The World of After
Novel
Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2021
When Kevin, an Irish Montrealer, attends graduate school at Oxford University in the early 1990s, he meets Leon, a London Jew from a Communist family, and Alex, a Soviet defector’s son raised in Toronto. The trio forms a complex and conflicted friendship from which Alex pulls away, spending his time tutoring a charming, upper-class student. When Kevin and Leon play a prank on the undergrad, the dire consequence sends Kevin into an emotional tailspin.
Ranging from a precisely and ironically evoked Oxford, which parodies that of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, to post-Referendum Montreal, war-ravaged former Yugoslavia, London, Moscow, Poland, and Berlin, The World of After depicts the 1990s as an interlude of freedom and confused but enriching self-discovery between the rigidity of the Cold War and the stark divisions of the post-September 11, 2001 world. Kevin struggles to find love, recover a friendship he has betrayed, and chart a world he no longer understands as Leon dodges his past and Alex descends into a criminal culture that leads to a confrontation with his own values.
Ultimately, what happened that night at an Oxford pub ties the three men together with a permanence they do not fully understand and leads them to follow distinctly differing paths in the rapidly evolving post-Cold War world.
Charming, with a sweeping but easy prose that evokes the ennui of Oxford as easily as the scars of war-torn Yugoslavia.
It is both an historical novel and a novel that speaks to our time. At one point, a character named Leon says: “You know what I say? I say don’t worry, new divisions will come along and you’re not going to like them one bit. The West will be gripped by some new oppressive ideology that’s even more repellent than anti-communism.”
If you love history and politics and how they can impact love and friendships, you’ll love this book. Henighan’s writing is incredible and if nothing else, you will be very impressed by his style.
