I have said before that I would read a treatise about sheep farming if it were beautifully written, and so it is with Lily Brooks-Dalton's Good Morning, Midnight. The story itself - a dual narrative about the world ending, leaving only a handful of humans on a deep space mission and at an Arctic research station - is a bit too sci-fi-esque for my taste. Passages such as "...the things you tell your colleagues when you're practicing simulated disasters and the things you think about when the world ends while you're very far away are so very different" and "even in crowded rooms, even in busy cities, even in the arms of a lover, he was alone. She recognized it in him because it was in her too" were the reason I read to the end, even though, in the midst of our own world-ending days, I could not buy what Brooks-Dalton was selling, and as a result I did not care about the characters, per se. I simply love the words, the beautiful prose spilling across each page, Brooks-Dalton's rendering of the human condition.
"He was drawn by the isolation and the punishing climate, the landscape that matched his interior. Instead of salvaging what he could, he ran away to the top of an Arctic mountain, nine degrees shy of the North Pole, and gave up. Misery followed him wherever he went. This fact didn't faze him and it certainly didn't surprise him."
