Still Becoming, Never Stopping
The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, Ben Berman Ghan. Wolsak & Wynn, 2024.
I often look to lyricism and narrative to determine the strength of any given work, regardless of genre. When I say “strength,” I mean, does it hold up to the long line of writing in the grand literary tradition? And when I say “success” or “holding up,” I mean its ability to add something profound and beautiful to that tradition. By those measures, Ben Berman Ghan’s novel marks one of the most successful books I have encountered in many years. One that accomplishes this with both lyric grace and depth.
The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits opens with a lush and wonderous vista of a colonized and terraformed moon. From that point, the reader is set upon a story that is powered by mystery and release that affords itself slippage in linear time. The story reads like a fine classic Doctor Who, a deep science fiction, but done with a sort of lyric wonder that one rarely finds in genre fiction. This work is profoundly literary. Ghan’s novel is a hybrid of so many genres and sources that its form matches strongly with its substance. The reader is drawn through a spectacular universe that is familiar in many senses — the long story arc touches upon migration, gendering, environmental collapse, apocalypse, technology as violence — and all adeptly constructed.
The novel utilizes a number of narrative points of view, each providing a different solitary consciousness learning and interacting with the physical world around them. Daisy, a young girl in their initial form, is the touchstone and centre of the story. We arrive with her in this universe of Ghan’s and we feel that presence strongly. “Daisy greets the surface of the moon like a kiss unwanted. It hardens itself against her. She breaks the world. It does not break her.” Like many works of sci-fi, the world around the characters is both cruel and beautiful. And the tension and mystery of these cruelties draws the reader through the beautiful and the sensational. We are not mired down in the vistas of Ghan’s worlds; we are left with impressions and curiosities that draw us through the narrative and the world.
This is a story built on mystery and revelation. In its deepest narrative sense, this a book of experience — one that invites the reader into the story through tactile and often difficult visceral experiences. We feel this story, the lives and consciousness that inhabit its pages, through the sensations of those living it. The narrative carries a sense of witness poetics and breaks down the constituent parts of operating and feeling in this fictional universe as if it were a fine-tuned poem. In this sense, Ghan’s work is a return to the great mythologies and wonder of tales like the Mabinogion, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the Táin Bó Cúailnge. This is a story and work of metaphorical brilliance that stands out in an era where such new mythologies are rarely achieved. Ghan’s work is a hybrid of poetics and narrative that stretches back to literatures that sprouted well before our often hard-edged rules of fiction and poetry.
Like those other works, Ghan’s novel is wonderous and far-reaching, yet manages to maintain strong living and breathing consciousness. The focus of the work, while visceral in its engagement with the physical universe it finds itself in, is fundamentally about the individual psyche. The body is extraneous to the self — an extension — and we are left with questions (and occasionally answers) about the limits bodies can and do place on the self. There is freedom in this notion, but there is also strife which Ghan seizes on for narrative purpose.
Loneliness lurks over much of the novel, permeates the timeline, and preoccupies many of the drives of the narrators throughout the novel. The diction and flow of Ghan’s prose narrative forms itself to this sense wonderfully:
She wants to chase a kiss into a past where the agreements of
her body are exclusively the cells she was born with, where the
civilization of her identity was tiny, and answered to nobody, and
had no promises to the world except to live and function as one of a
billion human forms.
And as poetics and as narrative, Ghan does well to build the feeling and sense of need and then to resolve in manners that both leave the reader yearning for more and resolve an immediate sense of release through delay. Feeling and release are central to great storytelling and Ghan does this exceptionally well, adding life to the universe his lyricism has built.
As form and order slip into the chaos of apocalypse, the physical world becomes a living being. Physical manifestations of people, in Ghan’s story, are present but in lesser ways to the other forms of creation. The science fiction story at the book’s heart, centred on artificial intelligence, does well to both differentiate and then problematize those differences between organic consciousness as life vs manufactured forms. Great space whales, alien Watchers, conscious cities, and the holographic echoes of other psyches build an ecosystem perhaps most closely resembling a rebirth Indigenous living universe mental model. Most importantly, this is an order that relies on constant shifting and reshaping. A point that is overtly stated in the consciousness as poem section, in which the narrator states, “I am still new / Still becoming / Never stopping.” Growth, demise, change, and mystery are ongoing. Change, in fact, is the only certainty in the universe. This is the notion that lies at the heart of the novel, that our essence lies within each of us and is also subject to change. Time, reality itself, is the view of rabbits running at speed through a field.
Thus, organic growth and change matter. Ghan’s novel refuses the mechanization of creation. This is no STEM course of trades, no coding order that envisions the totality of creation as the delusional western settler notions of the clockwork universe. The natural state of things is organic, cyclical, and full of the blooming and growth of the world that nurtured over the vast majority of our existence as a species. When cybernetic bodies are ripped open, when hard circuity is revealed, vegetation and faunas, unending life, pours forth. The future is resplendent in life and miracles in this universe. And the mysteries that land us there are worth chasing, full of beauty and suffering, and are the very essence worth reaching. Ghan’s book draws us to these ends through a mesh of sublime lyric narrative.
— D.A. Lockhart is an author and independent Indigenous scholar residing on the south shore of Waawiiyaataong (Windsor, ON).
Read this review and many others in Issue 305 (Autumn 2025). Order the issue now:
Order Issue 305 - Autumn 2025 (Canadian Addresses)
Order Issue 305 - Autumn 2025 (International Addresses)
