Book review, Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich: Not a rival to her previous works

When Louise Erdrich’s new novel Future Home of the Living God opens, Cedar Hawk Songmaker – the 26-year-old “adopted child of Minneapolis liberals” – is four months pregnant. For the first time in her life, she’s moved to discover more about her biological parents, members of the Ojibwe tribe – not least because she wants to know if she should be on the lookout for any genetic abnormalities lying in wait for her unborn child.

It’s certainly the right time to be worrying about such issues since, on this occasion, Erdrich’s fictional world is that of a near future America marked by “biological chaos”. Evolution hasn’t simply stopped; it’s actually going backwards. This means a variety of things, from the appearance of strange prehistoric animals in backyards, through to an extension of the Patriot Act, under the Church of the New Constitution that’s now in charge of the US, which calls for “gravid female detention”. Thus, what begins as a story about motherhood and origins quickly metamorphoses into an action-packed escape adventure as Cedar fights for her freedom.

Although it might seem like Future Home of the Living God is its own unexpected mutation in Erdrich’s oeuvre, the novel’s underlying themes – those of adoption, parentage and lineage – have also been central to some of her other works, particularly the two novels that preceded this one, the 2012 National Book Award-winning The Round House, and its follow-up LaRose. As such, it would be unfair to see this new work only as a product of the current historical moment, especially since Erdrich’s has been vocal about the fact she originally began writing the novel back in 2002, as a response to George W Bush’s reinstatement of the “global gag rule”. Given today’s conservative agenda in the US regarding women’s reproductive rights, it makes perfect sense, however, that Erdrich’s story is seeing the light of day now.

With the renewed interest in The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s impossible not to read Future Home of the Living God as a homage to Margaret Atwood’s genre-defining novel, and I’m already imagining the potential of some kind of fanfic spin-off that sees Cedar and Offred join forces. There are also echoes of PD James’s dystopian novel about mass infertility, The Children of Men (itself adapted into a brilliant film, directed by Alfonso Cuaron), here too.

The problem, however, is that while both Atwood and James excel at the dystopian world-building that underlies their plots, Erdrich’s wider world never convinces. The introduction of every new detail comes hand in hand with a series of associated questions: How? Why? It’s all so muddled in fact, that even the elements that Erdrich’s proved herself a past master of – the entanglements of kith and kin – are also somewhat lacking.

It’s testament to Erdrich’s considerable storytelling powers that I found myself eagerly turning each page to find out how Cedar’s story plays out, but there were simply too many unexplained absences and leaps in the plot, character development and scene-setting for this to rival the accomplishments of her previous works.

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich is published by Corsair, £18.99