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Summary
Summary
Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall--an enormous concrete barrier around its entire coastline. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and are a constant threat. Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness, and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding Captain and Sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. A dark part of him wonders whether it would be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if he had to fight for his life...
John Lanchester--acclaimed as "an elegant and wonderfully witty writer" (New York Times) and "a writer of rare intelligence" (Los Angeles Times)--has written a taut, hypnotic novel of a broken world and what might be found when all is lost. The Wall blends the most compelling issues of our time--rising waters, rising fear, rising political division--into a suspenseful story of love, trust, and survival.
Author Notes
John Lanchester was the deputy editor of the London Review of Books and the restaurant critic for the London Observer.
He is the author of a second novel, Mr. Phillips, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker.
He lives in London.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Lanchester (Capital) imagines coming of age amid the xenophobia and despair of a world ravaged by climate change in his dynamite dystopian novel. Twenty-something Joseph Kavanagh arrives for his mandatory two-year service as a Defender of the Wall surrounding his coastal country. It has survived the massive ecological devastation and sea level rise known as the Change, and its Defenders kill anyone from outside (known as Others) who tries to enter. Kavanagh suffers bracing cold, prolonged tedium, and the exacting demands of his company's captain amid the fear of attack; any Defenders who fail are put out to sea. He gets to know his fellow soldiers and develops an incipient crush on androgynous and initially taciturn Hifa. After a war games training, a young politician warns the Defenders of rumors that the Others are increasingly desperate and some inside the country have been treasonously plotting ways to help them. Cracking under pressure, Hifa offers to have a child with Kavanagh, as parents receive a reprieve from duty, but their plans are obliterated by a surprise attack that has devastating consequences. This terrifyingly resonant depiction of desperation will spark lively discussions about the responsibilities climate change is restructuring, and is electrifying storytelling to boot. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
With the relentless advance of climate change, more and more speculative fiction authors are taking up the challenge of envisioning future scenarios in which environmental devastation has taken its toll on human civilization. In Lanchester's (Capital, 2012) version of this premise, one still-intact island nation has closed itself off from the rest of the world with a heavily guarded wall, protecting them from the desperate Others trying to get in. Lanchester's first-person narrator is a newly enlisted soldier, Kavanagh, whose tour of duty as a wall defender becomes a life-altering experience. Thrown into a world of ubiquitous, concrete, monotonous routine and nonstop icy sea winds, Kavanagh remains keenly aware at all times that, if an Other gets in, the responsible defender must join the Others. His biggest consolations are his growing friendships with Hifa, an androgynous fellow defender, and his stalwart captain as they face their worst nightmares when they are stranded outside the wall. Beautifully written and chillingly plausible, Lanchester's work is dystopian fiction at its finest.--Carl Hays Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Earlier this year, The Times reported that President Trump's pledge to build a border wall had been invented by his advisers as "a memory trick" to keep an unpredictable candidate focused on the issue of immigration. This tells us a lot about Trump, but it also speaks to the power of the wall as a symbol, which is both monumental in its simplicity and elusive enough to sustain any number of meanings, often based - as Ursula K. Le Guin notes in "The Dispossessed" - on which side of it the observer happens to stand. This is the wall that fascinated Jorge Luis Borges, who marveled that the emperor who ordered the construction of the Great Wall of China also burned all of the books in his kingdom; and Pink Floyd, who put it on the cover of an album about a celebrity who dreams of becoming a dictator. John Lanchester's new novel, also called "The Wall," arrives at a moment in which the definition of a wall is a matter of national debate, and it actively invites such associations. As the main character says on the first page, as he searches for words to describe the wall of the title, "You look for metaphors." The narrator is a young man with the Kafkaesque name of Joseph Kavanagh. He has just arrived at the Wall, "a long low concrete monster" that runs for thousands of kilometers around the periphery of an unnamed island nation, closing it off completely from the outside world. All citizens are required to serve there for two years as Defenders, forming the last line of resistance against the threat of an armed invasion. This recalls the Night's Watch of "Game of Thrones," except that the country is recognizably Britain, and the enemies on the other side aren't supernatural White Walkers, but human beings in rowboats and dinghies. As in many dystopian novels, the narrative hints at its back story through the ominous appearance in the text of unexplained proper nouns - the Change, the Breeders, the Others - before revealing that an environmental cataclysm has produced rising sea levels and extreme weather across the globe. Britain, which has been spared the worst, uses the Wall - a literal Brexit - to keep out both water and unwanted immigrants. As Kavanagh makes modest plans for his future, falls in love and finds small forms of consolation, there are shades of Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go," but trouble lies ahead, and the second half turns into an ordeal that evokes Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." Like most of its literary precursors, " The Wall" opens long after the Change, which allows Lanchester to present his society as a given, without having to worry about the details of the transition - a luxury granted to novelists, if not politicians. The catastrophe evidently happened over a short period of time, creating a historical dividing line as decisive as the Wall itself, and everyone knows whose fault it was: "The world hadn't always been like this and ... the people responsible for it ending up like this were our parents - them and their generation." This kind of moral clarity has little to do with the real devastation wrought by climate change, which promises to be just gradual enough to allow those who caused it to avoid blame during their lifetimes. Lanchester's vision of an agonized cultural reckoning seems like its own sort of wishful thinking, and even if we grant his premise, many of his conclusions - like the notion that most people would stop having babies out of sheer guilt - are less than persuasive. Yet if the novel succeeds only intermittently as a parable, it's gripping as a story, especially when it leaves the Wall. As Lanchester puts distance between himself and his gigantic symbol, the plot grows less constrained, and the last hundred pages are full of tense action and sudden reversals that are mercifully unburdened by any allegorical significance. The result marks a step forward for Lanchester, a formidably intelligent author who has sometimes stumbled over his undeniable gifts. His debut, "The Debt to Pleasure," was so pleased by its Nabokovian conceit - a murderer's confession posing as a cookbook - that it settled for a series of variations on the same dark joke. More recently, "Capital" was a credible effort at a big social novel that was so densely reported that its characters barely had room to interact or change. For a certain type of realistic novelist, a shift to speculative fiction - which allows the writer to invent as well as observe - can be liberating. "The Wall" revels in this opportunity, but it occasionally falters under Lanchester's decision, which echoes "Never Let Me Go," to keep most of his people slightly colorless, as if to contrast their ordinary inner lives with their horrific situations. In practice, the narrator's restricted voice prevents us from seeing his world as clearly as we should, and we learn frustratingly little about its most vulnerable actors - the climate refugees on the far side of the Wall. The novel gathers momentum as it goes, and few readers will stop until they reach its final page. Early in the book, Lanchester toys with the idea of "concrete poetry," in which a poem is typeset to look like its subject, like a house or a Christmas tree. In its closing lines, like the album of the same name, the novel doubles back on itself to take the shape of the Wall - but it lives most vividly in the places where its meticulous structure breaks down. Lanchester constructs a more elegant wall in prose than any politician could in concrete, but the limits that it imposes on itself are still barriers, no matter how artistically designed. Citizens at the Wall form the last line of resistance against the threat of an armed invasion. ALEC NEVALA-LEE is the author ofthe group biography "Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction."
Guardian Review
His last novel Capital skewered the property bubble, now his latest The Wall imagines Britain barricaded after environmental catastrophe. Lanchester talks about refugees, Brexit - and optimism Desperate refugees risking their lives crossing the Channel in small boats in the dead of night; extreme temperatures forcing people to flee their homes; politicians inciting a fear of others, and railing against traitors who "want us to be overrun, to be washed away". These are not recent news stories, but a glimpse of a possible era after climate catastrophe, or the "Change" as it is known in one of the first big novels of the year, John Lanchester 's The Wall. Lanchester imagines a moment in the future when rising sea levels mean there isn't a single beach left on the planet, those countries that remain habitable have become fortresses and the young feel bitterly betrayed by the previous generation because of the destroyed world they have inherited. We are barely into 2019 and the future already seems terrifyingly bleak. "I didn't crack my knuckles and sit down to write a novel about now. I was halfway through another novel. I still am," Lanchester explains, almost apologetically. "It's not the future, but it's a version of a future, and it feels a lot like a version of the future that we are heading for." With the emphasis on borders, fear of invasion and lines such as: "This country is the best in the world", and, of course, the wall itself - "a long, low concrete monster" - it is hard not to read the novel as a riff on Brexit and the US under Trump, as well as a chilling ecological dystopia. Post-2016, a wall is surely shorthand for ugly political and ideological division (as with the grisly punishment wall in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, written in Berlin in 1984). "One of the things about the wall in the book is that it is not a metaphor for anything else," the author insists. "We had this period when walls were coming down around the world and now, just as an empirical fact, they are springing up all over the place." And he hasn't been following Brexit obsessively - "a gigantic waste of emotional energy. Danny Dyer seems like a deathless genius of political science for asking: 'What is it?'" The book came more quickly than others. It was more than a metaphor. It was an image, a country with a wall round it Lanchester is one of Britain's most celebrated essayists, with a canny journalistic instinct as a novelist, from his award-winning 1996 debut The Debt to Pleasure, a balsamic-black foodie satire written at a moment of peak gastro-porn during a stint as the Observer's restaurant critic, to his last novel Capital, a Dickensian saga of the London property bubble, published in 2012. He distinguishes his non-fiction and fiction in terms of subjects that interest him, "things happening in the world" and "the things that won't leave you alone". For novels, he says: "There's this sort of psychic charge, there's something unresolved, that's why the images keep coming back." And for this, his fifth, the image was of a person standing guard on a wall. It initially came to him in the form of a recurring dream. The author tells himself "sort of half-conscious" stories to help get to sleep: "It works, by the way, I sleep really well." The dream first began in 2016 "and it wouldn't quite go away. Then I started thinking about who the person was and what the world was. It didn't exactly write itself but it came much more quickly than my other books," he says. "It was much more than a metaphor. It was an image, a country with a wall round it." The son of a South African-born banker and an Irish mother (the troubling story of his parents' marriage is affectingly recounted in Family Romance, 2007), Lanchester describes himself as "a well-disguised semi-immigrant"; he was born in Germany in 1962; had lived in seven different countries by the time he was four; and spent much of his childhood in Hong Kong (the inspiration for his 2002 novel Fragrant Harbour). For him, the image of the wall is a "comforting" rather than a disturbing one. Growing up, he was very aware that "Hong Kong was safe and that just over the border there was a place where people were desperate to escape from, and that people died trying to get over the border, people drowned swimming. There was a street called Boundary Street, and if you got to Boundary Street you could stay, you weren't repatriated. For a child's imagination there was something very vivid about that, and the thing which stuck with me is that you are in the place that is safe." For this reason, he struggles to understand fears over immigration, of "being swamped or overrun or threatened in some way. If people want to get to the place where you are, that means you are in a safe place." Witty and softly spoken, he has been described as resembling "an off-duty bank manager", partly because he is unafraid of nerdy subjects (only Lanchester could make the Vix Index of market volatility interesting, as he did in How to Speak Money) so that there are few genres he hasn't tackled. "You make me sound like Meryl Streep: 'She does Polish, she does Jewish, she does Wasp, she does funny!'" he grumbles. Although he seems too rooted in the here and now, too interested in the intricacies of systems from the London tube to the FTSE, to contemplate science fiction, it should be no surprise that he has now taken on the most urgent issue of our times in this slim yet devastating work of speculative fiction. He chafes slightly at the label, recalling JG Ballard asking him not to mention SF in an interview he was writing, "because he felt you automatically lose half the readers". While that has undoubtedly changed, he argues that, as a subject, global warming is already scientific fact. If any novelist is going to make real the nightmare scenarios we are storing up, it is Lanchester. He began Capital in 2006, after all. "Any fool could see that there was a crash coming," he says now. Is there going to be another recession? "Yes, I'd have thought so, but heaven only knows what form it will take." Quoting the German economist Rudi Dornbusch in a Guardian piece on the TV adaptation of Capital in 2015, Lanchester wrote: "In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could." Substitute the environment for economics and the consequences are catastrophic. "I think, unfortunately, that is the way that change happens," Lanchester says. "There's a bitter truth in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. 'How did you go broke?' 'Two ways. Gradually then suddenly.' Lots of things happen like that." He is deliberately opaque about the timeframe in which The Wall is set: "There are all sorts of feedback effects of climate, which means we don't know how fast it is going to happen." Researching an essay for the London Review of Books back in 2007 (which begins by anticipating the radical civil disobedience of groups such as Extinction Rebellion), he was haunted by the idea of "climate departure"- a point in the future when the coldest average day "is warmer than the warmest average day in the past", he summarises. As he says, it's best not to think about it too hard. But the powerful "psychological resistance" and "denial" that he identified as characterising our response to climate change are an indulgence no longer available to us, as the extreme weather, not to mention the dire warnings of the IPCC report, last year made clear. He has two children, now 20 and 16, with his wife the writer Miranda Carter, and is acutely aware of the legacy we are leaving behind. "It will be wonderful for it not to be the thing that fundamentally alters the texture of human existence, but the evidence doesn't suggest that," he says. "Just ask a gardener. I was talking to a wine person about English grapes. Part of the reason we have all this sparkling wine now is that 30 years ago they were harvesting champagne in mid-to-late October, now it's in August. That's not a metaphor for anything." People have always been frightened about the end of the world - that's the nature of who we are It is a commonplace that all dystopias are versions of the present, and Lanchester quotes William Gibson's famous line: "The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed." In the novel, a young "Defender" reflects on the old world: "The produce you could get before the Change," she said. "Everything, all the time. Tomatoes and fruits, hams from you name it, meat whenever you liked it, all of it all the year around ... it's like science fiction, where they have a machine that just makes stuff ... Where does it all end? I mean, the idea is amazing... and yet it's weird and it's wrong too." Lanchester came of age in the early 1980s, when "things were pretty grim". "People have always been frightened about the end of the world - that's the nature of who we are," he says, recalling how as a teenager the threat of nuclear war created similar feelings of individual impotence and impending doom. But what makes the current moment "particularly desperate", he believes, "is the absence of a will to do anything about it ... Trump gives a sort of autonomy for the forces that are actively lying." Along with our capacity for "selective amnesia", as a species "we have an amazing talent for being oblivious, we are really, really good at it," he marvels. "Maybe ... how unbearable it is if you are not. Because the alternative is back on the smartphones and the constant firehose of bad news. I'm not sure we innately have the tools to deal with that. We haven't worked out what to do about these," he says picking up my mobile as if it had just dropped from space. The novel's blockbuster ending is appropriately uncertain. Is there any room for hope? As he says, climate change is a story in which we deeply don't want to believe. "Well, I'm not sure," he replies, rather crushingly. "I don't think there's going to be a Live Aid style reunification concert five years later." How do you follow a novel about the destruction of the planet as we know it? "If history shows us anything, it's a school for wizards, or a novel about bunny rabbits or something." While a Hogwarts for rabbits seems unlikely, his next novel is bound to be something completely different. He likes to use a metaphor of a hall with a series of rooms off it to describe the writing process: "You know there's something in that room, you are attracted by it but frightened at the same time. You stay in the room for as long as it takes to write it, it's a day-in, day-out thing. And then at the end of it, that door's opened out. Why would you go back?" He has a strict word count per day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction and 1,500 for journalism. And he never fails to hit it. "The thing is," he quavers in his best Alan Bennett impression, "you feel ill if you don't!" (as Bennett once told him when asked how he did it). "It's true. Then what are you for? That's your job." (Although, reassuringly, he "not infrequently" goes back to bed of a morning, following Hilary Mantel's advice that it's crucial to get enough sleep before writing. "If I start the day too early, I can't.") And when he finally clocks off, he's a big fan of the TV box set: writers can only hope their novels are "as well written as very good telly", he says. He plans to return to the novel abandoned before The Wall, "but it's been putting up quite a good fight". He also wants to complete a collection of short stories, having recently had one, the first he has written, published in the New Yorker. "Seriously! I don't want to boast but I was very proud of that," he admits endearingly. "There are not many things that happen in your mid 50s that give you a genuine rush." For the immediate future, he hopes 2019 "is easier on all of us than the last couple of years". And in the long term? "My main ambition, my main hope for the book, is that I'm wrong." - Lisa Allardice.
Kirkus Review
"Nothing before the sea was real": a bleak portrait of a future world shaped by global climate change and refugees desperate for a few square feet of dry land.In the Britain of the near future, there are no beaches. Indeed, as the draftee called Kavanagh tells it, "there isn't a single beach left, anywhere in the world." Kavanagh, nicknamed Chewy by his fellow Defenders, has just one job: He has to guard a spot along the Wall ("officially it is the National Coastal Defense Structure") that now rings the island fortress. It's a preternaturally cold place, miserable, boring, but the stakes are high, for if any of the refugees called "The Others" get over the wall, one of the Defenders is put out to sea, exiled forever. Meanwhile, that Other, when inevitably captured, becomes one of "The Help," essentially enslaved; as the mother of Hifa, a fellow Defender, says, "Another human being at one's beck and call, just by lifting a finger, simply provided to one, in effect one's personal propertythough of course they are technically the property of the state." Kavanagh is diligent if bitter, especially toward the parents who avert their eyes when they see him, ashamed that they let the Change occur, ashamed that their world has come to all this. Unashamed, as impenetrable as the Wall, is the Captain, Kavanagh's commander, who in time reveals that the monolithic state of elites, soldiers, and all the rest is less impervious than it appears, bringing on a sequence of events that finds Kavanagh, Hifa, and the Captain on the outside, in a Hobbesian world, desperate to get back in. Lanchester's view is unblinking, his prose assured, a matter of "if" and "then": This is what happens when the sea rises, this is what happens when an outsider lands in a place where life has little meaning and the only certain things are the Wall, the cold, the water, and death.Dystopian fiction done just right, with a scenario that's all too real. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.