The Strange Truth About Us: a novel of absence

This tell-all book by M.A.C. Farrant, whom Publishers Weekly has celebrated as “a brave iconoclast” and whose work the Globe & Mail has said “bristles with moral fury … at the absurdities of our accelerated age and a great dose of laugh-out-loud humour,” offers her readers nothing less than The Strange Truth About Us.

A three-part novel-length work of prose fragments, snippets, questions, speculations, and meditations, by turns philosophical, dark, comedic, and lyrical, it attempts to imagine a multitude of possible futures for our garrisoned world.

“Annotations About an Absence” is a series of 115 numbered annotations to the day-long ruminations of a retired couple living in a gated community attempting to create an imaginary novel in which they express their fears about the future: “We attempt to express the universal confusion of mind that is the main feature of contemporary life. Which is? We are afraid.”

“Woman Records Brief Notes Regarding Absence” is written as a series of notes to these annotations, providing (in the utterly blank spirit of transparency) a running satiric narrative on the project. Each of these “notes” is written as if it were a description of a late-night TV movie or the content of a wet Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet left on a woman’s doorstep that has taken hold of her mind.

“Other Prose Surrounding Absence” comprises twenty-seven prose pieces that take aim at a globalized world bludgeoned by the threat of “end times”—climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and really bad politics—that seem designed insofar as we are able to retain our status as “individuals.”

Unique in style and approach, engaging, enigmatic, controversial, and delightful, this book is an attempt to prick the bubble of our complacency in the face of the “awful atrocity” we’ve made for ourselves.