Review by New York Times Review
Earlier this year, The Times reported that President Trump's pledge to build a border wall had been invented by his advisers as "a memory trick" to keep an unpredictable candidate focused on the issue of immigration. This tells us a lot about Trump, but it also speaks to the power of the wall as a symbol, which is both monumental in its simplicity and elusive enough to sustain any number of meanings, often based - as Ursula K. Le Guin notes in "The Dispossessed" - on which side of it the observer happens to stand. This is the wall that fascinated Jorge Luis Borges, who marveled that the emperor who ordered the construction of the Great Wall of China also burned all of the books in his kingdom; and Pink Floyd, who put it on the cover of an album about a celebrity who dreams of becoming a dictator. John Lanchester's new novel, also called "The Wall," arrives at a moment in which the definition of a wall is a matter of national debate, and it actively invites such associations. As the main character says on the first page, as he searches for words to describe the wall of the title, "You look for metaphors." The narrator is a young man with the Kafkaesque name of Joseph Kavanagh. He has just arrived at the Wall, "a long low concrete monster" that runs for thousands of kilometers around the periphery of an unnamed island nation, closing it off completely from the outside world. All citizens are required to serve there for two years as Defenders, forming the last line of resistance against the threat of an armed invasion. This recalls the Night's Watch of "Game of Thrones," except that the country is recognizably Britain, and the enemies on the other side aren't supernatural White Walkers, but human beings in rowboats and dinghies. As in many dystopian novels, the narrative hints at its back story through the ominous appearance in the text of unexplained proper nouns - the Change, the Breeders, the Others - before revealing that an environmental cataclysm has produced rising sea levels and extreme weather across the globe. Britain, which has been spared the worst, uses the Wall - a literal Brexit - to keep out both water and unwanted immigrants. As Kavanagh makes modest plans for his future, falls in love and finds small forms of consolation, there are shades of Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go," but trouble lies ahead, and the second half turns into an ordeal that evokes Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." Like most of its literary precursors, " The Wall" opens long after the Change, which allows Lanchester to present his society as a given, without having to worry about the details of the transition - a luxury granted to novelists, if not politicians. The catastrophe evidently happened over a short period of time, creating a historical dividing line as decisive as the Wall itself, and everyone knows whose fault it was: "The world hadn't always been like this and ... the people responsible for it ending up like this were our parents - them and their generation." This kind of moral clarity has little to do with the real devastation wrought by climate change, which promises to be just gradual enough to allow those who caused it to avoid blame during their lifetimes. Lanchester's vision of an agonized cultural reckoning seems like its own sort of wishful thinking, and even if we grant his premise, many of his conclusions - like the notion that most people would stop having babies out of sheer guilt - are less than persuasive. Yet if the novel succeeds only intermittently as a parable, it's gripping as a story, especially when it leaves the Wall. As Lanchester puts distance between himself and his gigantic symbol, the plot grows less constrained, and the last hundred pages are full of tense action and sudden reversals that are mercifully unburdened by any allegorical significance. The result marks a step forward for Lanchester, a formidably intelligent author who has sometimes stumbled over his undeniable gifts. His debut, "The Debt to Pleasure," was so pleased by its Nabokovian conceit - a murderer's confession posing as a cookbook - that it settled for a series of variations on the same dark joke. More recently, "Capital" was a credible effort at a big social novel that was so densely reported that its characters barely had room to interact or change. For a certain type of realistic novelist, a shift to speculative fiction - which allows the writer to invent as well as observe - can be liberating. "The Wall" revels in this opportunity, but it occasionally falters under Lanchester's decision, which echoes "Never Let Me Go," to keep most of his people slightly colorless, as if to contrast their ordinary inner lives with their horrific situations. In practice, the narrator's restricted voice prevents us from seeing his world as clearly as we should, and we learn frustratingly little about its most vulnerable actors - the climate refugees on the far side of the Wall. The novel gathers momentum as it goes, and few readers will stop until they reach its final page. Early in the book, Lanchester toys with the idea of "concrete poetry," in which a poem is typeset to look like its subject, like a house or a Christmas tree. In its closing lines, like the album of the same name, the novel doubles back on itself to take the shape of the Wall - but it lives most vividly in the places where its meticulous structure breaks down. Lanchester constructs a more elegant wall in prose than any politician could in concrete, but the limits that it imposes on itself are still barriers, no matter how artistically designed. Citizens at the Wall form the last line of resistance against the threat of an armed invasion. ALEC NEVALA-LEE is the author ofthe group biography "Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
With the relentless advance of climate change, more and more speculative fiction authors are taking up the challenge of envisioning future scenarios in which environmental devastation has taken its toll on human civilization. In Lanchester's (Capital, 2012) version of this premise, one still-intact island nation has closed itself off from the rest of the world with a heavily guarded wall, protecting them from the desperate Others trying to get in. Lanchester's first-person narrator is a newly enlisted soldier, Kavanagh, whose tour of duty as a wall defender becomes a life-altering experience. Thrown into a world of ubiquitous, concrete, monotonous routine and nonstop icy sea winds, Kavanagh remains keenly aware at all times that, if an Other gets in, the responsible defender must join the Others. His biggest consolations are his growing friendships with Hifa, an androgynous fellow defender, and his stalwart captain as they face their worst nightmares when they are stranded outside the wall. Beautifully written and chillingly plausible, Lanchester's work is dystopian fiction at its finest.--Carl Hays Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lanchester (Capital) imagines coming of age amid the xenophobia and despair of a world ravaged by climate change in his dynamite dystopian novel. Twenty-something Joseph Kavanagh arrives for his mandatory two-year service as a Defender of the Wall surrounding his coastal country. It has survived the massive ecological devastation and sea level rise known as the Change, and its Defenders kill anyone from outside (known as Others) who tries to enter. Kavanagh suffers bracing cold, prolonged tedium, and the exacting demands of his company's captain amid the fear of attack; any Defenders who fail are put out to sea. He gets to know his fellow soldiers and develops an incipient crush on androgynous and initially taciturn Hifa. After a war games training, a young politician warns the Defenders of rumors that the Others are increasingly desperate and some inside the country have been treasonously plotting ways to help them. Cracking under pressure, Hifa offers to have a child with Kavanagh, as parents receive a reprieve from duty, but their plans are obliterated by a surprise attack that has devastating consequences. This terrifyingly resonant depiction of desperation will spark lively discussions about the responsibilities climate change is restructuring, and is electrifying storytelling to boot. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
"Nothing before the sea was real": a bleak portrait of a future world shaped by global climate change and refugees desperate for a few square feet of dry land.In the Britain of the near future, there are no beaches. Indeed, as the draftee called Kavanagh tells it, "there isn't a single beach left, anywhere in the world." Kavanagh, nicknamed Chewy by his fellow Defenders, has just one job: He has to guard a spot along the Wall ("officially it is the National Coastal Defense Structure") that now rings the island fortress. It's a preternaturally cold place, miserable, boring, but the stakes are high, for if any of the refugees called "The Others" get over the wall, one of the Defenders is put out to sea, exiled forever. Meanwhile, that Other, when inevitably captured, becomes one of "The Help," essentially enslaved; as the mother of Hifa, a fellow Defender, says, "Another human being at one's beck and call, just by lifting a finger, simply provided to one, in effect one's personal propertythough of course they are technically the property of the state." Kavanagh is diligent if bitter, especially toward the parents who avert their eyes when they see him, ashamed that they let the Change occur, ashamed that their world has come to all this. Unashamed, as impenetrable as the Wall, is the Captain, Kavanagh's commander, who in time reveals that the monolithic state of elites, soldiers, and all the rest is less impervious than it appears, bringing on a sequence of events that finds Kavanagh, Hifa, and the Captain on the outside, in a Hobbesian world, desperate to get back in. Lanchester's view is unblinking, his prose assured, a matter of "if" and "then": This is what happens when the sea rises, this is what happens when an outsider lands in a place where life has little meaning and the only certain things are the Wall, the cold, the water, and death.Dystopian fiction done just right, with a scenario that's all too real. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
