Photo

In Marcel Theroux’s postcollapse ­novel, “Far North,” global warming has reduced civilization to largely pre­industrial levels of technology and made sparsely populated areas like the Siberian tundra safer than lawless cities. There’s a satisfying sadness and finality to Theroux’s vision, but the story’s true power comes from the hard-won victories of its remarkable narrator, Makepeace. “A person is always better than a book,” Makepeace claims, and the novel’s enduring achievement is to give us a protagonist who lives up to that claim.

Face scarred by violence, Makepeace patrols the streets of deserted Evangeline, a Siberian town founded by Quakers. After mistakenly shooting a Chinese boy named Ping and then nursing him back to health, Makepeace learns that Ping has a secret — and it’s the same secret harbored by Makepeace herself. Ping is a woman, disguised as a man to fool a violent world. In Ping’s case, she’s also trying to disguise her pregnancy.

Theroux is never shy about subverting expectations. Soon after Ping recovers, Makepeace says with typical yet heartbreaking understatement, “I can’t dwell on what happened next, . . . but in June, Ping died and the baby died with her.” Ping’s death serves as a kind of turning point for Makepeace: it will kill her or force her to engage the world.

Then she witnesses a plane crash, and her despair turns to curiosity: Is the plane a sign of returning civilization? During Makepeace’s quest for the answer, members of a strange cult take her prisoner and sell her to slavers. The detail that destroys her is the same one that destroys the reader: “Sometimes, when you’ve suffered a lot, it turns out to be the small thing that breaks you. That chain almost finished me.”

Advertisement Continue reading the main story

The harrowing account of Makepeace’s journey to the work camp has the full weight and context of 20th-century history behind it. But when she reaches the camp, personal revelations again dominate. Transferred from hard labor to garden work, Makepeace is unable to bear “the ghost of what might have been” and is “mired in the shame of what I’d become.” If shackles can break you when you’ve suffered, then small pleasures, like gardening, can also break you — by making you foolishly believe you have a chance at normal life.

Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.

Next to such moments, even desperate scenes in a contaminated city (where workers must search for technological marvels) seem oddly unimportant. In this wider context, Theroux can do little more than echo dozens of predecessors, from J. G. Ballard to Cormac McCarthy.