What if a book could tell you exactly what happens after you die?
For millennia, humans have joined religions and invented rituals and stories to explore the notion that there’s something waiting for us after death. In her second novel, Perth author Rebecca Higgie imagines a world where the dead are waiting for us, but only those who are still remembered by the living.
“I think that there is something after this. But I don’t know fully what that thing is,” Rebecca Higgie told STM in the living room of her Bentley home.
“(Death) is going to come for me, it’s going to come for all of us. How I’m remembered, I have no control of. All I can hope is that I spend whatever afterlife there might be with my loved ones, and that hopefully there will be others after (me).”
Set in Perth in 2049, The Book Of The After follows two politicians, Eleanor and Negus, whose soulmate connection lies at the heart of the star-crossed-lovers story. Told from multiple points of view, spanning the living and the dead, the novel explores the Faustian bargain of fame and political power, as the characters rise to prominence at the cost of their lives. It also examines how leaving behind a legacy in death can be its own kind of torment.
Guy Fawkes, the 17th-century English Catholic conspirator who took part in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament in 1605, is a central character in the novel. The chapters based on his life open up a window into the past, while his perspective in death delves into the idea of how a soul becomes tormented when someone is condemned to be remembered forever.
“I’m fascinated with this idea of thinking what it would be like to be one of those historical figures that gets twisted over history . . . I wanted to explore how these were people in life, but what is left is the stories we tell about them and they ultimately reflect the stories we want to tell ourselves,” Higgie said.
“Legacy means nothing, it will go, it will shift, even the most famous people — we look at Alexander the Great, to figures in the Bible, and we think how can we twist them? How can we use them? Who they were in life is utterly irrelevant.”
The novel also interrogates authorship through a narrator known simply as “The Author,” who introduces excerpts from the book-within-the-book that gives the novel its title. These passages also reveal the novel’s vision of the afterlife, a concept that Negus comes to believe in as a young adult.
“Writing this book has made me think a bit more about the fact that you don’t have control of your legacy. With my books, for instance, there might be a time where there’s something that’s perceived as offensive, or it may simply just be forgotten to the sands in a library just rotting away,” Higgie said.
“It’s made me appreciate this country more, this place right here, right now, and how special it is.”
Higgie spent six years writing The Book Of The After, and started developing the novel as the devastating Black Summer bushfire season tore through Australia alongside the COVID pandemic. She consciously chose to open the novel in 2049 as an imagined near future and the year before the current 2050 net-zero target.
She doesn’t shy away from describing an imagined apocalyptic Perth where Kings Park is burnt to the ground and the city’s skyscrapers are flooded with water. The climate-related future events in the book are all based around the IPCC’s high-emission scenarios.
“When we talk about the future, we talk about these calamities. We talk about climate crisis. We talk about apocalypse. We even talk about technological disaster. But my book is saying it’s here, and we actually need to aggressively act on it,” Higgie said.
“We need to act because the cost is humanity and love. Whether it’s the love of children, family, the love of a lover or the love of country, it’s something so profound that it should compel us to act.”
Among the imagined climate chaos is a cast of characters who refuse to let their loved ones be forgotten, including a young boy with cancer who is affectionately called Little Bee, remembered in the form of a nursery rhyme and inspired by a song Higgie sang to her son when he was a baby.
“Little Bee started from a song I sang to my son, who’s a terrible sleeper . . . one night he was wearing a onesie with a bee on it and I started singing to him, ‘you are my little bee’ over and over, and I couldn’t help thinking about songs that are sung repeatedly which then become nursery rhymes and who’s behind those nursery rhymes,” she said.
The novel straddles these big themes of climate crisis and political power struggle with the intimate interiority of the central characters’ worlds, a dichotomy not only central to the concluding narrative message, but which also echoes the time and place that Higgie was writing from. Alongside the pandemic, Higgie’s husband was away for months at a time and she was battling sleep deprivation with a newborn.
“I felt this yearning in my chest that felt like it filled the world, and these tendrils reaching for (my husband) to come back. So I had this constant reflection about what it feels like to be apart from the people you love and no legacy, or power, or anything can make up for that,” she said.
Many of Higgie’s descriptions are drawn from going to the places that feature in the novel. She spent a lot of time in Kings Park, lay under Otto the whale in WA Museum Boola Bardip, went to Canberra and watched politicians argue in the House of Representatives and went for a run along the route that she describes Negus jogging in Melbourne.
“I love Perth as a city; when I lived in London I was miserable. But Perth is this city that you’ve got these little threats that are always there. We smell the smoke during summer. The water is already trying to push up the convention centre carpark. There are all these niggly threats that make such rich territory for a novel setting,” she said.
Higgie initially planned The Book Of The After as three distinct sections — the Now, the Before and the After — and wrote half the novel following that structure before deciding to interweave the timelines. To rework the structure she meticulously re-plotted the story through a Post-it note wall: yellow for the main plot, pink for the book within the book, and blue for the past.
“I wanted it to be this back-and-forth structure but you can’t keep all of that in your head, so the Post-it note wall was crucial,” she said.
The whole writing process took her six years: two years of research, two years of writing, then two years of editing. Much of her process was intertwined with caring for her son, who the novel is dedicated to.
“So much of it was walking around and thinking about it with my boy in a baby carrier. He went to Kings Park, he lay down on the floor with me at WA Museum to look up at Otto the whale. And now he even has an Otto toy,” Higgie said.
Not a novelist who can write in cafes, Higgie wrote the majority of the book in the office of her Perth home surrounded by jars of dried banksias. Winning the readers’ choice award in The Best Australian Yarn competition in 2023, for The Pyrocene, also gave her encouragement as it was pulled from scenes that would become The Book Of The After.
“It came at a time where I was really struggling with the book, I was close to the end, it was too big, it was overwhelming me . . . when I got the call that I’d got acknowledgement from the judges that I’d made the top 10 and then the readers’ choice award, I sobbed my eyes out. What it meant for me was it helped me to believe that this is a story which moves people,” she said.
The Book Of The After is published by Fremantle Press and is available to buy at local bookstores or online, $34.99.