National Post (National Edition)
THE BIG UP-IN-SMOKE
LIFE IN CORY DOCTOROW’S DYSTOPIAN TORONTO HITS A LITTLE CLOSE TO HOME
Walkaway By Cory Doctorow Tor Books 384; $34.99
Walkaway, the thrilling and surprising new novel by Cory Doctorow, begins with a Communist party. Not the Communist Party, but an illegal rave in a disused factory. In Doctorow’s nearfuture vision, there are a lot of disused factories around, left to rot when their profitability slips. The factories, in fact, are symptomatic of the world as a whole: in the wake of environmental disaster and political instability, the rich have grown richer (“zottas” are the megarich, oligarchical families whose power transcends the porous national boundaries), production is largely automated, and those even in the middle of the economic-social ladder have been left behind, doomed to a life of short-term gigs and scrambling, while the rich, well, get richer still.
Wait — that sounds familiar ...
Hubert Etcetera (his parents gave him 18 middle names) and his friend Seth are in their late 20s, and generally too old for a factory party where participants share “fast-acting” beer (“it was ditch water an hour ago. We sieved it, brought it up to room temp, dumped in the culture”) and wear masks of historical Communist figures, but they’re both, in their own way, fighting the inexorable slide of age and “the world of non-work.” They meet Isabel, the politically dissatisfied daughter of a Toronto zotta, and the three are forced to run when the party is busted by the authorities.
No, not for loud music, or drug use, or bad fashion choices: the Communist party is broken up when they restart the factory’s machinery and start giving away the products — Muji beds — to any and all takers. People die in the melee over trademark infringement.
After their escape, (and breakfast at Fran’s — yes, some places in Toronto are truly timeless), and an encounter with Isabel’s father, the trio begins to entertain the possibility of “going walkaway,” joining the thousands of dissatisfied and cast-off who have left the cities and established a new world in the territories, leaving their “default” lives in pursuit of a better life.
And that’s just the first chapter.
With Walkaway, Doctorow has created a powerful and unique work that, like the best science fiction, balances an imaginative perspective on a future that feels — at times uncomfortably — utterly contemporary.
“Created,” though, is the wrong word. “Synthesized” is perhaps more in keeping, both with the subject matter of the novel and Doctorow’s approach to it. It’s not just that this is a novel of ideas merged with a science fiction thriller, in which characters often speak in paragraphs before being interrupted by drone attacks and fight scenes; it’s also a comingof-age story, a series of love stories, a visionary perspective on a hard-won future, a family drama, a diaspora tale, a hard-edged hippie daydream and a prison break novel. Oh, and it has more than its fair share of dirty bits.
By rights, such a melding shouldn’t work; there’s too much at play. Walkaway, though, doesn’t only work; it shines.
Much of this is due to Doctorow’s focus on the novel’s characters, his willingness to put them through hell, and his inclination to upset readerly expectations whenever possible. In the first chapter, for example, we get to know the earnest, serious Hubert Etcetera fairly well at an introductory level: we see the world as it appears to him, watch his budding attraction to both Isabel and the idea of walking away, building to the collective decision to walk.
If you’re expecting the second chapter to follow his story, though, perhaps showing their preparations and their first exposure to the territories, brace yourself: Walkaway actually jumps across time and to another character in the gap between chapters, establishing a pattern that runs the length of the book. Initially surprising and frustrating, the power of the shift quickly becomes evident. Doctorow is writing something more expansive than the story of a slacker finding himself when he walks off the map: Walkaway is at once a wider novel, drawing in characters as it goes, and a more intimate one, exploring those lives with powerful depth and skill.
The stakes, for the characters and the reader, are high. The zotta leaders of the default have limited tolerance for the walkaway world, and are given to lashing out with attacks when settlements become too established, when the mere existence of a viable option threatens the system they have established (and profit from). And when scientists in the walkaway discover a way to conquer death, that tolerance disappears entirely. The idea of immortality for all, the ultimate post-scarcity existence, threatens the very foundations of the default world; the zottas want — no, need — it for themselves. There will be casualties. And, for the reader, it’s going to hurt.
That’s as it should be, though, and a true measure of Walkaway’s success. After hundreds of pages of philosophical discussions (and putting those discussions into motion), after chapters of steadily mounting peril and escalating violence, after time skips that lead the reader through decades of the characters’ lives, the final sections of the novel come together with a gutpunching emotional veracity, a reckoning that draws together all the philosophy, all the drama, all the peril, to a series of human (and posthuman) peaks. It’s a bravura piece of storytelling, and marks a powerful shift in awareness and understanding, not just for the characters but undoubtedly for the readers themselves.