JODI PICOULT The Book of Two Ways. Reviewed by Sally Nimon
Jodi Picoult’s latest novel explores whether the ancient Egyptians have lessons for us in their approach to death.
How would a near-death experience change your life? Would the joy of being a lucky survivor make you leap up, take a deep breath, and pick up where you left off with a renewed sense of vigour? Or would it cause you to pause, think back over the roads not taken, and leave you wondering if it’s too late to try an alternative path?
To Dawn Edelstein, one-time Egyptologist and current ‘death doula’, whose job it is to guide terminally ill patients towards acceptance of the inevitable, death is quite literally an everyday occurrence. Yet when she finds herself staring down the barrel of her own mortality, her thoughts fly not to her husband and daughter in Boston, but to a scene of her youth that was buried in the deserts of Egypt long ago.
Dawn was once pursuing a PhD on the ‘Book of Two Ways’, instructions that ancient Egyptians painted onto the inside of tombs or coffins as a kind of map for the deceased to follow to access the afterlife:
It showed two roads snaking through Osiris’s realm of the dead: a land route, black, and a water route, blue, which are separated by a lake of fire. If you follow the map, it’s like choosing between taking the ferry or driving around – both ways wind up in the same place: the Field of Offerings, where the deceased can feast with Osiris for eternity. There is a catch though – some of the paths lead nowhere.
It’s not difficult to see the metaphor here. Especially when we learn that it is not just the heat of the Egyptian sun and gritty sand that Dawn has left behind. She is also missing the blue eyes and entitled swagger of one Wyatt Armstrong, a marquess in waiting with a reputation for being ‘Harrison Ford and the Second Coming all rolled into one’. Their story starts off antagonistically, as all good romances do, finally coming to a head one evening in the dusty tomb of a man who lived 4000 years ago. Love and death. Life and death. Emotions and death. Everything and death.
Because death is an inescapable and ever-present theme in ancient Egypt. It is most likely a mistake to assume that the ancient world’s inhabitants spent all their time fixated on the moment their lives would end, but since this is the subject of so much of what they have left behind, it inevitably flavours our perceptions. Of course they must have loved, and danced and laughed and obsessed over the minutiae of their lives the same way we do. Did Imhotep really say that? Are we going to the feast tonight? Does this stela capture my best side?
Whereas we, two to three thousand years later, do the exact opposite. Death is not something to be embraced or understood – rather it is to be ignored or avoided right up to the moment when that is no longer possible. As Dawn notes, ‘After nearly thirteen years of end-of-life work, I know that we do a shitty job of intellectually and emotionally preparing for death.’ She tries her best to facilitate the transition by helping her clients with whatever they need, but more often than not this seems to involve dry cleaning, groceries, ‘giving business advice on selling a car’, or even procuring ice cream at 3 a.m.
The Book of Two Ways is about death as a recurring theme throughout our lives, regardless of how we choose to live them. Because it’s not just the end of life that we have to learn how to navigate. Depending on each particular roll of the dice, we might encounter the death of a marriage, the death of youthful dreams, the death of a friendship, or just the death of what you thought your life would be, even if you’re fine with how things actually turned out.
This would have been equally true for the ancients, of course, although the average peasant would have had far fewer life choices available to them than most people in the modern era. Yet, unlike us, they chose to embrace the inevitable, to study and attempt to understand it, to explain it with stories of journeys, pathways, gods and possibilities of the afterlife. As Dawn comes to realise: ‘Even the Ancient Egyptians recognised that knowledge was the difference between a good death and a bad one.’
But the Book of Two Ways also suggests there are limits to how much knowledge can help. Sitting alongside the ancient narrative, Picoult also weaves in a very modern one, the quantum mechanics theory of parallel universes. According to this view, one Dawn’s decision to go off in pursuit of a youthful encounter in Egypt spawns another entire yet separate universe in which a different Dawn returns home. A cynical view would suggest that this might operate rather like a modern version of papal indulgences (i.e. it doesn’t matter if I make a terrible decision now because somewhere, somehow, there is another me making the right one), though I doubt this is Picoult’s intention.
Instead, I think she is drawing a parallel between the beliefs of the ancient world and the theories of today. Twice in her life Dawn is forced to make a major decision through circumstances not of her own making – the first time she does the socially accepted ‘right’ thing, the second time she does not. Not every reader will agree with how she conducts herself, and Picoult’s description of Wyatt, though probably intended to be charming, can at times come off as immature or even annoying. The parallel narratives, combined with discussions of both ancient Egyptian beliefs and quantum mechanics, may also prove distracting or off-putting for some readers. But The Book of Two Ways certainly holds much food for thought.
This was an interesting book to read in the last months of an extraordinary year that has seen – alongside too many premature deaths – the near-death of a way of life we had largely taken for granted. It has forced us to reflect on death in ways the ancient Egyptians would have found familiar. Did their beliefs and preparations help them when they were eventually forced to go into that good night? Would knowing what was coming have helped us in the early months of 2020? Or will archaeologists 4000 years from now be debating the significance of images of small, spiky spheres and the sudden appearance of signs on buildings stating ‘stand 1.5 metres apart’?
Only time will tell.
Jodi Picoult The Book of Two Ways Allen & Unwin 2020 PB 432pp $32.99
Sally Nimon once graduated from university with an Honours degree majoring in English literature and has hung around higher education ever since. She is also an avid reader and keen devourer of stories, whatever the genre.
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