With the seas rising, an unnamed area surrounds itself with a barrier wall to keep out both the sea, and the people outside who are barely surviving on boats and rafts. Without spoilers, I’ll say that readers get to see both sides of this wall.
There are so many correlations between the dystopian world of The Wall and today’s world of class division, and fear of ‘the other’. It’s allegory, satire, and warning all in one.
I came here looking for a comment on isolationist policies (a wall around Britain - Brexit, anyone?), the effects of climate change and maybe also a philosophical view on otherhood. I can't say I didn't get what I was looking for, but it turned out to be a bit more shallow and pretentious than I expected. Lanchester begins to describe a post-Change Britain, but he never finishes this job. There are one or two leads, but never enough to paint a full picture. The same applies to the world outside the wall - there are hints, but no real concrete descriptions of what the world looks like at all. This can be a good thing - to let the reader imagine these things for him-/herself - but to be able to do that, we need at least some hints as to what this world has become. But all we get …
I came here looking for a comment on isolationist policies (a wall around Britain - Brexit, anyone?), the effects of climate change and maybe also a philosophical view on otherhood. I can't say I didn't get what I was looking for, but it turned out to be a bit more shallow and pretentious than I expected. Lanchester begins to describe a post-Change Britain, but he never finishes this job. There are one or two leads, but never enough to paint a full picture. The same applies to the world outside the wall - there are hints, but no real concrete descriptions of what the world looks like at all. This can be a good thing - to let the reader imagine these things for him-/herself - but to be able to do that, we need at least some hints as to what this world has become. But all we get is a walled-in Britain, an ocean, a rocky island, a pirate ship and an oil rig. If I wanted to be nice, i'd say it's like a combination of "The Road" and "Waterworld" outside the wall and some sort of artificial, unsettling version of a rural England on the inside. But that wouldn't be entirely honest. The truth is, it's none of the above. And unfortunately, there's nothing to replace that description with. Reading this leaves me wanting more, but not in a good way. Hell, the book doesn't even have a proper ending!
But all in all, it's still ok. There's still a wall that's being patrolled. There are still Defenders guarding Britain against the Others. There's still treachery, catastrophe, pirates and post-apocalyptic settings to compensate the lack of depth. Lanchester does a fair job of following whatever writer's manual he has in his back pocket. But that's all there is. And I expected more than that.
We're probably going to see more of this gender: the post-climate change dystopia. There was already Bacigalupi's Water Knife and others. This novel (not really sci-fi) takes its place squarely within that genre. In the post-climate disaster, The Change, era, England has built a Wall around itself to protect itself from The Others, the environmental refugees from other parts of the world, now underwater or uninhabitable. Young men and women now have to serve time on the Wall, as military service, for two years, to try and prevent the Others from getting through. If the Others succeed, they are offered a choice between euthanasia or becoming Help, that is, slavery. And the Wall Defenders who failed to stop them are put to sea, with close to zero chance of survival. As such, this system has created major generational hostility between the generations that did nothing to stop climate change and …
We're probably going to see more of this gender: the post-climate change dystopia. There was already Bacigalupi's Water Knife and others. This novel (not really sci-fi) takes its place squarely within that genre. In the post-climate disaster, The Change, era, England has built a Wall around itself to protect itself from The Others, the environmental refugees from other parts of the world, now underwater or uninhabitable. Young men and women now have to serve time on the Wall, as military service, for two years, to try and prevent the Others from getting through. If the Others succeed, they are offered a choice between euthanasia or becoming Help, that is, slavery. And the Wall Defenders who failed to stop them are put to sea, with close to zero chance of survival. As such, this system has created major generational hostility between the generations that did nothing to stop climate change and are still around, and the younger generations who have to live with the consequences, the loss of food diversity, the loss of beaches, and then, of course, the Wall. The novel follows one such young man as he starts his Wall service. This is rather bleak, with limited hope. Nevertheless, it is a page-turner, and clearly meant as a warning of things to come.
