Title: The Book of Two Ways
Author: Jodi Picoult
Written: 2020
Pages: 417
Structure: A novel in 15 Chapters plus notes and bibliography
What does it mean to live a good life? What is a good death? Is there only one true path for us to follow, or are there a variety of good decisions that we can make? “The Book of Two Ways” explores these ideas in the context of Egyptology, Quantum Mechanics, and tangled relationships.
This is a beautifully strange book. It’s subtly ambiguous – if you’re not careful, it’s easy to miss the clever art of the author.
At the heart of the novel is an Egyptian Coffin Text known as “The Book of Two Ways”:
Also part of these Coffin Texts was the Book of Two Ways, the first known map of the afterlife. It was found only in certain coffins in Middle Egypt during the Middle Kingdom, usually painted on the bottom. It showed two roads snaking through Osiris’s realm of the dead: a land route, black, and a water route, blue, which are separated by a lake of fire. If you follow the map, it’s like choosing between taking the ferry or driving around both ways wind up in the same place: the Field of Offerings, where the deceased can feast with Osiris for eternity. There is a catch, though…
The ancient idea is that the deceased person needed knowledge to know where they were going. There wasn’t one “good” path but two, both of which lead the soul to a happy afterlife: the way of land, and the way of water.
The story begins with an airplane crash that the protagonist, Dawn Edelstein, survives. The airline offers her a plane ticket to anywhere in the world, and asks Dawn where she wants to go. The chapter ends with the wonderfully ambiguous words “I open my mouth and answer”.
From this point until we almost reach the end of the novel, the chapter titles alternate between “Land / Egypt” and “Water / Boston”. It’s not overt – but Picoult subtly invites the reader to consider two different “ways” for Dawn. Her “way of land” unfolds in Egypt where she becomes romantically involved with another Egyptologist, Wyatt Armstrong. Her “way of water” happens in Boston where she is married to physicist Brian Edelstein and has a daughter Meret.
Picoult shapes the entire architecture of the novel around this ancient ‘Book of Two Ways’.
Because of the subtlety of the Picoult’s structure, it’s also possible to consider the series of chapters as flashbacks between one part of Dawn’s life and the other. It’s ambiguous, and in either way of reading it, the story makes beautiful sense.
The ambiguity of the Egyptian “Book of Two Ways” is dovetailed masterfully with Quantum Mechanics. Brian explains it to Dawn:
“I’ve never understood quantum mechanics,” I said, steering the conversation away from me. “Teach me something.”
He turned to a fresh page and drew a tiny circle. “You ever hear of an electron?”
I nodded. “It’s a particle, right? Like, an atom?”
“Subatomic, actually. But for our purposes, you only have to know it behaves like a sphere. And one thing we know about spheres is that they can spin, right? Either clockwise or counterclockwise.” He drew a second circle on the page. “The thing is, electrons are supercool because they can spin clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time.”
They proceed to discuss Schrodinger’s cat – how it is both dead and alive at the same time. Similarly, the novel invites us to experience two possible versions of Dawn’s life simultaneously.
True to the laws of Quantum Mechanics there is a “superposition” of alternatives, and the boundaries between both ‘ways’ of Dawn’s life begin to dissolve, but even this is delightfully ambiguous.
If you like to be spoon-fed unambiguous plots with a clean unmistakable ending, you will probably struggle with this book. There are a lot of on-line reviews from those who were uncomfortable with the ambiguity, or the archaeological and scientific details. But if you’re willing to accept the ambiguity, and mentally travel for a while on “The Two Ways”, this book is very rewarding.
I am glad I read this book, and am happy to recommend it. It is the sort of novel that will be more enjoyable the second time through.
