Alice Robinson’s third novel (and second foray into speculative fiction) begins with a mother’s bittersweet “second chance at life” – one she never asked for. One hundred years in the future, 40-year-old Esther is the first of 47 sleepers to be “woken” from cryogenic suspended animation in an underground bunker. She does not know where her children are, and is being cared for by a strange woman her mother’s age, Grace. Over the course of the novel, Esther anxiously speculates on the length of her sleep and reckons with her new reality, as she slowly begins to remember her life and her children. If You Go unites various tropes and themes of domestic and speculative fiction. Its reflections on loneliness and the personal sacrifices of motherhood are set in a future where the environmental, social, political and economic crises of today are exacerbated.
Review: If You Go – Alice Robinson (Affirm Press)
Esther is confronted but unsurprised by the “climactic instability” of the future she awakes in, as well as the proliferation of war and the widening gap between the rich and poor, which has intensified in the world she once knew. Yet what is truly disturbing is her sober realisation: “I had failed to prepare my children for their future.” Drawing on thriller techniques, Robinson creates tension by slowly revealing why Esther’s life was “suspended” – and who Grace really is. Reawakened in a world that continued to exist without her, Esther must grapple with the incoherence of a body and life put into stasis. If You Go is more intimate, more insular, and much darker than Robinson’s previous works, Anchor Point (2015) and The Glad Shout (2019), which were concerned with land management, family responsibilities, and fraught mother–daughter relationships. By contrast, If You Go is more interested in personal expectations of motherhood and templates for it, and the loneliness of single parenthood. The novel is told from the first-person perspective of Esther, single mother to two children and the child of a broken family herself. In her life before the suspension, Esther was plagued by a sense of her failure as a parent and her struggle to work, write and survive the everyday difficulties we all know well, including the merciless cost of living. Robinson deftly conveys Esther’s desperation as she calls in favours, conceals lowbrow freelance writing jobs from her family, and attempts teaching work she’s unpractised at. All work that “wasn’t enough” and left Esther watching her “savings tick down like the timer on a bomb”.
