Inside a nation trapped by a sea of troubles
‘NONE of us can talk to our parents,” says Kavanagh, the narrator of John Lanchester’s The Wall. He is speaking from an undefined near-future Britain where — alongside the novel’s titular, physical barrier — a kind of wall has risen between generations.
It is part of the general fallout of what everyone calls “the Change”. “The diagnosis,” Kavanagh says, “isn’t hard — the diagnosis isn’t even controversial. It’s guilt: mass guilt, generational guilt. The olds feel they irretrievably f **** d up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It’s true.”
How the older generation destroyed the world is clear enough; what the world resembles now is something Lanchester feeds to readers in small doses of local detail.
With a descriptive parsimony that lends the novel the feeling of a fable, the elements slowly fall into place. It becomes clear that “the Change” has seen sea levels rise to the extent that there are no beaches any more, seemingly anywhere.
While mainland Britain, within “the Wall”, seems to be more or less intact, much of the world’s population has been forced to take to the sea, wandering endlessly in search of asylum.
The Wall’s primary purpose is to keep these wanderers, “the Others”, from overrunning what appears, in its way, to remain a green and pleasant land. Or at least, relatively green and pleasant: Kavanagh’s Britain does not have the Mediterranean weather climate-change optimists might hope for; instead it seems to be wetter and colder than ever.
And though British society seems to continue in various comfortable first-world ways, almost no one in Kavanagh’s generation has any desire to bring children into it: “Breeders” have to be encouraged by special perks and social provisions.
The Wall sets a limit to all this, but it is also the fulcrum around which everything seems to revolve, in the writing and the world alike.
In Kavanagh’s Britain, where all citizens are chipped and monitored, everyone of fighting age must spend two years’ guarding the Wall from incursions by Others.
For, Kavanagh, at the beginning of his service time, boredom turns it into a kind of fixation, almost the sole recipient of physical description in the whole book.
“The Wall is ten thousand kilometres long, more or less... It is three metres wide at the top, every centimetre of the way. On the sea side it is usually about five metres high; on the land side the height varies according to the terrain. There is a watch house every three kilometres: three thousand-plus of them.
“There are ramparts, stairs, barracks, exit points for boats, helipads, storage facilities, water towers, access structures, you name it. All of them made of concrete.”
Above all, though, it is cold, everywhere, and all the time: “The cold is one of its fundamental properties; it’s intrinsic.” It blurs into a concrete poem, Kavanagh notes, repeating“Sky concrete water wind” ad infinitum.
Like “the Wall”, The Wall isa carefully constructed circuit of repetition, closing just as it opens with the same five words: “It’s cold on the Wall.” In between, although this is a slim novel, it travels a long way, taking Kavanagh with it.
His journey is both a commentary on storytelling, and a savage attack on the present-day mores of an island with its own stark political generation gap, where politicians happily talk of immigrant “swarms”, and whose government continues to operate the “hostile environment” policy that saw 63 British citizens wrongly deported to Jamaica last year.
The Britain of The Wall, with its citizen chips, its one-in one-out immigration policy, and its use of lucky asylum seekers as unpaid domestic slaves, is very on the nose.
“But,” you can almost hear Lanchester asking himself, “why not?” Why bother with a metaphor or a fable when the briefest walk down the path of the literal can bring you to something so extreme and yet so recognisable?
There are, to be sure, more fully imagined alternative futures to be found in the burgeoning climate-fiction genre — the doyen of “cli-fi” remains Kim Stanley Robinson.
And there are more craftily universalised fables of insularity and suspicion, too — none more compelling than JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, now nearly 40 years old.
But The Wall is a neat, disquieting, elegant book that deserves to be read.