Part 1 was on the OS of my life, Part 2 the professional version, both written in 2022. This one is a little more ambitious – civilisational!
The thought stream started thanks to one of my favourite newsletters, which gave me an insightful metaphor – “Religion is the operating system of a civilisation” – attributed to Rudyard Lynch.
One of the other insights that has taken up quite a lot of space in my mind is courtesy Ernest Becker (via The Worm at the Core) – that the awareness of our own mortality is the hidden engine of human thought, emotion, and culture. Humans apparently invented symbolic systems – everything from soul to religion to nation to art to legacy as a means of managing the terror of death.
I have a thing for what-if scenarios, and that’s one of the reasons I loved The Names. I remember at least two occasions when they happened in a literary work – the first was a Hardy Boys + Nancy Drew book that asked you to turn to a particular page depending on the option you chose from the possible outcomes, and the second was a Jeffrey Archer short story (One Man’s Meat) which had Rare, Burnt, Overdone, and À Point endings!
In The Names, Florence Knapp creates three scenarios based on a single choice – registering the naming of a baby. From there, three pathways open – parallel lives of different people in the family that follow separate trajectories across three decades.
In terms of narrative, the book is structured as the state of the characters in a particular timeline and then taking seven-year leaps. This did force me to go back a few times to reorient myself, but it didn’t really bother me a lot. In fact, it helped me pay attention and recollect the small touches that show patterns, and sometimes notice a version of what happened in some other timeline.
The book somehow manages emotional depth while maintaining a brisk pace, and balancing it with a natural amount of unevenness across three different timelines in terms of character depth and arcs. The subject is not a pleasant one, and that requires some complicated work across the internal dialogues of all concerned (x 3). Not to mention getting the involvement of characters other than the key ones just right. Neither are easy tasks to accomplish.
What I really liked about The Names is that in addition to being a great story, it is also a thoughtful, mindful and emotionally aware reflection on choice and consequence.
