The Book of Malachi, South African writer T.C. Farren’s new novel, centres around Malachi Dakwaa, a mute thirty-year-old man, performing mind-numbing factory work, who gets an extraordinary job offer. In exchange for six months as a warden on a top-secret organ-farming project, Frasier Pharmaceuticals will gift Malachi the power of speech and graft him a new tongue, after his was cut out when he was a boy… Far out to sea on an oilrig, Malachi finds himself among warlords and mass murderers. But are the prisoner-donors as evil as Frasier says? Do they deserve their fate? In this intriguing piece, Farren wonders about what the afterlife might mean.

 

When I begged my character, Malachi to go face to face with naked killers in cages, I had no idea what he was going to find out. Where I live [near Cape Town], the homicide rate is second only to South America and dead bodies turn up wherever humans live. My only intention was to spy inside the minds of murderers but Malachi walked straight into the prisoners’ hall in his white sneakers. He went in furious and wishing them dead but within days came across something surprising. The afterlife.

I’m still bewildered at how the book turned out, but now I’m thinking, what if Malachi is right?

What if this life is a mere dream of bodies and sci fi stories are more real than steel oil rigs and life boats and fish fingers? What if sci fi writers are renegade scientists exploring what we’re too terrified to believe? Immortality has always been a big theme in science fiction. You might say that Dante Alighieri started the genre in 1314, with his eighth circle sinners queuing up to be butchered, healed, then cut up again. In 1890, Oscar Wilde’s character, Dorian Gray stayed young and lovely while his painted portrait grew wrinkled and hideous. If you think about it, the Bible itself is pretty sci-fi with its construction of two clubs, one with silver service and uninterrupted happiness and the other filled with burn victims. Most religious writings say you earn your place in heaven strictly by being nice but the Malachi from the rig (not the one from the Bible) reports that it’s much, much easier to qualify.

I would so love to believe him.

If Malachi is right, humans would think twice before lashing out then running to hide. Potential killers would think, “Wait. Even if I slip through the justice system I’ll be married to this guy. Every time I reach out to touch a lover, press an elevator button, he’ll whisper, ‘Same hand. Remember?’ Even if the killer managed to shut them out, they would reappear later, at their own death. Even worse, they might greet them with understanding and tenderness. This might be very disconcerting for a murderer.

Even among the fairly gentle, there would surely be less suicide and panic attacks. If I could see my old dog out the corner of my eye with her shred of red ribbon from last Christmas still knotted to her collar, if my auntie whose three children died in a single car accident could laugh and chat to them in the sound studio of her mind without being diagnosed as crazy, the world would be a much sunnier place.

The planet might even have half a chance. When Malachi first landed on the rig with his own secret guilt he couldn’t bear the sight of the sun and the sea. They were too huge, too bright, too powerful. After he stumbled upon the afterlife he was moved to tears by the beauty of the elements. Maybe if a whole lot of us believed in forever, our never-ending spark might ignite with all life forms so we’d look at the orangutan, the roiling sea, the patient, wise tree and think, ‘You are me’.

I used to think that lovers of sci-fi were bent on escaping the earth, flying sideways or upwards into outlandish metaphors for inner and outer wars. After Malachi, I’m starting to think that sci fi might be closest we have to cold fact reporting on our biggest mystery.

The Book of Malachi is out now from Titan Books