Imagine a death for which no one is left to grieve, and only the birds are left to tell the story.

This is the death of a city which, under ecological and environmental pressures, can no longer sustain the human life that created it. If we could look into the mind of this city as it lays dying, what would we find? In Imagine a Death, Janice Lee explores this question from the heart of such a city as it slowly folds and falls, exposing the darkness and beauty of those who are living, loving, and dying there.

The book opens with a stream-of-consciousness introduction to the Writer, an introverted and reflective lover of eternal sentences, who is contemplating death. She muses about sudden versus slow death, what we imagine death to be, and what it really is. Later, we meet the self-obsessed and emotionally-stunted Photographer who, while working through a personal loss, attempts to find his identity but only becomes depressed and confused, halting his photography and exchanging action for inertia and malaise. Finally, there is the orderly and self-contained Old Man who categorizes and compartmentalizes his loss, infusing meaning into his search for a reason to go on.

These characters explore the role of death in their lives. As they overlap with each other and the city’s other inhabitants, they become increasingly isolated in an inhospitable world. In prose which at times seem to spring out and unfurl from a live source and at other times to spiral into metaphor and imagery, Lee weaves the reader into the claustrophobic and dwindling world in which her characters live. By tightening her prose into cycles of self-reflection and making her chapters ever more compact, Lee shepherds the reader through a narrative bottleneck; on the other side is a not-so-futuristic vision of an imperiled earth.

Lee’s vision of ecological catastrophe is of a slow death, and her forecast of the human reaction to such an event is denial and inaction. She imagines through her characters that most people living through such an event will be focused primarily on themselves, looking backward and inward, unaware of their own impending doom. Those who do notice and care will feel helpless as they watch everyone around them carry on as if nothing is happening:

The city’s inhabitants wipe ash from their windshields like it’s no big deal. This sort of thing has happened before, and there is no need to bring a towel or rag as the ash permeates everything — clothes, hair, skin. People simply use their sleeves or the palms of their hands, knowing that there is really no more separation from this dust that dirties everything and the dust they too will become in their impending deaths. The ash has become routine, customary, part of the backdrop. If the city burns down, then it burns down. Its inhabitants accept this fate.

That’s not to say that the inner lives of Lee’s characters are meaningless or irrelevant. While ecological death is the novel’s broad theme, each of the three characters explores death on a personal level, grieving their particular losses and discovering their own resonant truths.

Imagine a Death rings a warning bell for all of us. While reading, I wondered whether the story actually is set in the present, where ash is currently covering cities, birds are dropping from the sky, and the earth is losing inhabitable space all the time. Meanwhile, we go on with our daily lives, our personal journeys. Perhaps the greatest wisdom in this book comes from the mosses: “think lightly of yourself, and deeply of the world.”

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