John Lanchester’s The Wall

(Faber & Faber) Reviewer: Donal O’Donoghue Armed with one of the most concrete metaphors of these uneasy times, Lanchester, an award-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction, delivers an allegorical fable that is a warning about how the world may finally break itself while also offering a sliver of human hope. It opens on the Wall, a vast fortification, some 10,000 kilometres in length, built to keep the Others out and manned by conscripts known as The Defenders, one of whom is the narrator, Joseph Kavanagh. We learn that the Wall runs the entire jagged length of the coastline of the UK and was built in the wake of a cataclysm known as The Change. In this nearfuture, robots (bots) carry out utilitarian duties, there is also a slave class known as The Help, Defenders can get special privileges by becoming Breeders and the Elite run the whole totalitarian show. If the Others, who come by sea, successfully breach the wall, those defenders on duty pay for their ‘failure’ by being sent out to sea, thus becoming Others.

The prose is spare, sometimes poetic (the types of cold the Defenders experience on the wall) with shades of other literary dark futures including 1984, The Road and The Handmaid’s Tale. Yet The Wall has its own allegorical power, both a warning of the possible shape of things to come but also of the way things are now in certain lands and minds.