. In trying to contend with the rapid time shifts, the chorus begins to sound distorted and off-tune. As the book builds to its final confrontation between Coral and Khadija, her dead brother’s daughter, from whom she has been hiding the truth about his death, the boundary between memories and the present disappears almost entirely. As the book’s time system is overwhelmed, we feel overwhelmed by extension. Our responsibility to tell the story is lifted only in the final pages of Dead in Long Beach, California—when the technology falls away, when there is a silent knowing that the two women pass between them, when Coral finally shares her grief with another human. When Coral begins to build a new community to help carry the weight of her story, the chorus stops singing. Finally, the novel’s system of time rights itself.•
Join us on July 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Blackburn will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
