In each scenario, our protagonist has to figure out how to survive and find meaning in a world that is overcome by routine, leaving its citizens brain-dead at work and unaware that they’re dying. In her debut novel, Ling Ma contemplates whether a world plagued by global capitalism is that different from one plagued by zombies. Will we work ourselves to death, or is there something more to life? This is the question Severance poses and suggests an answer to.Severance is a zombie apocalypse tale, a workplace comedy, and a classic coming-of-age story all in one. Routine being an essential part of everyone’s life, there is plenty of self-reflection to go around when reading this book. With a realistic protagonist and sometimes too-vivid apocalyptic images, Ling Ma illustrates both the freeing and the enslaving senses of routine. Yet … there are so many jobs with work-related routines that can become suffocating and pointless and flattening.” They break up and change time, create a sense of order and control.

“During periods of unemployment, I learned that there is no way to inhabit freedom without establishing routines. Ling Ma continues to explain some of the inner workings of her meditation on work:

Severance, according to Ma, “ began as a meditation on work.” Others characterize it as a satire of millennial working conditions. They are lifeless but continue to put away dishes, do paperwork, or organize shelves. When the Shen Fever infects people, they continue doing their mindless work and life routines. How did the disease overcome them, exactly? This is the second way Ling Ma makes us self-reflect, this way being purposeful, whereas the fever’s likeness to reality is coincidental. We are steadily overcoming our coronavirus, while, in Candace’s world, the Shen Fever overcame them.

The likeness of the Shen Fever to COVID-19 is only one way Severance holds up a mirror to our own lives, a reflection that I would assert is positive in one sense. Some may even get the impression that Ma’s novel is semi-prophetic, being published in May 2019, before our own pandemic.

Still, the talk of masks, quarantines, and shutdowns in the novel hits close to home. The analogy ends there, however-and thankfully it does, because the Shen Fever is far more deadly. It sounds a little like our non-fiction acquaintance, COVID-19! And what is the End? “The End” is disease from China known as Shen Fever that takes the US and the world by surprise.

Severance ling ma