the immortals

The Immortals, subtitled Names Changed to Protect the Living, is a novel built as a found manuscript. It is the deathbed account of an ordinary man. He spent forty years in the private service of someone who was not ordinary at all.John was a veteran left for dead by his own life. Then a stranger named Norman found him in a pub. He wrote his story in a hospital bed, near the end of his own life. What he has to tell is the closest thing to a witness statement for four thousand years of human history. It spans the founding of Uruk and the House of Wisdom’s fall in Baghdad. It includes Bernard of Clairvaux emptying a hillside toward a war he would not live to see fail. It reaches the room in New Hampshire where a currency was reinvented. It reaches the Sunday evening in Washington that unmade it again. Norman was there for all of it, one of a scattered handful who remember everything. They have never once been able to explain, even to themselves, what they are trying to get back to.This tale moves between two registers throughout. One is an old soldier’s plain, exact memory of the man who employed him. The other is that man’s own account of a history too large for any single witness to hold. Between them, a pattern emerges and repeats. It begins with a gain built in good faith. Then comes a slow refusal to name its cost while there is still time. Eventually a collapse follows that nobody quite intended. The reader is left, like John, to decide how much of an impossible account to believe. The reader must also decide what to do with a story that offers no tidy lesson at the end. Its only claim is the plainer, harder one. Building something and taking responsibility for what it costs are two different disciplines. Almost nobody manages both.