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A review by adamskiboy528491
Anthem by Noah Hawley
3.0
"The adults are lost. We, their children, are starting over."
Anthem by Noah Hawley is kind of like a shadow. There is no visceral commentary at work here, only the light of real life projected onto caricatured cutouts, their flat shapes moving ceaselessly about the page.
Something is happening to teenagers across America, spreading through memes only they can parse. At the Float Anxiety Abatement Center in a suburb of Chicago, Simon Oliver is trying to recover from his sister's tragic passing. He breaks out to join a woman named Louise and a man called The Prophet on a quest as urgent as it is enigmatic. Who lies at the end of the road? A man is known as The Wizard, whose past encounter with Louise sparked her collapse. Their quest becomes a rescue mission when they join up with a man whose sister is being held captive by the Wizard, impregnated and imprisoned in a tower.
I’m a massive fan of Hawley’s work after discovering his tv miniseries, Fargo, and I’ve realised he is a master at tightly plotting unpredictable stories and writing believable characters. Hawley is also a pop culture maniac (in a good way), borrowing names from Stephen King’s The Stand, Hunger Games, and other sources that provide a bit of vintage wit. More importantly, Hawley recognises that the country is in shakedown, in a terror grip of disasters, social and geological. Anthem is a great novel which invokes many ideas and sentiments around our twisted modern America. Guns, religion, conspiracies and a struggle with a seemingly subjective reality all encompass his young protagonists as they struggle to find purpose in a world beyond the truth.
Anthem by Noah Hawley is kind of like a shadow. There is no visceral commentary at work here, only the light of real life projected onto caricatured cutouts, their flat shapes moving ceaselessly about the page.
Something is happening to teenagers across America, spreading through memes only they can parse. At the Float Anxiety Abatement Center in a suburb of Chicago, Simon Oliver is trying to recover from his sister's tragic passing. He breaks out to join a woman named Louise and a man called The Prophet on a quest as urgent as it is enigmatic. Who lies at the end of the road? A man is known as The Wizard, whose past encounter with Louise sparked her collapse. Their quest becomes a rescue mission when they join up with a man whose sister is being held captive by the Wizard, impregnated and imprisoned in a tower.
I’m a massive fan of Hawley’s work after discovering his tv miniseries, Fargo, and I’ve realised he is a master at tightly plotting unpredictable stories and writing believable characters. Hawley is also a pop culture maniac (in a good way), borrowing names from Stephen King’s The Stand, Hunger Games, and other sources that provide a bit of vintage wit. More importantly, Hawley recognises that the country is in shakedown, in a terror grip of disasters, social and geological. Anthem is a great novel which invokes many ideas and sentiments around our twisted modern America. Guns, religion, conspiracies and a struggle with a seemingly subjective reality all encompass his young protagonists as they struggle to find purpose in a world beyond the truth.