Three

[sawyl]

I've had Sarah Lotz' Three on my radar for a while and, in the mood for something post apocalyptic, I decided that the time had come to dive in.

On January 12th 2012, a plane crashes in Japan. Another crashes in the Florida Everglades. A third crashes in sea off the UK. And a fourth crashes into the township of Khayelitsha in South Africa. In each of the first cases, a single young child survives; in the last case, the authorities confidently assert that no-one has survived. Returned to their next of kin, the children — Bobby Smalls in the US, Jess Cavendish in the UK, and Hiro Yanagida in Japan — seem strangely changed and very different to their pre-crash selves.

Meanwhile back in Texas, Pastor Len Vorhees learns that one of his congregation, Pamela May Donald, died in the crash in Japan; but before she shuffled off her mortal coil, Pam was able to record a short, incoherent message that ends with the message "Pastor Len warn them that the boy he's not to..." Seeing this as a personal warning against Hiro Yanagida — and spotting it as his way in to the evangelical big time — Pastor Len announces that Pam is a prophet and her last message is a warning that the surviving children, including a heretofore unknown survivor in South Africa, are actually the four horsemen of the apocalypse and that the end of times has arrived.

The story unfolds through a series of accounts — a combination of interpolated first person narratives, interviews, chat logs and emails, and articles from the media — assembled by the writer Elspeth Martins into her book Black Thursday: From Crash to Conspiracy.

Key characters in the unfolding record are Lilian Small, Bobby's grandmother whose husband Rueben has advanced Alzheimers; Paul Craddock, Jess's guardian, a vain actor who appears to be somewhat less than reliable; and Ryu, a hikikomori who is involved, over a chat server, with Chiyoko Kamamoto, the cousin of Hiro Yanagida. Much of the information about Len Vorhees and his theory about the end of the world comes from Reba Neilson, Pamela May's principal frenemy, through Len's mistress, and through his public appearances and pronouncements. The characters voices are effectively realised and the technique of using collage of narrators contributes a strong feeling of a rounded and realised world.

The final closing sections break the walls of Martins' book, pulling in sections from Elspeth's trip to Japan where she finally intends to lay some of her ghosts to rest. Whether this lays the reader's own ghosts to rest or whether it leaves events open is probably going to be a matter of taste. In my case, I thought it added just the right final note to proceedings.