Here One Moment a Haunting Novel

 

 

 

 

Here One Moment (2024)

By Liane Moriarty

Crown, 495 pages.

★★★★★

 

Which of these would creep you out more, someone jumping out to scare you or someone who walked down an aisle telling you and everyone else the age at which they will die and how it will happen? I’m solidly in the second camp; I don’t want  to know! I’m also here to tell you that if you are not already familiar with novelist Liane Moriarty, you should fix that.

 

Moriarty really knows how to spin a yarn. Plus, if you’re sick of novels about rich people, know that Moriarty generally favors prosaic folks. Speaking for myself, I’m really bored with novels about privileged 30s-something Manhattanites whining about their First World problems. If you’re with me, no worries, mate; Moriarty is an Aussie. But let’s return to my opening.

 

Passengers are in the air for a short flight from Hobart, Tasmania to Sydney. Flight attendant Allegra loves her job, but she isn’t having a great day. One member of the crew is arrogant, another is a lazy slacker, and Allegra has just rushed to the loo to clean the vomit a passenger has deposited on her uniform. She doesn’t have a spare and no one is taking up the slack. In other words, there’s no one readily available to keep order when a woman so nondescript that few can remember what she looks like when they reach Sydney stands up from her aisle seat as if she’s frozen in place.

 

Passengers ask her if she’s okay but she says nothing until she begins to walk around the plane delivering a message. She looks at each passenger and says, “I expect” and proclaims the age at which they will shuffle off this mortal coil and their cause of death. You’d probably feel okay about things if she tells you that you will die at age 95 from a cardiac arrest. But what if you’re Leo and she tells you that you will pass at 43 from a workplace accident and you’re just about to turn 43? What if you’re a young mom like Paula who is told she will die at 84? You might be fine with that and perhaps delirious to consider that your daughter Willow will live to 103. But when told that four-year-old Timothy will drown at age seven, Paula goes ballistic and screams, “How can you say that to a mother?”

 

Okay, that’s seriously creepy isn’t it? When the zoned out soothsayer is challenged she calmly replies, “Fate won’t be fought.” So here are a few questions? Do you believe in clairvoyance? Most people reflexively say no. But if you were Leo or Paula, how much consolation would you take from those who tell you that the prognosticator is nuts and that clairvoyance is fake? Could you walk off the plane and live your life as if you never heard the forecast? How about the newlyweds told that the wife’s death will come in four years via domestic violence? Such is the setup for a more serious look at free will versus determinism, though Moriarty doesn’t expect us to enroll in a philosophy class and makes no statement more complicated than. “If free will doesn’t exist… all your decisions and actions are inevitable….”

 

Here One Moment would be a heck of a book if Moriarty ended the book at the Sydney airport, but Moriarty ups the ante. Imagine the potential panic when several of the more immediate predictions come true. Coincidence or an oracle? Moriarty follows how those on the plane adjust their lives or don’t based upon where they come down on the free will versus determinism question. For most, it’s in the back of their minds even if they profess not to believe in predictions. Moriarty also reveals the identity of the erstwhile Sibyl, her backstory, how she feels about what she did, and how she handles notoriety.

 

Don’t be put off by the book’s 495-page length. Many of those pages are just a few lines. It’s a proverbial page turner that you will zip through. And, yes, I will take responsibility if you go on a Liane Moriarty kick after reading Here One Moment.

 

Rob Weir