A Rising of the Lights

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I wonder if there is a term for fictional works that chronicle a narrative but also a mental journey of its characters. Considering the existence of the omniscient narrator, the ideas that fictional characters are a means through which the author communicates/examines a multitude of thought processes, and then stories in which absolutely everything happens within the confines of a mind, ‘mental-fiction’ or ‘psych-fiction’ is probably too broad and flimsy to act as a binding label to a subgenre…

Sorry, my own thought process are running away with me; a side effect from just finishing Steve Toltz’s A Rising of the Lights.

Russell Wilson’s world has never been like that of other peoples’, but that hasn’t stopped him trying to secure love and normalcy. However, it’s incredibly hard to find security when everything that happens to you feels like having the ground disappear from beneath your feet. In quick succession, his wife confesses to an affair and leaves him, his elderly parents decide they no longer wish to see him, and he loses his job to an AI system. When his childhood friend Edwina sets him up with a job as a high school guidance counsellor, the dilemma of trying to inspire young humans to care about their future becomes the next mystery for Russell to grapple with. After all, is it worth crafting a future for yourself when the horizon is populated with robots and AI? Is the future even worth considering when it’s only the present that really affects the human condition? And then there’s the contradiction of the human condition: the cure for loneliness causes loneliness…

My immediate thought upon closing this book was that it reminded me of The Great Gatsby. Despite being written in a nonchalant and cynically humorous way, it’s a book that is really a lament for an age of uncertainty. With the rise of AI, generational attitudes are crashing upon each other, culminating in a person that has no static sense of self and is wholly influenced by external events and the behavioural messages that they have absorbed through media on how to deal with them. While the overarching cloud of gloom and doom (a la Great Gatsby) definitely left me feeling that something had been scooped out of my brain with a melon-baller, it was quickly smoothed over with the clever prose, intellectual dialogue, and leisurely rapid-fire pace in which disasters befall the protagonist (like the author forgot their finger was holding down the trigger).

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To say this book is ‘thought-provoking’ is putting it mildly. ‘Mind-exploding’ might be a better way of phrasing it. Imagine that it only blows up a portion of your brain and the shrapnel just continues to flutter about: thoughts chasing each other. Like when you kick up sand underwater. The brilliance of it really is how it makes you aware of the cloudy, chaotic, undefined swirling of your identity. Especially in this day and age where we're constantly absorbing so many messages through media and machinery. The dynamic, wavering, fragility of the sense of self - we see this reflected in the entire cast of characters; an ensemble that I still don’t know if I liked any one of them, but they all work together to tell a most interesting story.

I thoroughly enjoyed A Rising of the Lights and would absolutely recommend it. It's deep, funny, chaotic, and slightly unbelievable, still with a nice hopeful nugget at the end. 

Author: Steve Toltz, 2026

Published: Penguin Random House Australia, 2026