From Brexit to migration, this masterly climate change dystopia explores contemporary fears with a blend of realism and metaphor
“It’s cold on the Wall.” What kind of story might be signalled by such an opening sentence? An adventure set in Roman Britain, perhaps – something by Rudyard Kipling or Rosemary Sutcliff, complete with centurions and mists over northern crags. Or a fable of the sort that Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino might have written: a sombre meditation on the correlation between civilisation and frontier systems, composed in the voice of a Confucian scholar exiled to the steppes, plangent with echoes of Chinese poetry. Most obviously, in 2019 any mention of a chilly wall with a capital W is bound to conjure up images of George RR Martin’s Night’s Watch, standing guard amid the snows of northernmost Westeros. Historical fiction, fable, fantasy: the wall is an image potent enough to serve the needs of an entire range of genres.
John Lanchester, in the first pages of his new novel, makes knowing play with this. It is not immediately clear where his wall is, nor why it should be so cold. A mention of trains and lorries is soon a signpost that we are not on Hadrian’s Wall, but beyond that the setting remains opaque. There are Captains, there are Sergeants, there are Corporals. Our narrator, it gradually emerges, is a man called Kavanagh, sent to the Wall for an obligatory two-year term of service. As a Defender, his duty is to stare out to sea, and keep watch for people referred to only as Others. Much hangs on his ability to spot them: for every Other who makes it across the Wall, a Defender will be expelled from the country, put out to sea on a boat. The ominous sense of jeopardy that this establishes hangs like a shadow over the entire book.
Anxiety about the fertility of migrants has been a constant in apocalyptic fiction
Continue reading...via Science fiction books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2FOq3qi
0 comments:
Post a Comment