Michael Cunningham: Specimen Days

In addition to being a fine prose stylist, Michael Cunningham has an uncanny knack for making himself the vessel for other writers. He did it in 1998 with his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Hours, which conjured the ghost of Virginia Woolf, and he has done it again in Specimen Days, which grows out of Walt Whitman's unsung masterpiece like a beautiful orchid rising from a sturdy, misbegotten pot.

Before I describe the flower, a word about the pot will help. Of all Whitman's works, Specimen Days is the least likely to ring a bell.

Published in 1882, many prose pieces in Specimen Days describe soldiers dead, dying, or maimed in the American Civil War. It memorialises the assassinated President Lincoln. And it also includes journal entries of the most staggering beauty. The contrast is striking. The "procreant urge" which convulsed society for Whitman had also suddenly, sickly, gone into hard reverse.

Just as The Hours did with Mrs Dalloway, this novel looks to Specimen Days, and expands upon its themes, most specifically tying the scenes of death and destruction Whitman witnessed 150 years ago to those Americans feasted on over the TV during 9/11. In making this connection, Cunningham has announced that this is a book about prophecy, in the Whitman sense of the word.

"The word prophecy," Whitman wrote in Specimen Days, "is much misused; it seems narrow'd to prediction merely. That is not the main sense of the Hebrew word translated 'prophet'; it means one whose mind bubbles and pours forth like a fountain, from inner divine spontaneities revealing God."

And so, the triptych of narratives which make up Specimen Days involve prophetic individuals seeking a mystical connection with the world through creation. But in a 21st-century kind of way — a world where suicide bombers believe they ensure everlasting life by taking their own and as many people's as possible — their sense of creation often involves destruction.

Set in New York City during the Industrial Revolution, the first section features a deformed 12-year-old changeling named Lucas, whose brother Simon was recently killed in a factory accident. Like a touretic who has inhaled Leaves of Grass rather than swear words, Lucas responds to everyday conversation with quotes from Whitman's work.

Lucas' parents are haunted shells of human beings, convinced their dead son speaks to them from machines. A tanning factory veteran, Lucas' father sips from an iron lung, inhaling Simon's ghost with each breath. Lucas' mother rarely rises from her bed, transfixed by the songs Simon sings from a creaky music box.

This is strange and creepy material, and just as suddenly as we adapt to this world, Cunningham dunks us backward into the second narrative, The Children's Crusade, a thriller-like tale set in present day New York City involving child terrorists called "the family" who are schooled in Whitman and who blow themselves up on the city streets, taking a life with them, of course.

The final section, Like Beauty, catapults us into the future, when people are engineered and lizard-like aliens wander New York. A nuclear meltdown has tainted Omaha or South Dakota, so beyond New Jersey is unsafe to go.

Like Whitman, Cunningham has pulled deep in his lungs and has created a canvas as vast and strange as our world today. In doing so, he has penned the tale of a city and a country engorged with death but looking for transcendence often in the wrong places.

Like its namesake, this novel is a work that is so original it unfolds with a whiff of inevitability. Finish it and you will find it hard to believe it did not exist before.

* John Freeman is a New York writer.

* Fourth Estate, $36