Sometimes, even after the last word is read and the final page turned, a book is so full of unique and deftly drawn characters that they seem to continue living, free of the pages, ink, and binding that contained them. Masha Hamilton’s 31 Hours is such a book, and each character, no matter how brief the appearance, is so vibrant and fascinating that the idea of the end of the book, the end of the reader’s ability to follow them as they live their lives, feels like a deep and tragic loss.

31 Hours weaves together the stories of Jonas Meitzner, his family, friends, the city of New York, and the man he knows as Mahmoud. Jonas is vividly present to the reader, and as he struggles to find meaning, we despair and search along with him.  This quest for purpose and direction has slowly separated Jonas from the rest of his life and began severing the strings that tie him to the city and the life he grew up in.  His gradual isolation has led him, finally, to a secret apartment and a group of extremists who believe that violence is the only effective way to change the minds of mankind.

Jonas’ disappearance from the lives of his family and friends has been brief, and, so far, mostly unnoticed, until his mother shoots awake one night, driven by a fear for her son she cannot quite pin down:

This must be what it mean to worry oneself sick—although this emotion seemed closer to premonition, which made it even more alarming.  Simple worry she could dismiss as wisps of weariness-fueled nonsense.  Portent was born of concrete facts not yet processed by the conscious mind….Because Jonas recently had seemed so troubled.  Too vulnerable, too raw, even for him.

Carol knows, somehow, that her son is not merely busy with his new girlfriend, a new job, or school.  He is missing, gone from her life and the rest of the life he had built for himself. And something is terribly, terribly wrong. What she cannot know, what none of the people who love Jonas know, is that he is in hiding in a bare apartment, preparing to sacrifice his life and the lives of others in an attempt to change the path of the world around him.  He has thirty-one hours left, but he has already vanished from the lives of those he loves.

Swirling around the vacuum of Jonas’ disappearance are his parents, his childhood friend and girlfriend, Val, Val’s family, and Sonny Hurt, a pan-handler whose love of New York, its people, and its subway, contrasts the despair that Jonas feels when looking at the same scenes. Jonas is not violent, or, really, even angry, but he is convinced that the only action that will catch the attention of the world is a destructive one, that the city and everyone he loves need to feel fear, despair, and terror in order to truly understand the path they are on.

Hamilton uses the day and a half that Jonas has to prepare himself, the time that he feels he is truly alone, to show how connected, how loved, how not alone, he actually is.  This novel shows the humanity inherent in Jonas’ reasoning, his connections, loving and fierce, with the rest of the world, no matter how it might look outside the event, or inside Jonas’ head.

Hamilton begins her novel with a quote from François Bizot which contains the lines

We could maybe try to ask a new question, as well as a very old one: “How is it possible?” We may find the answers in ourselves.

It is clear that 31 Hours is an attempt to answer that question.  The one that must haunt the aftermath of any tragedy, great or small, accident or deliberate.  How could it happen? Is it because the parents weren’t loving enough? The girlfriend not open enough? Or is it, somehow, impossible for outside forces to halt, impossible for anyone not at the centre of the storm to see the chaos raging around them?

The prose in this novel is lyrical and spare, and the characters are astonishing. Each of them, even the smallest, lives and breathes and exists so fully that their voices ring out even after the final page.  There is a lot of compassion in this novel, and love, and hope, and yet the question posed before it even begins still resonates, unanswered, but perhaps closer to truth than before.

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