Rising tide of refugees hit British brick wall
HHHH by John Lanchester Faber & Faber, £14.99
IF YOU’RE looking for a life-affirming New Year read then you should give John Lanchester’s apocalyptic new novel a wide berth.
The Wall is a 1984 for our times, a bleak confrontation of what might happen to the world in the aftermath of cataclysmic climate change and political upheaval.
Britain may have survived but it now exists behind The Wall, a coastal defence structure built around our entire coastline to defend us from desperate refugees known as the Others.
In this frightened, dystopian society, all school leavers must do two years’ national service as Defenders on the Wall. Everyone wears a chip and the only future is “the rulebook or anarchy, nothing but the Wall and the Others and the always waiting, always expectant, entirely unforgiving sea”.
Defending the Wall is a gruelling business: bungle your rifle drill and you are likely to have your term of duty extended. Allow an Other over the Wall and you will have your chip removed and be put to sea, and almost certain death, in an inflatable raft.
The novel opens as the narrator, Joseph Kavanagh, begins his two-year stint.
He faces two types of cold during his 12-hour shifts, one is difficult but bearable, the other “displaces part of you; it makes you feel as if there’s less of you... it’s a premonition of death”.
On leave, he visits his parents in their dreary suburban home. He has nothing to say to them, nor they to him; both sides are conscious that “the olds feel they irretrievably **** ed up the world, then allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It’s true”
There is a poignant moment as Kavanagh is leaving and his parents immediately turn on the television to watch a programme about surfing. The seaside is but a memory as Britain is now “beachless, like every coastline in the world after the Change”.
ANOTHER touching insight is the admission of a fellow Defender that he hopes to study literature at university and become an academic. Kavanagh is amazed at the precision of such aims, aims which, tragically, are unlikely to be fulfilled in this dark and desperate world. Displacement is a theme of the book. We get no real sense of Kavanagh, other than his general disgruntlement and underlying fear, as Lanchester has reduced his characters to bare essentials. Though grim, the book is a tour de force which builds to a dramatic conclusion.