Anthony Weller (1957–2021)

Anthony Weller's The Land of Later On is a picaresque novel that wanders through the afterlife with Walt Whitman as a guide. Weller's conceit is that the dead inhabit a world just like this one, but all of time is available, so you can visit your apartment, say, or London, at the present, or in the past or in the future, and you can jump from one place or time to another, sort of like Dr. Who. You are conveniently provided with travel brochures. The Land of Later on gives you a choice--you can stay there, or you can decide to come back, be reborn, which choice means you will forget all that went before, but your essence stays the same, although it will be shaped by whatever circumstance you find yourself being reborn into. Most people choose to be reborn, including Shakespeare, Blake, Dante, Hitler and Stalin, but not Whitman. He finds the afterlife pleasant. He manages to get laid by a cowboy at a truck stop in Arizona.

The main character, a jazz musician, spends his time hunting for his dead wife. He reflects, at one point, near the end of the book that though he spent his life making music, when he dies, he will be forgotten fairly soon, although he managed a couple of concerts that transported his listeners, to such an extent that they were lifted, flying, maybe like riding the horse or chasing the dragon. I'm too attached to the illusion of logic and consecutive thought and the solid dirt of earth ever to fly out of my head. Except when I hear the right music.

I'm not attached to the soulmate solution for the problem of existence. Funny, the book I read before this was called the Archivist, and he too was on a search for his dead wife, who essentially committed suicide because her husband violated basic archival principles and threw away her notes about the holocaust, which he thought were making her insane, but really were just the research for her poems. The question of that book was--if your creative process makes you unsociable and your behavior suspect, should you continue to be allowed to pursue it?… (mehr)

Just an OK view of what it might be to go to the afterlife. The protagonist is a bit whiny, and I thought the writing felt a little amateurish. Plus the author clearly loves jazz (and I don't. Sorry.)

Decent enough idea: You go to the afterlife, and it's what you make of it. But sometimes the one person you love just isn't there.

I shouldn't read reviews of stuff just before I read it or as I'm reading it. I was reading a review of this that said if you want this story, done much better, do A Brief History of the Dead. And that influenced me. I read that one first, and liked it better. So go do that if you want suspense.

Our protagonist here is a musician who was trapped in a debilitated body, his music taken away from him. And four years before, his long-time love died before he did.

He finally decides to kill himself, and spends most of the book searching for Lucy. The big swindle is that people are encouraged to go back to earth in new bodies -- like reincarnation -- rather than crowd up the afterlife.

Yet the afterlife is largely a product of your brain -- you can go to any time, any place, within reason. For some reason, astronauts and dinosaurs are off limits. So it's infinite. Yet there's pressure to go back to earth. Turns out there's a need for people -- their souls, their creative sparks, something -- to go back to earth.

Many go back, some don't. There's a little book -- like the Gideon's Bible of the afterlife -- that's a false guide to what to expect, all done to encourage people to go back.

But our protagonist won't go. He's looking for his lost love, and he doesn't believe she would've gone back to earth only to forget about him, and he doesn't want to go back without her.

Sounds good, but again, the writing was a little grating. Also, our protagonist picks up a mentor, Walt Whitman. I never read Walt Whitman and I don't have a good historical sense of him, but as his guide, he just comes off as some regular guy. Not impressed. I'm guessing the author must like Walt Whitman, too.

In any case, I didn't die (and go to the afterlife or not) from reading this. But A Brief History of the Dead is far better executed with this sort of idea, and very suspenseful. Read that instead, or too.… (mehr)