Their faces are bright patches with hairdos.

I started thinking about time-signatures in prose after reading this descriptive line by Judith Schalansky, narrating from the child POV (in an essay), and how quickly the image lends itself to a child narrator, or to the way a child might describe something. It is literal, bold, unselfconscious—the faces are what they are, the child passes this information along casually—and the reader is given a time that reflects the narrative perception.

When I say time-signatures, it is to bracket the way different writers describe time in their prose, and how images, metaphors, and figurative language intersect with voice to reveal intent. A time-signature is part of narrative craft, a way in which time is both created and evoked.

.. my family lived less than a mile away from one site where the world would begin to end.

Gary Fincke’s “Faith”, published in a recent issue of Pleiades, also offers a distinct time-signature: a Before which wanders between the retrospective adult and the child. Fincke grows up near missile silos during the Cold War, where he and his friends practice drills in preparation for nuclear disaster. The time-signature here is apocalyptic but also childlike, innocent of investment or complicity. (I wish I could link to the actual text, but I can’t, so I’m leave this interview with Fincke instead, as a consolatio.)

Time belongs to adult men, Fincke suggests: "The rest of the day waits like a woman he's paid for." But time also empties itself of meaning and resonance when those men disappear, as when: "My father's garage is hollow where his car has been gone three years, sold and replaced with the emptiness of nostalgia."

Watching a real estate seller at work, his mind mapping property values, Fincke’s narrator adds: "Soon there will be nothing but borders." Here, the prophetic reaches towards the apocalyptic through the speculative—which brings me to Choi Jin-Young.

“A group of Koreans are making their way across a disease-ravaged landscape—but to what end? To the Warm Horizon shows how in a post-apocalyptic world, humans will still seek purpose, kinship, and even intimacy. Focusing on two young women, Jina and Dori, who find love against all odds, Choi Jin-young creates a dystopia where people are trying to find direction after having their worlds turned upside down.” (Source: Honford Star website)

Choi Jin-young's novel, To the Warm Horizon, was first published in Korea in 2017, prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. (I am still in love with Honford Star’s cover design!) Translated from the Korean by Soje, To the Warm Horizon creates a post-apocalyptic world changed by an unnamed virus. Although this virus wrecks the world as it has been known, it isn’t the greatest threat to life; that role is reserved for humankind, who finds ways to mobilize violence and war rather than care. How people respond to disaster creates the hinge for suspense.

Jin-young’s time-signature is part of how verisimilitude is established—and its effectiveness is critical to our relationship with the characters. It is post-apocalyptic in the most realest way – at the intersection of government’s failing, leaders fall, citizens looting, private militias terrorizing others, visa crises, and continuous refugees running, running towards something. There is an element of hindsight that touches the reader, a thick taste of rue in feeling one has averted a crisis.

The story takes us through the ravaged world as people from Korea flee across the continent towards Russia, seeking safe, virus-free (i.e. human-free) places to settle. The chapters alternate between first-person narrators who stories are tangled, each of these characters becomes precious the reader.

Ryu, a character, begins the book with two questions:

Have you ever heard of Korea? Is Korea still where it used to be?

Immediately, we understand that the address is intimate; the interrogative references something which may no longer exist. We are in the future. She is the wife of Dan, the mother of Haemin, a son who lives in Warsaw, and the mother of Haerim,  a daughter who died at 11, whose death is the reason they fled Korea.

The world changed suddenly, Ryu explains, and yet they found ways to believe the virus with vanish— that government policies and modern medicine would protect them. They persisted in these beliefs until Haerim died suddenly at school. After arriving in Russia, Ryu describes finding a god whom people believe will protect them, but Ryu has "survived this long" not due to god's power, might, or care. Ryu has survived due to god's "indifference." 

I am now over seventy years old—no, eighty? I’m not sure. I have lived for too long. Relative to my years, the two months or so I spent in Russia would at most amount to a single sheep in a herd of a hundred. And yet that one sheep remains so vivid in my memory. Not at day goes by that I don’t remember you all.

Survived this long. What a way to open a speculative novel—to create tension while also placing the idea of survival, itself, into question. And: you all, that strange invocation. What does it mean to survive cut off from one’s family and children? How does surviving require one to address a letter to the world, asking about one’s homeland? Set before the rest of the book, and separated from it, Ryu's story serves as a prologue which establishes context.

The first chapter is narrated by Dori, whose parents are dead, and whose sister, Joy, is now in her care. Their parents died believing humans were intelligent and persistent - humans would find a solution if one waited and listened. But Dori believes humans will create a bigger disaster, and life will be determined by those who find opportunity in it.

Disaster, itself, creates new hierarchies of power based on access to basic goods. Part of the conflict in Dori’s story is avoiding the opportunists who are harvesting children's livers for folk cures. Here is how Dori describes the way time has changed:

If nothing had happened, nothing would’ve happened.

We would’ve continued to not own the house we lived in. We would’ve started paying off another loan as soon as we were done with the first. We would’ve occasionally pushed death aside with the words, I'm so exhausted I could die. We would’ve whittled each of our own lives away, silently and ever so calmly.

The subtle contraction of would and have suggest that Dori is younger than Ryu—and not of the same middle-class, a fact the author gives us in describing the life between loans. For Dori, the disaster is not metaphysical, not inflected by Blanchot—it is simply a continuance of the struggle to survive, to devise a plan by discovering the opportunity.

Much of Dori’s character is revealed when she meets Jina, a fellow refugee with "blood-red hair,” a daughter of men with guns (one of whom will eventually rape Dori). When Jina savors a potato, Dori wonders how she can make such a fuss about a single, tasteless, root vegetable:

That might have been Jina's hope. Hope beyond that of crossing the border or finding a bunker. To live well in the now instead of recalling the past and being miserable or anticipating things getting better and forcing her upon herself.

And Dori compares herself to Jina, compares their positions in the apocalypse: 

What misfortune wants is for me to mistreat myself. To look down on myself and destroy myself. I'll never come to resemble this disaster. I won't live as the disaster wants me to live.

This comparison—and this friendship—enables Dori to refuse to be swallowed by the disaster, and to assert ethical boundaries on the actions of surviving. The way that Choi Jin-young moves between tenses and times is fascinating—it is the pulse of the book.

One more quick example. In the middle of the book, Ryu narrates from the period prior to the onset of the pandemic. She describes her marriage, her husband’s infidelities, the struggles of childcare alongside maintaining her own career. The logistics, time, and emotional labor of divorce strike her as “a hassle,” though she does consider it. Ultimately, Ryu survives her pre-pandemic life in Korea by “purging memories”, pretending things never happened.

That also occurred to me daily. The feeling of sitting in an empty playground, swinging back and forth between this is fine and is this fine.

This is fine vs. is this fine. Jin-Young repeatedly lays the ethical questions of the disaster over small, personal choices in the characters’ lives. The time-signature is unforgettable. As is the book.