Future is grim with wall
Dystopian fiction is really a form of journalism. George Orwell’s 1984 is a logical extrapolation of what would happen if the follies he reported on went unchecked.
John Lanchester has some claim to be today’s Orwell, a brilliant journalistnovelist, with a rare gift for reconstructing the chains of cause and effect behind the often inexplicable events in the headlines. His novel, Capital (2012), was a dramatisation of the contents of his reporter’s notebook. But if in the decades to come I want to recapture the feeling of what this decade was like, what we hoped for and worried about, I expect I am more likely to reread Lanchester’s new novel, The Wall – despite its being set in the (hopefully distant) future.
Featuring politicians exercised by the possibility of boatborne migrants, the book is certainly topical. The story takes place years after an environmental catastrophe known as ‘‘The Change’’. This has led to a rise in sea levels so drastic that in Britain a giant concrete wall has been built along the whole coastline. Nobody under 25 has ever seen a beach.
Much of the rest of the world has fared worse, resulting in a migration crisis that makes our world look like a model of stability.
In the face of all this, politicians trumpet the message that nothing is a greater threat than foreigners coming and eating our turnips. So the British populace meekly accept the return of conscription, and every young person must do two years’ service ‘‘on the Wall’’.
Their task is to spend hours staring out to sea, keeping a lookout for boats containing ‘‘Others’’, as migrants are known. Any ‘‘Other’’ who has survived the perilous journey to the British coast must be unusually resilient and ruthless, so the ‘‘Defenders’’ must liquidate them on sight.
Those ‘‘Others’’ who do make it are invariably caught and forced to become ‘‘Help’’ for the rich. A strict one-in, one-out policy means any Defenders who let Others slip past will become an Other themselves.
The first section is perhaps the most memorable as, through Lanchester’s narrator, Defender Joseph Kavanagh, he skilfully gives us a flavour of the interminable tedium of life on the Wall. Later it becomes a more conventional but compelling adventure story, as Kavanagh begins to question the dehumanising rhetoric about ‘‘Others’’ he has always been fed.
Life on the Wall is brilliantly evoked, but the scraps of information we get about life in the rest of the country don’t seem to add up to anything very coherent. In Lanchester’s vision of the future, Britain is seriously underpopulated because people feel too guilty to breed (‘‘We broke the world and have no right to keep populating it’’) and yet these same hyper-socially conscious people tolerate the Government’s inhumane antiimmigrant policies.
No doubt Lanchester’s point is that politicians are always capable of stoking fear of immigrants to such a degree that the populace will consent to acts of gross national self-harm in the name of keeping borders secure.
It’s a very enjoyable read, but until Lanchester’s future is realised (or not), we can only partially judge this novel’s worth.