Review: Duperre's Inferno
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 19, 2012
The Rift series, to me at least, has become a saga of epic proportions, a true literary jewel, a brilliant masterpiece. The story grips you: you need to know what's going to happen next and it's hard when you have to close the book to get back to real life. The characters and their relation to each other are extremely detailed and developed, to the point where you feel like you know them. The style is top-notch: Duperre's prose is fluid, neat and concise. To sum up: good story, good characters, good style... That would be more than enough, but there's more: if you care to go beyond the surface, you quickly realize The Rift is much more than a zombie story. It's actually a human story. A Divine Comedy.A new character appears in Book 3: General Alexander Bathgate, who somehow epitomizes the depth of the narrative. Early on, the reader learns that his real name was Terrance Graham, that he was a teacher, and that he took the name and uniform of an officer after killing him (an action paralleled toward the end by another character). So you know from the start that here's someone you can't trust. Consider this: as a reader, you're holding in your hands a book by Robert J. Duperre, writer. There's a narrator in the book, and all the characters are described through a third-person narrative. Graham / Bathgate's story is only one of the many stories in the novel, and it is indeed a story, since he admits it's a lie... There's a metafictional mise en abyme at work here, telling us not to take anything for granted or at face value, warning us to go beyond the surface. Multiply this by the number of characters, and you get why it's impossible to cover even one per cent of this book's potential in an Amazon review...If the preceding argument seems far-fetched, one only needs to consider the amount of hints populating the novel, such as the titles given to chapters: "The Portrait of a Lady" (chapter 6), like Henry James's novel. Chapter 10  "Bright Lights, Big City" like Jay McInerney's. Chapter 14 "A Tale of Two Kingdoms", hitting quite close to Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities". And it's not only books: the movie Mad Max is mentioned, and the famous Star Wars sentence "I have a bad feeling about this" uttered by Forrest (!) at some point. In chapter 15, punctuation matches a mad character's rambling, with a massive dose of Louis Ferdinand Céline's "dot-dot-dot". Onomastics play a role too, as we feel Duperre paid a form of homage to many influent authors by naming characters Hawthorne, Crane, Dante... Duperre, like Brian K. Vaughan in the series Lost or comics like Y The Last Man, deftly manages to blend pop culture with highbrow stuff.Bathgate admires Alexander the Great, hence the choice of his new first name. The omnipresent link with History is another important axis in The Rift. The virus can be compared to the Plague (which is also a book, by Albert Camus, and there are similarities, we could go on and on...). Bathgate's Machiavellian mind leads him to rebuild a society that reminds us of the darkest hours of past History: the Inquisition, the Witch Hunt(s), slavery, Nazism... History tends to repeat itself, Duperre establishing a direct link with many philosophical concepts thanks to - or because of - this evil character. It's a dog eat dog world where only the strong survive (Darwin's Survival of the Fittest), even if it means turning on your own kind (Janusz Bardach's Man is Wolf to Man), in an endless repetition, an eternal return (Nietzsche) to the same mistakes.Lying, to others, to oneself, is a major theme. It's directly linked to dualism: Bathgate's violence is not always controlled, as if he were a puppet manipulated from a distance. Many other characters follow this pattern, either through an inner, contradictory voice, or dreams, hallucinations. Each of which leading either to catastrophe or salvation, a form of protection or of destruction. Most of the time, these occurences are manifested by italics, and look like examples of Stream of Consciousness, a literary device so dear to the likes of Virginia Woolf or Marcel Proust. This dualism is further reflected when one character, Marcy (a dystopian Pythia), compares dreaming to returning to the safety of the mother's womb: the idea is both a regression and a way to move forward through rebirth. The Prologue announces it: this is the "Cycle of Life", the end of one thing is the beginning of another. Contradictions, paradoxes are at the core of Life itself. Sam is both a destroyer and a creator, someone (something?) who is averse to chaos and wants to obtain order,  yet who threw the whole world through Hell.In The Rift, violence is not free: Hawthorne's dismemberment in chapter 5 is an echo of what befell Falsifiers in Divine Comedy. In Chapter 6, the Dead are burnt in a "fiery pit" of a circular shape, also referred to as "the Mouth of Hell" by Bathgate and "Inferno" by the narrator. Bathgate alone totals three of the seven deadly sins (Wrath, Envy and Pride), another important theme in Dante's narrative. After purgatory, if the parallel with Dante Alighieri's own masterpiece stands, some characters should reach Heaven in Book 4...