Fractured city mirrors life in Gaza
Much ink and breath has been wasted describing William Sutcliffe’s third young adult novel as “dystopian” or “fiction”. We See Everything is, in fact, a form of dramatised reporting about the occupied Palestinian territory of Gaza. The narrative has been transposed to London, so we get St Pancras and Parliament Hill instead of Al-Shati and Beit Hanoun, but imposed borders still define “The Strip” and its parades of grimy bomb sites — an area thickly patrolled from above by armed drones tracking every citizen’s every move.
As if to ram the idea home, the author opens the novel with an epigraph from Atef Abu Saif’s The Drone Eats With Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire written in the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge — the absurdly euphemistic name given to Israeli military strikes against Gaza in 2014. (Later in the novel, there is an attack which lasts for the same period: 51 days).
Sutcliffe has form in this area; his first YA outing in The Wall was very explicitly about a young Israeli boy who ventures into the occupied West Bank. Naturally, we get both sides again in We See Everything, the story flitting between Lex, the 16-year-old son of a Corps commander who falls in love with a traumatised girl, and drone pilot Alan, whose pangs of doubt about the rhetoric of “defending the country” from “terrorists” lead him to question his entire life.
YA books are never going to be without some excruciating cliches and clunking contrivances. Sutcliffe gets especially dull when writing about Lex and Zoe’s burgeoning relationship (“. . . for the first time I can see the curves of her body, take in the full force of her explosive beauty”).
Nevertheless, We See Everything is fundamentally about families and the inevitable fracture occupation provokes. Sutcliffe skilfully sketches despair and paranoia. There are explosions and chases but most of the action is internal, focusing on impossible choices and sacrifices that must be made.
By changing the setting to a place somewhat familiar to a Western audience, the author is doing something admirable by attempting to imprint empathy and understanding on younger readers who might not see through the conceit as adults might. There is a moral force at its heart, which must be respected.