Jenni Fagan's 'The Delusions' Presents a Witty Satire of Afterlife Bureaucracy
Jenni Fagan's satirical fifth novel, The Delusions, opens with an epigraph from Philip José Farmer's Venus on the Half-Shell, a Kurt Vonnegut-inspired science fiction work: "The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest." This statement sets the tone for a story that explores infinity and eternity with a sharp, humorous edge, underpinning and undermining the narrative's metaphysical foundations.
A Vast Anteroom to the Afterlife
The novel takes place in "the largest soul terminus in existence," a metaphysical equivalent of a big-box store where souls are processed before moving on to whatever comes next. In this vast anteroom to the afterlife, individuals must sort their false self-perceptions from reality through a Questionnaire. Failure results in immediate Dissolution, while success leads to Processing—though even the staff are uncertain about what lies beyond.
The queues in this terminal have always been long and volatile, filled with the angry, entitled, and afraid. However, things are deteriorating rapidly. It appears the wider universe may have grown weary of humanity, with Earth being wound down. As a result, ribbons of dead people stretch across the infinite floor of Processing, overwhelming the system and causing the Leaderboard to malfunction. Suddenly, the Processing floor is inundated with a million cats, and reality becomes increasingly unstable.
Targeting Modern Delusions with Grotesque Humor
The Delusions fizzes with impatience, invention, and dark humor, targeting contemporary societal ills such as greed, politics, celebrity culture, smartphone obsession, and fantasy escapism. Fagan particularly skewers billionaires, media figures, and those who believe digital simulacra can evade both death and authentic life. The process of expelling these delusions is grotesque: they are wrestled out of individuals' bodies as live, slimy eels in public, revealing hidden truths like mass murder, rape, or corporate corruption.
This afterlife is far from heavenly; it resembles a cross between Heathrow security on Christmas Eve and a damp Monday at a Wolverhampton job centre. The staff, overwhelmed and disinterested, have little time for interaction. The protagonist, Edi, is an Admin who died of cancer and has worked in Processing ever since. Her advice to the newly dead is blunt: focus on identifying self-delusions and avoid wasting time. Edi is easily irritated, cares only for her still-living son, and breaches protocol by watching for him in the queues—a poignant reflection of the novel's theme of owning one's identity.
Narrative Strengths and Challenges
Edi serves as the narrator, but her monologue can become exhausting as it crams in details about Admin organization and the ambiguous structures of the Universal Beyond. While she effectively drives Fagan's worldbuilding, other characters often feel thin and transparent, even for dead souls. Readers might wish for moments of respite, where Edi pauses her hectically determined explanations to show rather than tell. Yet, the novel's humor and wit often overshadow these minor flaws, keeping audiences engaged and amused.
Initially, The Delusions evokes comparisons to Powell and Pressburger's film A Matter of Life and Death, but with reversed paternalistic hierarchies. As the story unfolds, the afterlife's values appear delusory themselves, managed by shady, hypocritical overlords—echoing the adage "as below, so above." The satire gradually gives way to celebratory pathos, leaving readers with a sense that Edi may never have been what she believed, and her rants could be the simulated monologue of a spirit clinging to delusions. Fagan's genius lies in making even this uplift feel fragile and uncertain.
The Delusions by Jenni Fagan is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£18.99), offering a unique blend of metaphysical exploration and social critique that resonates with contemporary audiences.
