THE WHITE CITY

released OUT NOW! 255 pages | Hardback/ebook

Author roma Tearne Publisher aardvark Bureau

Sometimes, the pieces just don’t quite fit.

Inside Roma Tearne’s short (and beautifully written) novel, two different books are fighting it out. One’s a hard-hitting tale of the cost of oppression, whether it’s a near-future London drunk on you’re-withus-or-against-us “War on Terror” logic, or (in flashback) the state-sanctioned murder squads of Pinochet’s Chile. The other story is set during a decades-long winter and features the kind of extravagantly dystopian details that wouldn’t be out of place in The Hunger Games – like the fact that in this post-NHS future it’s literally illegal for paramedics to treat people who can’t prove they have insurance first.

Both modes have bags of potential, but set alongside each other, they clash. The big freeze (whether it’s caused by magic or climate change is unclear) could be a metaphor for the protagonist’s numb shock after her brother is arrested on terrorism charges, but OTT inventions like “the Arena” (why bother making something like this up when horrors like Guantanamo actually exist?) and lines of portentous post-apocalyptic dialogue like “We live amongst the broken threads of other people’s lives” cheapen Tearne’s sharplyobserved and moving family conflict. We’re not saying SF can’t blend with gritty drama, but here it feels like the author’s heart isn’t in it. Nic Clarke