Several books that were published between 2016 and 2021 are destined to become the focus of intense scholarly analysis in the future. To mention just two of the novels that seem destined for this retrospective analysis are Richard Powers’ Bewilderment and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan. In the case of Powers, though his book was released in September 2021, the full extent to which Donald Trump attempted to stage a coup against the peaceful transfer of power had yet to be fully revealed. As a result, Bewilderment’s subplot about the extremes a sitting President takes to preserve his grip on power seems eerily prescient.
The Book of Joan is set in a much more distant future and the connection between this story and Donald Trump is significantly more tenuous and symbolic. The primary difference between the two novels, however, is that Yuknavitch published her book before the Trump administration even had a chance to become the most corrupt in American history. And yet it manages to be, on one level, a cautionary tale about the profound danger of allowing a fame-seeking celebrity grifter to use propaganda to manipulate his way to living out his fever dreams of fascist dictatorial authoritarianism.
The dystopic future for earthlings outlined here actually takes place mostly aboard a space station orbiting high above the planet. Earth was deemed inhospitable due to a devastating global reckoning. The consequences not only shrink the population severely but generate a rapid-scale evolutionary transformation of the species into a barely recognizable hairless and translucent shadow of its former self. This mutated version of humanity eventually produces a new aesthetic allowing people to literally turn their skeletal bodies into a medium for storytelling by branding text and images into the skin as white as paper. In order to maintain an adequate supply of water for everybody aboard the station, death is mandatory for everyone upon their fiftieth birthday. If there is something that seems familiarly fascistic about life for what is left of humanity, it is entirely intentional. One of the few recognizably human attributes among the populace is the seemingly uncontrollable urge to turn toward despots during times of existential anxiety.
One might well assume that the despotic ruler of this dystopia, Jean de Men, is intended as merely another example of the old-fashioned concept of the composite villain based a little on this dictator and a little on that tyrant combined with the requisite dose of Hitler. Except that the description setting up the backstory to the villainy of the absolute leader of the space station known as CIEL has a very distinctive familiarity to it:
“…his astral rise as an author revered by millions worldwide, then overtaking television—that puny propaganda device on Earth—and finally, the seemingly unthinkable, as media became a manifested room in your home, he overtook lives, his performances increasingly more violent in form. His is a journey from opportunistic showman, to worshipped celebrity, to billionaire, to fascistic power monger.”
At the time of publication in early 2017, the only part of that description that had yet to come to fruition was the last part. Just a few years later that last part would become an example of foreshadowing.
The villainous Jean de Men is described by the narrator as a “strange combination of a military dictator and a spiritual charlatan.” That description was already easily connected to the real-life inspiration for the character. What makes this book worthy of analysis in the future as an eerie foretelling of what would happen in the years immediately following publication is the stunning plot twist at the end.
While most of the action takes place aboard the space station, it turns out that some pockets of humanity did manage to survive the devastation which prompted the escape to the space station. Amongst the survivors is the title character: a latter-day Joan of Arc. Like St. Joan, she had a vision of the coming destruction. And just as Joan of Arc made claims to powers beyond the reach of ordinary folk, so does the woman who comes to be known as Joan of Dirt. She earns her name by practicing a strange ritual in the soil in which she calls upon a mysterious force that pre-empts the coming man-made apocalypse by triggering a cosmic cataclysm. The result is not significantly different from what she saw in her vision except for essential detail. By summoning the end of the world ahead of schedule, Joan changes history in a way that subverts the plans of Jean de Men and his minions to reap the benefits of exploiting the world’s resources completely before time ran out. And ever since the forced rush to survival aboard CIEL, Joan has been quietly leading the resistance down below.
This backstory serves to situate the backbone of the narrative as a battle not just between good and evil, but between Jean and Joan. A battle for the future of humanity pitting a man against a woman. This theme introduces the element of misogyny into the rise of Jean de Men which just so happens to also correspond to its real-life Presidential inspiration. It is within the construction of this theme of the novel as an exploration of the battle of sexes that the jaw-dropping final twist is revealed. A twist that serves to change everything. And it is this twist that all but guarantees the novel will be studied very closely as a commentary on the political phenomenon resulting from the unexpected climax of the first Presidential election in American history to pit a female candidate against a male candidate as the front-runner.
