John Lanchester: writings on The Wall
When an author’s dystopian novel starts to read like non-fiction
“I kept having this sort of recurring dream,” novelist and journalist John Lanchester said about the genesis of his fifth novel, while in conversation with fellow writer Andrew O’Hagan (left and right, below). “It started with an image of a bloke standing on a wall. Alone. At night.” “Literally a dream?” O’Hagan queried.
“Literally a dream,” Lanchester confirmed with a nod.
It was only after several nights of dreaming the same scene that Lanchester began to imagine the wider story around it. Implicit in this one image was a world existing in the aftermath of catastrophic climate change.
Joseph Kavanagh, Lanchester’s protagonist, is a young “Defender” stationed on “The Wall”, a concrete structure surrounding the entirety of the British coast. In a form of compulsory national service, the Defenders are enlisted to prevent the “Others” — desperate migrants that populate the surrounding seas — from crossing the border.
In the current climate, O’Hagan noted, this perhaps hits a little too close for comfort: “It feels that the terra firma of the book is very recognisable. It feels like it could be now, and it could be here.”
Indeed, what sets The Wall apart is how close its dystopian “future” seems. The world a degree or so warmer, isolationism in full force, a fear of migrants: you’ve stepped right into Lanchester’s dream. Perhaps this place is so recognisable because it isn’t that much of a stretch.
This frightening closeness to reality is something of which Lanchester is well aware. “I’m fine with it being called dystopian, but in my head
[The Wall] was something actually slightly darker, because it was almost like a form of non-fiction.”
And yet, Lanchester started writing the book well before some of the key events that make it feel contemporary; before Extinction Rebellion dominated headlines, before Brexit (Lanchester went back to doublecheck dates), before Trump had even mentioned his own wall. Looking back now, Lanchester revealed, “If you’d asked me if I was thinking about climate change, I’d have said no, not particularly.”
Lanchester noted that although climate change is real and is here, “the people who are most severely affected haven’t been born yet. They’re the unborn poor of the world near the equator. And that’s a new thing in human history: to take radical action to change our lives for the benefit of people who don’t yet exist.”
He believes the uniqueness of this problem presents the arts with a crucial role to play: “to imagine those people into being and to imagine the consequences of not acting in order to prompt us to act.”