It takes a smart novelist to write an engaging story with multiple characters and viewpoint switches. Liane Moriarty pulls this off really well in her novel, Here One Moment, about a passenger on a short intercity flight who predicts the ages at which her fellow passengers will die and the cause of death. We follow a selection of these passengers in the days, weeks and months following the “Death Lady”‘s predictions as they assimilate what they’ve been told.
Honestly, this is such an original and clever story and Moriarty really pulls you in wth short chapters that flit between Cherry’s story – she’s the Death Lady – and one of a small group of passengers who have been given the short straw – a death predicted for the near future. Understandably their responses vary from being a bit worried, angry, or shrugging the predictions off as nonsense. That is until some of the predictions begin to come true.
Cherry is a pleasant looking, reserved woman of around seventy who arrives on the plane tired and a bit dehydrated. Her mother was a well-known fortune-teller in the Sydney suburb where Cherry grew up. You might think that Cherry has inherited this profession and continued to practise. But Cherry’s a maths geek from a young age. How her life develops takes the reader through the sixties and seventies and on, so that we eventually form a clear picture of why she had her ‘funny turn’ on the plane.
The lady sighs. She turns to appraise Leo.
Leo says, ‘You’re telling us how and when we’re going to die?’
Later he will berate himself. He will think he should have followed Sue’s lead and shut her down, but his feelings are mixed up with memories of his beloved grandmother’s confused face and how he – Leo! – could make it smooth and peaceful when he went along with her delusions. He was better at it than his sisters. Those were the last gifts he gave her. He will do the same for this lady. It doesn’t matter what nonsense she is talking.
‘Cause of death. Age of death,’ says the lady. ‘It’s really very simple.’
‘Sounds very simple,’ agrees Leo. ‘Give it to me straight.’
Meanwhile we get to know the half-dozen or so “doomed” passengers and how they deal with what they’ve been told. There’s Allegra, the cabin manager, stunningly beautiful, loves her job and yet has a family history which includes depression. Is she really likely to taker her own life in the next year? There’s engineer Leo, a loving family man, late for his daughter’s performance in a school production, supposedly going to die in a workplace accident. He chums up with Ethan, 30 years old and returning from the funeral of a friend, who has died suddenly, leaving Ethan to wonder about seizing the day.
There’s also the ER nurse in her sixties, still fit and active, as well as the bride, with her new husband, still in their wedding regalia, both women given terrible predictions. But possibly the most difficult to hear is the young mother, Paula, who has had to deal with an unsettled baby through the whole flight, which included a two-hour delay, only to learn at the end of it that her boy will die by drowning, aged seven.
We follow each of these characters, their stories woven in with Cherry’s, as their ‘death-day’ looms. It’s nail-biting stuff, as they’re all likeable people with busy lives, loves and families. You get to the middle of the book as the first predictions seem to come true, wondering if you’re going to like what happens next. Is this some kind of ‘And Then There Were None’ (Agatha Christie) scenario?
Well, you’ll have to read it to find out. I will say that it was interesting to read a book that deals with our mortality, an issue we tend to put to the back of our minds. But in the cases of Leo, Ethan, Allegra and co, death is suddenly there in their minds all the time. And the idea of what you might do differently if you knew what was in your cards, or tea leaves. The question of how much of our destiny do we hold in our hands.
I enjoyed all these character’s stories, even Cherry’s, who seems unlikeable at first, cruel even. I galloped through Here One Moment, desperate to find out the what happened – so it’s a four-star read from me. If you’re doing the 52 Book Club Challenge, Liane Moriarty has a sister Nicole Moriarty who also writes fiction.
Judith McKinnon 