The thing that happens -- you know *SPOILERS*

[muddlewait]

Spoilers, of course.






So. Georgia's death.

Before anything else: this was brave writing. Brave brave brave, and not pointless, suicidal shock-value bravery, which isn’t so much brave as it is desperate. This was brave with a big and meaningful payoff for bravery, and for me, Georgia’s death (and the way other elements in the story are built around and play off of it) is what makes this book special.

An extended aside, with a point:

I love Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It’s far from a perfect book. It’s got clutter, contradictions, sizable plot holes, underdeveloped key characters... I could go on. But I love it, way deep down to the bottom of my nit-picky little reader’s heart, because it does something well that is both important and difficult to do. It has its main character make a morally upright and fair decision, the best decision he could possibly have made, and punishes him, and other people, brutally for it, in a way that comes across as meaningful and honest – not in a cruel way, but a merciless one, and with appropriate amounts of anguish and horror. By the time I was done with that book, I was that much more convinced that being good does not always mean being rewarded, even if it has to be done anyway. And that’s a useful reminder.
 
By contrast, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix left me cold, and I knew why right after first reading it: I didn’t much care about the price paid at the end. I hardly knew the guy, and I knew Harry hardly knew him, too. After thinking about it for a few days, *I* knew who should have died, and I realized that Order of the Phoenix also had something important and difficult to do. It just didn’t do it.

Years later, in an interview, Rowling said she’d thought the same thing, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. I believe that, with that decision, she traded the better story for the easier one. I get the possible reasoning behind her decision. I do, and I don’t want to debate that here. But I disagree with that reasoning. Strongly.

Anyway, the point is this: Feed passes the Arthur Weasley test, with flying colors. (All red, of course. Every last one of them. Red.)

I’ve got a bunch of things I plan to geek out about concerning the climax and the way I see it interacting with the rest of the story. In the meantime, I’d love to hear about what other folks thought and think of it, and what they got out of it.

[runCMD]

I haven't read a book for pleasure in years ... Instead relegating my prime reading focus to technical manuals for systems and applications I manage.  It was the iPad and its ebook reader that set me down the path to find FEED.  Its was the blogger theme and rss icon that caught my eye as much as the promise of zombies.  Yay Zombies.

Once picked up - I found it hard to put down.  Third day into reading I awoke to find my face firmly planted on the glass of my iPad screen.    I turned the device back on and picked up reading from my last remembered spot.  

I did not expect Georgia to die.  I could only sense it coming within minutes of the revelation and had to stop reading just short of the admission.  

No - she's not going to ... Surely not.  She's like the main ... Nawww ... Just keep reading.  

When the end came - I put down my reader - dried my eyes - and went off to sleep like I had lost a member of my own.     Next day I did finish the book.  But nothing that came after mattered as much as that moment.   I didn't see it as a grand sacrifice for a noble cause - regardless of what it meant to her character in the end.  Nor did i take pleasure in the ultimate Tate reveal.    Even as the reader - The loss was mine as much as her brothers.  

I read the excerpt from the deadline book - and was comforted some to hear her voice again - even if it was emanating from the mind of her grieving brother.  Hello George.  What now ?      

[muddlewait]

I felt comforted that same way, hearing Georgia's voice again in Shaun's mind. Made me laugh out loud with relief, which I do too little these days. There's a powerful observation in that -- that the way to have life after death, even if you don't get to live it yourself, is in the truths you leave in other peoples' heads.

One thing about the climactic event that impressed me is that it doesn't have any hint of "stunt writing" about it. The narrator dies because it's the most painful and hardest decision possible in terms of the story, sure, but it's also a logical outgrowth of the rest of the book, and I remain amazed at how well it works.

Killing the character who appears to be the sole first-person narrator partway through the first book in a series could easily have felt like it had been done purely for shock value, or for the sake of novelty or cleverness. But that isn't what happens here. We know this is a world with a Wall,  in which people who write the truth risk their lives and die for the sake of their final reports, so Georgia's death doesn't break any rules in this particular case; in fact, in this world, it's following them. Moreover, the whole of Feed is a macro version of the climax, in that the book, as well as her final post, consists of Georgia's reporting of, and thoughts and feelings about, the events leading up to her death. The questions I think many readers would reflexively if subconsciously ask at the death of a narrator -- "How can she be the narrator if she's dead? Who's been talking to us? Her ghost? Has she been dying this whole time?" -- get answered, in an aesthetic sense. This book, through page 500ish at least, is at its heart a journalistic effort. It's Georgia's last report, just as much as her final words being typed from the van. Georgia is constantly writing her life down, recording pretty much every significant event or thought, distilling, analyzing, and sharing every moment she lives as soon as she's lived it. She never stops telling her story, so we don't have to ask "How could this dead person have decided to write this book?" Georgia didn't *decide* to write this book. She's always been writing it. She just finally got to the part where she died.

***

Just went back and re-read Georgia's last post. Before, admiration, yes. But there hadn't been any tears.

This time?

...