![]() ![]() When the epidemic, as it is soon called, reaches pandemic proportions, all the children are evacuated and placed in quarantine. Sam fixates upon finding a cure for the toxicity, testing powders and chemicals, all to no effect – in this book, individual power is nothing. Many moments in the book revolve around these cables at one point, a desperate Sam fixes the end of one into his mouth in order to receive guidance. We are, it seems, in an alternative America, where technology has become a Cronenbergian extension of the body: they receive sermons and advice from orange cables that have a kind of life. Marcus centres his story around a single-child family of “forest Jews”, Sam, Claire and their daughter Esther, who worship in secrecy in a hut in the woods. In The Flame Alphabet, the experimental novelist Ben Marcus imagines a world in which language takes on a toxic aspect at first, issuing only from the mouths of children, it leaves parents confused and sickened, whilst the kids rampage around the towns with their new found power, shouting down (quite literally) anyone who comes across them the toxin spreads until even reading and letters themselves have an ill potency. ![]() ![]() ![]() A misguided tweet can land you in prison an internet troll’s comments can leave you physically reeling. We all know how powerful language is, though we use it without thinking (much) every day. The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus (Granta) ![]()
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