My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The Returned is Jason Mott’s debut novel and as a first novel it’s pretty decent. As a novel, period, I found it less effective, with a number of flaws and unrealized potential.
The premise is high concept and simple: without explanation, the dead return to life, unchanged from the time just before their deaths (ie. murder victims don’t show up with knives stuck in their backs). As the story progresses the number of ‘returned’ grows significantly and things take a turn for the ugly as governments grapple to deal with all of the freshly warm bodies.
The novel pays lip service to the wider effects of the dead coming back to life, mostly by having people observe news reports on TV or in brief interstitials between chapters that recount the return of various individuals across the globe. The bulk of the story focuses on the elderly couple of Harold and Lucille Hargrave, who have their eight year old son returned to them fifty years after he drowned in a local river, and how their small southern town of Arcadia handles the newly not-dead (hint: not very well at all).
The characters are broadly drawn–Lucille is deeply religious, her husband is a cantankerous atheist, there is the decent but powerless government man and the colonel in charge of the eventual operation in Arcadia is revealed to be all but psychotic. The latter, Colonel Willis (I couldn’t help but imagine Bruce Willis as the character, as it is essentially a copy of the character of Major General William Devereaux that Willis played in The Siege), is set up to be a major player but actually has a fairly small role.
I had two main problems with the story, the first being that the premise is never explored in any detail. The dead come back to life, their numbers create a problem for the “true living” and that’s it. There are a few vague hints about the why and the how of why they have returned, but these are nothing more than traces. It’s an interesting concept but in the end it feels like a plot device to hang the story on.
I was fine with the story focusing on the small scale of the Hargraves and their boy, along with some of the town’s neighbors and a few other sundry characters that get drawn in, but here again the story is curiously one-sided, with the author staying almost entirely out of the heads of the returned, and this was my other major problem with it. I often felt like half of the story was being withheld. The boy Jacob is little more than a polite cipher, a wind-up toy in the shape of an eight year old. While everyone frets and threatens and talks about the returned, the returned themselves are little more than wallpaper in the background.
The writing sometimes tries a little too hard to wax lyrical but I admit I may be the wrong audience for this style of writing. It comes off sounding corny to me. “It was bitterly cold, like a hard winter where the ground is frozen and cruel.” I just made that up, but it conveys Mott’s style of metaphor. There’s also a little too much of characters confessing how little they know about particular subjects “other than what I see on TV” that feels like the author trying to cover for his own lack of knowledge on various topics.
The Returned is not a bad book, though. The prose is clean and direct and the story never meanders. There are some amusing exchanges between characters. By the end, though, the whole thing felt a bit disjointed, with character arcs that play out to no real effect, action scenes that don’t quite ring true (there should be a moratorium on people shooting someone in an extremity) and a conclusion that wraps things up but left me thinking, “Well, okay. I guess the story’s done now.”