For the High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club, I’m Shane Timson in Colby, Kansas. Today we are talking about the Blue Book of Nebo written by Mannon Stephan Ross. This book was originally written in the Welsh language and was recently translated into English.
It’s kind of a dystopia novel, but what I find interesting – In a lot of dystopian novels you see some sort of cataclysmic event such as a nuclear war and then everybody uncomfortably trying to survive and then move on. But this is a very interesting one because the characters seem to do okay in their world.
We don’t know what the “end” was. There are some rumblings where it could have been a power grid failure or some kind of war that ended everything, but we get the sense that the three characters in the story are the only people to survive. The main two characters are son Dylan and mom Roewna, also known as “Ma’am.” There is a younger sister but we don’t really see much about her. She was born after the event and when Dylan tries to inquire about her, Mom gets very angry and so he knows never to ask certain questions. So, we don’t really know anything about the sister.
In fact, when the book starts out, they are stealing from houses because these are like the only three people alive on the planet that we know of. So, they are in there and they are stealing books mainly and they find this blue book.
They start writing this story. Dylan who is now 14 was six at the time of “the End” as they call it. So, he writes everything he remembers from the end up to the present day. Mom, or Ma’am write everything before the present day. They agree that they are not going to read each other’s entries. They don’t know what each other is going to write, so they begin to write this masterpiece book.
It's interesting because they return to what they call the old ways – they are hunter-gatherers. And they seem to be okay with it. Again, there’s not this fear or anger about it. They sort of just accept it. Okay, we used to have all this other stuff. We don’t have it any more and now we have to live this way. We have to rely on each other, and they do that.
In a lot of other dystopian novels, there is a lot of fear. I don’t get the fear here. I get the sense that they love each other and they are going to do what’s right. In fact, there is one passage of the book where Rowena says, “I should write about Dylan now. I don’t see him much, even though I see him every day. I suppose I just see him melt into each other.”
That got me to thinking about how we are around certain people everyday but because life just becomes so routine, they are there but we don’t really notice them. That’s kind of a sad state of affairs. I don’t want to get to a point where I’m around my wife every day, but I don’t’ really notice my wife. She’s there doing her thing. I’m there doing my thing.
You kind of get the sense that these characters are just doing their thing and they don’t really see each other. They don’t really talk to each other. They are just trying to survive. Sometimes I think that is a problem we have in modern civilization with all of our technology and all of our advancements, sometimes we are just too busy just trying to live life and get everything done that’s on our list for that day, we fail to live. We fail to enjoy the very people that are around us.
I think this book teaches us to love each other.
I’m Shane Timson from Colby, Kansas.
