Tag Archives: Dystopia

Book review

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, 2006

The Road is a pretty traumatic read – if books came with trigger warnings, this would have lots of them. It is set in the nearish future after an environmental or some other disaster that has wiped out almost all plant and animal life on earth. The sun is blocked by clouds and ash covers everything. The landscape is hellish, blasted and burnt. The few human survivors hunt one another for food.

The story is told through the eyes of ‘the man’ and his son, survivors in an unremittingly bleak and hostile landscape. The only other survivors they meet want to kill them and eat them, or are enslaved and due to meet the same fate. At one point they see from a hiding point

“An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. Lanyards at the wrist. Some of the pipes were threaded through with lengths of chain fitted at their ends with every manner of bludgeon…The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasselled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry…Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.”

The son was born just after the end of the world. Initially his mother was with them for some time, but in one of the novel’s many disturbing scenes the man remembers his final conversation with her where she confirms her decision to take her own life:

“Sooner or later they will catch us and kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won’t face it. You would rather wait for it to happen. But I can’t. I can’t.”

The novel is a dystopian version of the classic journey/quest story, its title ironically referencing Kerouac’s On the Road. While Kerouac’s characters travelled freely through a sunny, prosperous American landscape, the man and his son are on foot, hunted and starving. They travel south looking for a warmer climate, with the vague destination of the coast, when they can go no further, and an equally vague hope that they might meet a community of non-cannibals willing to take them in and help them. They carry their small amount of food and possessions in a shopping trolley, which explains the need to stay on the road rather than heading across country. The road is largely deserted but also very dangerous – it is where they are most likely to meet other, equally hungry and desperate people.

The boy – he is around ten years old – constantly asks his father questions, principally to seek reasurance and comfort. He believes his father when told that they will find food, somewhere warm, and people to help them, even though every day proves how profoundly unlikely this seems. As all plant life is dead, the only food left is tinned and this is obviously in very short supply. All the other necessities of life, including shelter, clothes and clean water, are equally hard to come by. At several points they come close to starvation; at many others they are nearly captured or killed. After every step they get colder, hungrier, thirstier. The world they live in is so vividly realised that the reader shares in the feeling of trauma. Hellish doesn’t begin to describe it. The only thing that keeps them going is one another, and the small, unspoken hope that somewhere there is a place of refuge. Extraordinarily, at one point they find just such a place, an emergency bunker full of food and other resources, but the man refuses to stay, refusing to believe they will be safe, even though the road is a much more dangerous environment.

Despite everything, the boy preserves a core of integrity. He wants to help people they encounter, and cannot accept the hard decisions his father has to constantly make. He is the voice of compassion, the conscience of a lost world he knows only through the memories of his father, which in hindsight seems a paradise:

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

I enjoy dystopian fiction, and will watch just about anything involving zombies or end of the world catastrophes. Usually these involve a suspension of disbelief – the characters often survive for long periods without any obvious sign of food or water, for example, or find weapons in abundance just when they are needed. The Road offers no such false comforts. This is a terrifying world in which death seems an attractive alternative to the hardships of daily life. I read The Road compulsively in just over a day, all the time anticipating the end which I thought was inevitable – this novel was not going to have a happy ending. I am going to avoid spoilers and let you decide what you think about the ending, but whatever you do don’t read The Road unless you are feeling quite psychologically strong. Keep telling yourself it is only a story.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, 2006

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Book review

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch, 2023

Wow. Prophet Song is the most impactful novel I have read in a very long time. Some critics have compared it to 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, and I think they are right. At one point I found reading it so traumatic (if you have read it you will know immediately what scene I am referring to) that I had to put the book down for 24 hours. It’s extraordinary.

The novel is set in Dublin shortly after the election of a far-right nationalist Government, the National Alliance Party. No specific timescale is given but everything else in the novel is set in the present. The Government introduces emergency powers that are in effect martial law. A new quasi-military police are given far-reaching powers to quash any dissent or opposition, a classic fascist strategy. Events are told through the Slack family. Larry, a teacher and trade unionist, is arrested and held without charge while attending a protest. He quickly becomes one of the disappeared, a non-person whose existence is denied by the state. Human rights lawyers trying to locate the disappeared are themselves threatened and arrested. Larry leaves behind Eilish, his wife; Mark, their sixteen-year old son son; their daughter, Molly; thirteen-year-old Bailey; and baby Ben. Amnesty International says that “Enforced disappearance is a crime under international law and an insidious practice that not only persists as a relic of past conflicts but also still looms large as a contemporary instrument of oppression used by the states across the world as a tool to silence dissent and instill fear.”

Lynch’s brilliance in setting Prophet Song in Ireland begins to pay off. This is not some distant South American banana republic where human rights have only ever tenuously existed – this is a modern European country. But people were disappeared in the states of the former Yugoslavia – Bosnia, Serbia and others – and there is evidence of this happening in the Ukraine as well. Being European is no guarantee of human rights, and if we think of flagrant breaches of human rights as being something that happens elsewhere, we are wrong. But the Irish setting has an even deeper impact that this, because in Northern Ireland people were ‘disappeared‘ in the 1970’s by masked armed men appearing at their doors in the night, taking them away to be shot in the head in some remote countryside, never to be seen again. (For the avoidance of any doubt, of course I understand that Northern Ireland and Ireland are not the same country – but the experience of the Troubles affected people from both sides of the border, and that shared trauma clearly forms a backdrop to Prophet Song). Lynch also seems to be drawing inspiration from the approach taken Margaret Attwood in The Handmaid’s Tale in which everything that happens in the novel has happened in real life elsewhere in the world.

As well as her family, Eilish cares for her father, Simon, who has dementia. Vulnerable people – the very young and the very old in particular, suffer disproportionately in times of unrest. Simon has occasional bouts of lucidity during which he encourages Eilish to take the rest of her family and leave the country, but she stubbornly refuses, despite being warned that “History is a silent record of people who could not leave“. It is not as simple as that – history is also “a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.”

Mark is called up for military service shortly before he turns seventeen. He refuses to support a regime which has captured and possibly killed his father, and goes into hiding. Refusing his mother’s attempts to persuade him to leave the country he joins a rapidly growing force fighting to overturn the regime. At this point Mark fades from the narrative like his father before him. The rebel force make progress and capture parts of Dublin, providing a glimmer of hope, but the fighting intensifies in Eilish’s area, with bombs falling on the houses and streets. Daily life becomes more and more dangerous, with civilian casualties inevitable. The rebel forces are not portrayed as saviours but as equally vicious as the Government forces. Bailey is seriously wounded during a shelling attack. Eilish tries to take him to hospital but it is being bombed and evacuated. She finds another hospital but when she returns the next night to check on him he has also been ‘disappeared’, apparently taken as a suspect rebel soldier despite his age. Finally, in a desperately upsetting and gruesome scene Eilish finds his broken body in the morgue, showing signs of having been tortured before being killed. Initially my instinctive reaction to this traumatising scene was that Lynch had gone too far, that the Government forces would have no reason to torture a young teenager, but a moment’s thought made me realise that such scenes are happening right now across the world, that age is no protection for children in war zones, (the ongoing tragedy in Gaza was brought vividly to mind) they have no special status, and that the idea this could not happen in a Western Europe capital is simply wrong.

Somehow Eilish finds the strength to go on, and she flees with her two remaining children as refugees from the fighting, trying to cross the border into Northern Ireland. This becomes a story of ‘illegal’ immigrants, so stigmatised in the UK and across Europe at the moment. The refugees are exploited by people smugglers and corrupt border crossing guards. Seeing this experience through the eyes of already traumatised people (as of course refugees often are) humanised the refugees in the face of the often heartless headlines we read about ‘economic migrants’ and the rest.

Lynch’s point – that these things could so easily happen to us, as they are already happening to so many people, and we should reject any complacency that ‘it can’t happen here’ – is inescapable. If there were to be any doubt, towards the end of the novel he drives the point home:

“and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore”

Prophet Song is an extraordinary, challenging novel, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It is undeniably a difficult read but an important one, and a very worthy winner of the 2023 Booker Prize.

Gaza

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch, 2023

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Book review

MaddAddam is the third and final novel in (and also gives its name to) the MaddAddam trilogy. It continues the story of the characters introduced in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, and opens in traditional manner of sequels: two survivors of the apocalypse, Ren and Toby, (the principal characters of The Year of the Flood), set out to rescue their friend Amanda, another of God’s Gardeners, the survivalist millennial cult who has been kidnapped. During their search they met up with other survivors including several former members of the God’s Gardeners, who were either all extremely lucky or somehow developed an immunity to the man-made virus that triggered the pandemic. They also meet Snowman Jimmy (principal narrator of Oryx and Crake) and his ‘Crakers’, modified humanoids genetically designed to survive the apocalypse and prosper in the new, post-human world. Together they form a small defensive compound, pooling their resources and skills and protecting themselves against the hostile wildlife, as well as the two ‘painball’ (a form of gladiatorial combat) kidnappers.

As with the previous books in the trilogy, Atwood combines present tense narratives with long, detailed flashbacks. In this novel we learn a lot more – possibly a shade too much – about Zeb’s background. He and his brother, Adam, who we later find out is the founder of the God’s Gardeners, escape from an abusive father and step-mother, and go on the run. Zeb adopts a bewildering series of different identities, at each stage crossing the paths of other characters already featured. Or as the New Stateman’s reviewer put it:

A penchant for coincidence began to emerge in The Year of the Flood and by this instalment it’s running as amok as the pigoons. All the survivors have known each other for years and keep bumping into each other in the post-apocalyptic landscape, while rarely encountering anyone who didn’t appear in the first two books.

The improbable coincidences pile up as Zeb moves from job to job, all of them ‘manly’ roles such as pilot and bouncer for a sex club (the one Ren and Amanda work at, of course). Zeb has adventure after adventure (at one point he is mistaken for Bigfoot, which I think was intended as comedic relief?). I had the impression Atwood was writing these asides as a form of therapy, an escape from ‘serious’ writing and that she could have gone on almost indefinitely.

Humour is also provided by the naivety of the blue-skinned, penis-waving Crakers. They are like toddlers constantly asking “why?” insisting on being told stories, and then interrupting them. This joke is quite amusing the first time it is used, but it doesn’t bear that many repetitions.

When it was originally published MaddAddam was met with some confusion. Why was Atwood still writing about this society which had already been explored in considerable depth? Was there anything particularly new to say about the apocalypse? There’s a degree of condescension in this attitude – as if science fiction is not worthy of the attention of an author of Atwood’s status – but this is nevertheless quite derivative stuff. The lack of originality in the novel’s core concept – ‘the end of the world, and what happens to the plucky group of survivors’ – is certainly a weakness which becomes all the more apparent by this stage of the series. There’s no sense of peril in the conflict with the Painballers – the novel’s bad guys – and the final showdown is told almost entirely ‘off-screen’ through the confused eyes of one of the Crakers, who doesn’t really understand what is going on.

Atwood hints that the Crakers may not be the primitive creatures we have been led to believe. One of the younger humanoids learns how to write and gains an understanding of some of the simpler human concepts. Is this a sign of the Crakers’ beginning to evolve and throw of their genetic limitations, or not? We don’t find out because this element of the story remains unresolved.

In the novel’s acknowledgements, Atwood wrote: “Although MaddAddam is a work of fiction, it does not include any technologies or biobeings that do not already exist, are not under construction, or are not possible in theory”. (my emphasis). The final clause in this sentence is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. A lot of things are theoretically possible but still thousands of years away from being developed. To imply that the technology in MaddAddam is in some way imminent is misleading: psychic pig/human hybrids are not going to happen any time soon. Of course what Atwood is doing quite deliberately is referencing a similar point she made about The Handmaid’s Tale – that everything described there had happened to women at some point in human history. This is an attempt to make the text more vivid and real, a warning rather than speculative fiction. Whether she needed to do that or not is a moot point – without it does the text stands on its own well enough as fiction? Most dystopian fiction doesn’t need the protective cover of an ‘it could happen, really’ justification.

Atwood prescience happens where I suspect she least expected it – not in the development of genetic engineering, but in an aside on one of Zeb’s early jobs:

“His first employer was Ristbones, an outfit that specialised in the hacking of electronic voting machines. That had been easy in the first decade of the century, and also profitable – if you controlled the machines you could slip in whichever candidate you wanted”.

I detected some conservative themes in the previous novels in this series – opposition to gun control, and a suggestion that the apocalypse could in some way be an opportunity for a new start for humanity – but I didn’t expect to see Trumpian lines about electoral fraud being anticipated so accurately.

MaddAdam by Margaret Atwood, 2013

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Book review

The Year of the Flood is the sequel to Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. It was a long wait to find out about the mysterious people that Snowman/Jimmy saw on the beach at the end of his hazardous supply-run to his former compound, but one of the obvious advantages of reading these novels ‘in arrears’ so to speak is that they can be read without the long delays in between publication, keeping the details of the preceding books fresh in the mind.

However, the enigmatic end of O&C is not immediately resolved – the wait continues until near the end of this sequel. The Year of the Flood follows the story of two of ‘God’s Gardeners’, the millennial cult mentioned in O&C. God’s Gardeners believe that a biblical ‘waterless flood’ is coming, in which the world will be cleansed of the damage done by man. and of mankind itself, leaving only a small number of survivors who have prepared for the ‘flood’.

Prepping – ‘the practice of making active preparations for a possible catastrophic disaster or emergency, typically by stockpiling food, ammunition, and other supplies‘ – is now a fairly common concept if not practice, particularly after Covid, but I am not sure when it became mainstream. Regardless, God’s Gardeners are preppers, stashing away supplies in ‘arks’ in preparation for the coming imminent catastrophe. And they are as it turns out absolutely right to do so. Atwood’s sympathies seem clearly with those warning of the impending ecological disaster, even if it is probably too late to do anything to avoid it.

As the narrative develops we learn more about the God’s Gardeners’ beliefs – they are strict vegetarians and aim to live entirely self sufficiently while they await the expected end of the world, even though their origins are not fully explained until the third novel is the trilogy, MaddAddam. Sections of the novel are regularly interspersed with copies of sermons preached by Adam One, the God’s Gardeners leader and founder, and hymns which celebrate their endless round of festivals. The cult’s leadership council are all called Adam and Eve One, two, Three etc. We also learn that the group’s ideology is perhaps not as outlandish as we had originally been led to believe – their understanding of the likely coming apocalypse proves almost exactly right, and they develop an impressive range of survival skills. The community steadily grows as more people come to realise that the modern way of life is unsustainable.

Much of The Year of the Flood follows a similar time period and structure to Oryx and Crake, with a fresh perspective of the events leading up to the apocalypse and its aftermath from the point of view of the God’s Gardeners and in particular two of their surviving members, Toby and Ren. As with O&C much of the novel is told in flashback. Toby (confusingly, a young woman) works as a ‘meat barista’ in a burger bar, enticingly named SecretBurgers. As we know from O&C law and order has largely broken down in the world outside the corporation compounds, so when Toby is assaulted by her manager, the psychotic Blanco, she is unable to do much about it until the God’s Gardeners rescue her and take her to their commune.

The other parallel thread of the story is told by Ren, a child member of the group, whose mother Lucerne is an escapee from one of the corporation compounds. At first Lucerne is in a relationship with Zeb, one of the Group leaders (while the focus of this novel is on the female characters, Zeb is a charismatic figure and it is no surprise that he comes to the fore in final novel of the trilogy). When that relationship breaks down and Lucerne and Ren return to their compound, (Lucerne claiming to have been kidnapped, a not entirely unknown experience), Ren goes to a conventional compound school where she meets Jimmy (Snowman) and Glenn (Crake). This is the starting point for the timelines of the two novels to merge.

Atwood carefully creates a very convincing portrait of a world where science is unchecked and is taking us to the brink of catastrophe. Her warnings about gene editing technology, global warming, and climate change could not be clearer. This isn’t a ‘we are all doomed’ rant, but it tiptoes close to it: if a full-scale global apocalypse does ever happen I can imagine Atwood standing in the wings, tweeting ‘well I did tell you so’. Unlike with most other dystopias there is no real attempt to suggest a way out of this mess – we are probably past the point of no return, and all we can do (it is implies) is stock up on tinned goods and hide our guns.

There are a few other weaknesses in the narrative. The days of the apocalypse themselves remain strangely unexplored – we know in detail how it happened, and how the handful of survivors come together, but almost nothing about the event itself. Atwood is careful to provide elaborate reasons why Ren and Toby survive the pandemic (Ren is locked in a bio-secure environment when it happens – it’s not entirely clear why but it appears to be some sort of quarantine required as part of her role as a sex-worker; Toby locks herself in the high-end spa where she works, also ensuring her survival) but other survivors emerge without such clear reasons for their survival, and the novel’s plausibility wobbles alarmingly when they all end up being known to one another, including several of Jimmy’s previous girlfriends. This makes for moments of recognition when incidents in the first novel are called back, such as when Jimmy’s college girlfriend burnt his shoes because they were made of faux leather, but this doesn’t make them any more plausible.

As a dystopia The Year of the Flood doesn’t have a lot more to say than Oryx and Crake. But as an adventure story it is entertaining, even exciting at point, and the reader is always rooting for the God’s Gardeners, unlikely good guys in the apocalypse if ever there were any, to come out on top, The strange Crakers make a return appearance at the end of the novel when the action catches up with where we left it at the end of Oryx and Crake, setting things up for the exciting finale, MaddAddam.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, 2009

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Book review

The Power, by Naomi Alderman, 2016

Many of the great dystopian novels have at their centre what amounts to a thought experiment – a ‘What If….?’ What if women were enslaved and used to breed children? What if totalitarianism ruled our lives? What if our obsession with technology distorts society to remove all meaningful human relationships? And so on. Alderman’s master-stroke in ‘The Power‘ is to imagine a new and compelling ‘What If?’ – what would happen if women had the ability to generate electric shocks from their bodies? What if they literally had ‘the power’? What would that do to gender relationships in society? Would women be free from sexism, oppression, sexual violence and so on? Ultimately, would the world be a better place?

Alderman uses a rather clumsy framing device to provide a structure to the narrative. The novel is book-ended with correspondence between a male historian turned author and a female editor. He seeks her comments on and support for his novel, ‘The Power’. He is attempting to find a wider audience for his archaeological findings by turning them into a novel, recreating the world he has discovered . She patronises him, finding the scenes of female on male sexual violence and the idea of male soldiers “sexy”. She suggests the novel is published under a male pseudonym, in an ironic inversion of a practice in publishing that still survives to this day. Their letters are written several thousand years after the central events of the novel. The historian’s theory, given imaginative form in the novel, is that women have not always had ‘the power’, and in earlier pre-power societies men were the dominant sex. He describes the period when women’s electrical abilities first emerged, and the events leading up to the global war which followed.

This framing technique is not new of course – Margaret Atwood (who mentored Alderman during the writing of this novel) does something similar at the end of the Handmaid’s Tale, as does Orwell at the end of 1984, but the impact of the device in both is different, distancing the reader from the grim dystopias, and offering hope that the world has changed. In The Power, Alderman both opens and closes the novel with the correspondence, so we are aware while reading the novel that things don’t end well – chapters headings even have a grim countdown to the apocalypse to emphasise the point. Between chapters are illustrations of archaeological finds. The historian ‘author’ speculates on their purpose, often wildly inaccurately. Alderman has some fun here – for example she talks about the mysterious meaning of the ‘bitten fruit logo’, although this ignorance of twenty-first century technology is not really consistent with the story within the story, in which email and smart-phones are fully understood.

The central narrative is told through the intersecting stories four main characters: Roxy, the daughter of a British drug baron; Margot, mayor of an unnamed city in the United States; Allie, a teenage girl in an abusive foster home in Alabama; and Tunde, a young male Nigerian journalist. Tunde stumbles into journalism driven by a need to understand ‘the power’, and through his efforts the reader sees the its impact on countries around the world. In some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the changes are literally revolutionary. Allie is at the heart of the development of a new religion focussed on women and their new powers, reinterpreting Christian theology with a fresh emphasis on the role of women. Margot’s story shows the impact of the power on politics and the military-industrial complex – the military possibilities of the power are quickly identified. Finally Roxy’s story shows how organized crime reacts to the opportunities of the changes within society. These disparate narratives converge, improbably, on the newly declared central European nation of Bessapara, which becomes the focus for their stories and the stage on which a new world order begins to emerge.

At first, the power liberates women. No longer frightened of the men in their lives, they begin to take control. The reversal of roles happens quickly – stripped of their power to physically dominate women, men become subservient. This is shown in some obvious ways – there is a scene when women soldiers rape some young men – but also in subtler ways, such as the male newsreader who claims not to understand the political stories he is covering, and is relieved to turn to lighter news or the traffic reports.

The central concept of ‘The Power‘ is remarkably effective. It is thought-provoking and challenging. It locates the oppression of women in their physical weakness relative to men, and asks what would happen if that situation were to be reversed? Whether women’s oppression is solely down to this issue or is rooted in other causes is probably beyond the scope of this review, but what is interesting to me is that Alderman argues quite explicitly that once women have the upper hand, they behave just as badly and oppressively as men. They abuse their physical superiority to strip men of their human rights, to demean them, to torture, humiliate and assault them. Women are not the gentle sex here, they are just weaker, and as soon as that changes they exact revenge. As a mediation on the relationships between the sexes and their capacity to change, this is therefore ultimately a pessimistic book. It argues that human power is not located in the rules by which we agree to conduct civil society, but in our brute strength and ability to harm one another:

“It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command unto the people saying “It is thus.” But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold.”

Furthermore that physical power cannot be trusted in the hands of either sex. Women’s liberation in these circumstances becomes impossible. Their oppression is caused by their physical weakness relative to men (the author suggests) and there is no mysterious electrical power that is going to spontaneously emerge and liberate them – but even if there were, that freedom would be at the expense of men, civil society, and peace.

The contrast with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘ is stark. We believe that Atwood’s world is possible, not least because it is drawn from the real-life oppression of women. Women can be freed from Gilead not through any superhuman or supernatural external forces, but through their own actions (and those of their allies). Atwood’s novel is therefore at the same time both more chilling and more optimistic about the future of our species.

I am left wondering, worrying – have I misunderstood the allegory of ‘The Power‘? Does a novel that ostensibly seeks to imagine a world in which women do not have to fear men really end up by concluding that such a world is impossible, unattainable? In a way I hope so.

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Book review

The Lottery, and other stories, by Shirley Jackson, 1949

I haven’t checked but I think this may well be the first collection of short stories I have reviewed in over 400 posts. That must at least be in part because I focused on the Guardian’s top 100 novels for a long time, but it is probably also a comment on the limitations of the short story as a literary form. Most publishers, even in this case, feel compelled to gather them together in a quasi-novel format of approximate novel length.

Having said that, this collection works well as a whole, and the use of The Lottery as a conclusion gives the whole text a strong collective punch. The Lottery is by far Jackson’s best known short story, and rightly so – it is an extraordinary, bleak portrait of rural America descended into a controlled, ritualistic form of Taliban-style barbarism. The citizens of a small, unnamed farming community gather on 27th June for a traditional ceremony involving the drawing of lots, the purpose of which is only fully revealed in the story’s closing lines. The ceremony is a harvest sacrifice – “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” – of the kind practised by primitive societies. Whilst the story is chillingly bleak, there is some hope offered in the asides that confirm that some communities are abandoning what is obviously a long-established tradition of human sacrifice by stoning to death.

Originally published in 1948 The Lottery revealed the potential for savagery lurking under the veneer of civilisation in America. I understand it is read widely in American schools, although in the UK it is not, by comparison, well known. If I was teaching English teenagers I would definitely use this powerful exploration of how we in the West think of ourselves as so advanced but how we are just one step away from the jungle. The tiny details in The Lottery are what give it its power – the calm, bucolic portrait of the villagers gathering in good cheer, chatting quietly to one another about this and that, the officials fussing about getting things underway, and then slowly the panic builds as the lottery starts.

I am sure this point has been made many times before, but there are strong echoes between The Lottery and The Hunger Games. Instead of a simple sacrifice the later novel uses the concept of a lottery as the starting point for a to-the-death gladiatorial contest, but the random selection of an ordinary person chosen for the sacrifice is such a powerful concept that I can understand why Collins would have been inspired by it.

None of the other short stories in this collection feature such a gruesome turn of events as that in The Lottery. They are mainly set in domestic, suburban settings, in which housewives, often newly wed or with small children, struggle to settle into new homes. Usually there is a sinister undertone to the stories, a sense of repressed threat which finally explodes in the Lottery, thus justifying its place at the climax of the collection. Sometimes the stories are simply sketches of brief if unsettling incidents, such as The Witches, in which an old man on a train disturbs a family with inappropriately gruesome reference to witchcraft. Other longer stories feature women past their prime living lives of quiet desperation, with the minutiae of everyday life becoming oppressive.

Jackson links these 25 stories thematically and in terms of their setting – they all seem to take place at roughly the same period of time, and in the same middle-American setting. They are linked further by the use of the same name for several characters across the different stories – indeed the original title of the collection was going to be ‘The Lottery and the Adventures of James Harris’. This unsettles the reader – are we following different events in the lives of the characters, or unrelated stories featuring people who just happen to share a common name? Is there any continuity between the stories? This is a world in which the supernatural still lurks beneath the surface of everyday life, a world where the memory of Salem Witch trials still troubles, and where people believe in daemons.

Jackson is a fine stylist. Not a word is wasted. If you want to dip into her work The Lottery is a great if atypical starting point, but I would recommend this collection as a more representative selection of her writing.

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Book review

Early Riser, by Jasper Fforde, 2018

This is a really welcome return to writing ffor Fforde after a ffour year hiatus. (sorry).

I am guessing, but my suspicion is that his inspiration for this novel was the question “What if the last Ice Age had not finished when it did?” We know that human evolution – or probably more accurately the development of human civilisation – was profoundly affected by the most recent Ice Age. It can’t be a coincidence that the glaciers began to retreat around 11,700 years ago, and we can start to trace the rise of civilisation as we know it from around 10,000 years ago. But what if the ice had never gone away – what would human civilisation look like?fforde

Fforde builds his world around this premise, or something very similar to it. In this chilly world humans hibernate, and it is part of his slow reveal technique that it is not until around 250 pages in that we discover what we should have probably already worked out, that humans have retained body hair more akin to our monkey cousins than our current-day down.

This world is shown through the eyes of Charlie Worthing, a trainee Night Consul. The Night Consuls are a police force who maintain order while 99% of the population sleep through the winter, protecting the sleeping from the Villains and others who choose not to hibernate. Charlie is very much the innocent abroad, who tries to do the right thing but is constantly stumbling into situations where his presence is at best a complicating factor.

In this alternative world, death during the winter is a frequent occurrence, not just for the Night Consuls. Go to sleep thin and you don’t wake up. The drugs people take to stop calorie sapping dreams can also take their toll, leaving some survivors as little more than brain dead and very hungry zombies. Charlie’s first job as a consul is to escort one such walker to a research facility, and when his companion is stolen, Charlie goes in pursuit, setting off a chain of events that cause mayhem in this sector of snow-bound Wales.

Fforde’s world building is wonderful – he has really given a huge amount of thought to what life in his world would be like. It is in many ways a quite sinister dystopia – fertility rights are traded down generations for example. He has also created a detailed vision of what dream manipulation might look like. As a detective story the novel is slightly less successful – Charlie is a hapless hero who is always on the spot when someone else is blown away by one of the freaky new percussive weapons people have, or predated by one of the WinterVolk – semi-mythological creatures who people the winters, along with the surviving mega-fauna such as mammoths. Somehow he always survives, and for me this pattern became a little predictable – Charlie and A.N.Other character set out to explore mysterious scenario a, b, or c, peril threatens and A.N.Other is blasted to kingdom-come with Charlie watching open-mouthed alongside them.

The novel is chock-full of in-jokes and contemporary references, (and not-so contemporary references – Rick Astley features, for example) and the winter-world  is very recognisable, even if given a tweak. There is a Jane Bond film franchise, with one controversial male casting. References to the Welsh setting and the class war with the English give the novel a very specific set of cultural references that may not travel well – the novel is not yet published in the US, and it will be interesting to see how it is received there.

Quibbles aside, it is fantastic to have Fforde back. I don’t know if Charlie Worthing will be appearing in any sequels – I have a hunch not – but anything he writes is definitely worth reading. Highly recommended. If you haven’t read Fforde before then I also cannot recommend ‘The Eyre Affair’ highly enough – it is brilliant.

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