A young man (who will remain unnamed throughout the book) moves to Toronto in search of something like meaning. He drifts into the company of his sister, Grace, her boyfriend and their collective of chums and associates. Our narrator finds a girlfriend, a job, and things start looking up.
Then his sister and her boyfriend start acting increasingly weird. Both geniuses, they are conducting clandestine experiments into what Grace will only describe as ‘subjective time’. Soon enough Grace vanishes…followed quickly by her boyfriend. Breaking into their abandoned apartment, our narrator discovers a six foot tall wooden box with an interior covered in mirrors, a very hungry lab rat, a journal filled with incomprehensible scribbling and one note: “This is the only way back for us.”
An intensely deeply melancholic novel, THREE YEARS WITH THE RAT is better understood as a meditation on loss than as a science fiction novel. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the story flirts with that genre, dipping its toes into all sorts of tropes, like time travel, mysterious entities, paradoxes and horrifying, shapeless pursuers. At its heart, though, it’s about our narrator and his sister, a brilliant woman by all accounts, but also very difficult and distant. Their relationship seems charming and typical at first, but there are deeper layers that are uncovered as the plot progresses, and some of them are poisonous.
How do we deal with unfinished business, with questions unanswered and damage unavenged? The book certainly offers few sol;utionhs (and in some ways its sudden rush into the weird in its final chapters feels deeply unsatisfying, if only for its brevity and the inclusion of a few too many info dumps) but I was impressed with its commitment to wrestling with the pain and impact some relationships, however incomplete, may have on our lives. Me like books.
Me Like Books 