If You Go by Alice Robinson review – what would you do with a second chance at life?
Alice Robinson’s If You Go entwines the intimate and the dystopic, in the vein of her previous two works of fiction, but she dials both modes up a notch here. If You Go is the only of her novels written in first person and is also the one set the furthest into the future, in a time when cryogenic technology has advanced exponentially.
The opening pages introduce us to Esther, who wakes in an unknown, underground location with a breathing tube down her throat and sensors attached to her “like octopus suckers”. For a good portion of the book, it is unclear what this vaguely institutional setting is. Equally perplexing is what has befallen Esther, or her two young children – a mystery that injects the narrative with a real propulsive quality and a mounting tension.
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Grace, the only other person present, is also intriguing; she is Esther’s carer and captor all at once. Even her age is ambiguous: Esther observes how Grace’s skin is curiously unlined, but she also appears to belong to another time, tenderly offering “grandmotherly comfort”.
Esther’s present predicament is interspersed with vignettes from her past, mostly centring on her maternal relationships both as mother and daughter. If You Go’s futuristic storyline is patently speculative, but these memories, when read collectively, suggest our narratives around motherhood and family are illusory in their own way. The most radical departure from the maternal ideal is encapsulated by Esther’s mother, for whom “freedom” is wholly incompatible with marriage and motherhood.
Esther reflects on how she once believed becoming a mother herself would “elevate” her, but in reality it exposed her wounds and flaws. She once believed that if she went about her divorce in the right way, her children would be unscathed – but this proves impossible. That divorce is synonymous with failure is likewise interrogated: Esther’s daughter, Clare, appears to understand that “separation in all its pain and renewal was a normal part of family life”. Familial love, Robinson seems to be suggesting, is inherently messy but can withstand and hold such tensions when it is capacious and robust.
In contrast to Esther’s presently drab, sterile surroundings, the century-old memories she conjures are visceral, immediate and alive. Everything now reminds her of something then. This feels true to how grief operates and is convincingly conveyed by Robinson; Esther’s first thought as she wakes is a memory of her son Wolfie’s favourite cereal, its taste “as tangible as if I had a mouthful I needed to swallow”. Her scaly skin recalls Wolfie’s as a newborn; the facility’s pervasive refrigerated smell reminds her of the ice packs her former husband would use on his muscles after cycling. Noticing Esther’s faltering steps, Grace shortens her gait, “the way I’d done for Clare and Wolfie when they were small”.
If present and past are intricately meshed together, so too are reality and fantasy. Esther’s circumstances may seem far-fetched, but the emotions they trigger in her have corollaries in her recollections of reality. The timescale, for example, is fantastical, but time’s strange elasticity reminds Esther of early motherhood, when leaving the house on time with little kids was “a series of mazes”. Even the notion of freezing time has its antecedents, in Clare’s tiny footprints imprinted on plaster, “trying to preserve something that’s already gone when we begin”. The void she currently inhabits reminds her of her state of mind after splitting from her husband. And this is not the first time she has found herself somewhere “abnormal and unfamiliar”: marriage, motherhood and divorce were all similarly destabilising for her.
Throughout, Robinson’s linguistic choices illustrate how the geographic, the bodily, the technological and the mental all interconnect in deep ways. Esther characterises her grief as “a hostile landscape I had to live in”; childbirth was another land; an “underworld”. The knowledge stored on an old computer is “like memories buried in a skull”. Her parents-in-law’s house is so automated it feels “alive, a body we were living inside of.”
If You Go is not overly concerned with the specifics of cryogenics; we are told little about the science beyond that it’s modelled on animal hibernation. Ultimately, what’s more interesting are the existential questions Robinson’s futuristic premise raises. What would you do with a second chance at life? How can we prepare children for a future we can’t predict? This ambitious, immersive work doesn’t offer any neat answers. But it does satisfy in articulating the doubts and dilemmas many of us are wrestling with.
