Jennie Melamed – Gather The Daughters

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Book Review, Dystopia, Gather The Daughters, Jennie Melamed, Post-Apocalypse, Speculative Fiction

Female Dystopias

Jennie Melamed’s Gather The Daughters does of course inevitably remind the reader of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. This was such an extraordinary and shocking book at the time of its publication. Atwood had put no completely invented ideology into it; she sewed together trends, happenings and events from across history and geography. Atwood casts a long shadow, but Melamed, a psychiatric nurse practitioner who specialises in working with traumatised children, has clearly had her own professional experiences which have gestated this book.

Unfortunately, various world events – such as the kidnapping of young Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram and the democratic election of Trump, despite his ‘locker room’ boast of entitlement to grab and grope, not to mention the regular exposés of historic child abuse cases – sadly indicate that the need for writers to shock and warn us against any complacent thinking that the war for female equality and control over one’s own body has been won, is still a pressing one.

Melamed’s book is set in a possibly not far distant future, though it harks back to earlier, simpler times

Some cataclysmic apocalyptic world event has happened. Possibly. A small group of influential men have established a patriarchal, small island colony. Here, life is made secure and possibly viable, at least if you are one of the influential men. These rulers, The Wanderers, do maintain certain links with the Badlands, where some kind of plague, some kind of terrible devastation lurks. Occasionally, a new family will arrive on the island.

Harking back to some kind of particularly warped Amish style community, there are strict controls in place. These are mainly directed against women. Marriage happens remarkably early, within a year of the onset of menstruation. Life is also short, and once physical fitness is past early shuffling off of mortal coil is expected. There are also strictures on the number of children allowed. The powerful have devised ways to manage this, mainly through the indoctrination of a should and should not Holy Book, devised, as they so often are, for the powerful to keep others without power

Thou shalt not allow thy wife to stray in thought, deed or body. Thou shalt not allow women who are not sister, daughter or mother to gather without a man to guide them. Thou shalt not kill.

There is a brief, idyllic period set aside for the children. With rigid rules in place from birth till death, for all, and especially for the female all, a short summer season where children are allowed to run feral, live outside, and do as they please is a small time of wild paradise. Everyone knows the dark rules and the dark penalties for infringing those rules outside the brief summer escape. There is no other freedom of expression – except that resistance also, always needs to find ways and means.

Melamed tells this religious cult, island story through the voices of some of the girls. Janey is the oldest, the most dangerously subversive, starving herself in order to delay the onset of menstruation, marriage, motherhood. Amanda was her closest friend, but Amanda is now married and pregnant, her time of brief freedom and escape forever gone. Vanessa is daughter to one of the wanderers, the ruling elite; Caitlin the daughter of a particularly brutal man, not one of the especially privileged, though every man is privileged enough, in this society.

She discovers that grief is a liquid. It passes thickly down her throat as she drinks water and pools soggily around her food. It flows through her veins, dark and heavy, and fills the cavities of her bones until they weigh so much she can barely lift her head….At night, it rises up from the floor silently until she feels it seep into the bedclothes, lick at her heels and elbows and throat, thrust upward like a rising tide that will drown her in sorrow

Melamed recounts her quite horrific story with much delicacy and finesse. It is a spell binding story, a malevolent one, a warning one – and, unfortunately given the seeping violence of the times, wreaked by those who seek to turn back, in various ways, the freedoms women won during the twentieth century, a story one must hope is not, in any way, prophetic

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine. It will be published on 25th July

Gather the Daughters Amazon UK
Gather the Daughters Amazon USA

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Cormac McCarthy – The Road

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Book Review, Cormac McCarthy, Post-Apocalypse, The Road

Dark days on a dying planet.

Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize winning, bleak, heart-breaking post-apocalytic novel of the remaining few survivors, scrabbling towards the final, dying days of a wasted, destroyed planet, some time in the very near future would have been a sombre, regret filled read at any time.

But in these days where the Presidential Office is filled by an erratic, self-obsessed and unreflective man, McCarthy’s book seems far less fictional than might be comfortable. Less allegorical and possibly more prophetic. I hope not.

The ‘event’ some ten years ago in the past is never spelled out, but, there was a blinding flash, there were sonic reverberations, and people burned, disfigured. Some kind of nuclear winter appears to have occurred. Almost all living things have now ceased to be – vegetation, insects, birds, mammals, most humans.

Pockets of survivors, feral, cannibalistic exist in the unnamed place, somewhere in America, where the novel takes place.

The central characters are a man, and his child, a boy who is probably now 10 years old. His mother is no longer living, and why, will be revealed. The father looks back to a time before the event, before his son was born, before the world was catapulted into these dark days.

His son is his reason for living, he has been charged, he charges himself, to take care of his boy. Some years after the cataclysm, and all the available food sources (whatever there was, canned), in houses, in stores, across the world, have all been looted by whatever survivors there were. Most have long since, horribly, died, but those small bands who remain – are they people of decency and humanity, or are they those who now regard other humans merely as food, offering a few more weeks and months of survival for those who kill them?

Image from the film of the book, Viggo Mortensen as Man. Kodi Smit-McPhee as Boy

Bleak days, little hope. And yet, McCarthy offers us a strong love, some relic of who we might have been, when we seemed to ourselves to be evolution’s finest flower. There is the tenderness and dependence of father and son upon each other, as they walk a road ‘South’ in search of warmer weather Practical tasks occupy the pages. Scavenging odd discovered stores of tinned food, clothing, rags to bind round feet, wheeling all these worldly goods in abandoned supermarket trolleys. Balancing the need for fire and warmth with the possibly dangerous signals given out by smoke.

The reader knows the father and his son are ailing, infections taking hold, breathing laboured. The outcome is bleak, cannot be good, for either. Nonetheless, there is also something about the child. He has a kind of holy innocence about him. He might be a kind of naïve fool – or the repository of human wisdom, not intellectually, but in goodness, in kindness, in tenderness and that so sullied thing ‘humanity’ Time and time again he rather sets a moral compass for the father to orientate towards

There are many, sometimes subliminal nods to religious imagery, and I thought this a kind of journey through an anti-Garden Of Eden, where nothing grows, but the child might be – possibly a new kind of ‘Adam’.

It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away of every side. It’s snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom

McCarthy does the reader the great service of keeping a kind of ambivalence going in the story. We know how the story must end, realistically, without appeal to any kind of magic, corn, or unsatisfying tied up wrap. But, isn’t life itself something evolving? There have been earlier cataclysms which destroyed life as it was known. Didn’t other forms arise? Might a conscious, a self-conscious species, be able, some of them, to choose to be some kind of bearers of light?

I found the concepts, the far wider considerations McCarthy was presenting the reader, kept me engaged and absorbed, as did the practical details. Father and son, and particularly, that relationship between them, and the father’s memories of ‘before’ were all extremely powerful.

And, often his writing is magnificent, carrying his weighty themes, particularly in his chilling descriptions of the new, harshly wasted world

The land was gullied and eroded and barren. The bones of dead creatures sprawled in the washes. Middens of anonymous trash. Farmhouses in the fields scoured of their paint and the clapboards spooned and sprung from the wallstuds. All of it shadowless and without feature. The road descended through a jungle of dead kudzu. A marsh where the dead reeds lay over the water. Beyond the edge of the fields the sullen haze hung over earth and sky alike

Despite these undoubted strengths I sometimes struggled with McCarthy’s writing. He has a tendency to a kind of portentous elevation, using archaic language – and then over-using it. As example, he carefully seems to want to avoid using the word ‘wash’ replacing it with ‘lave’ Using an unusual or poetic word like that, once or twice, helps the feeling of strangeness. But if every time something – hand, face, hair, knife is not washed, but is laved, it becomes grating and repetitive in a way the reader would not have noticed if the common word had been used over and again, for a common action

Still, a very powerful read indeed

And I must link to blog-chum FictionFan’s review of this, first bringing it to my attention a while ago.

The Road Amazon UK
The Road Amazon USA

Claire Fuller – Our Endless, Numbered Days

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Book Review, Claire Fuller, Dystopia, Our Endless Numbered Days, Post-Apocalypse

And after the end of the world……….life went on, because the end did not begin.

Claire Fuller’s first novel, the brilliantly titled, teasingly contradictory Our Endless Numbered Days, is a strange, disturbing, beautifully written book about dark family dynamics, the wonder and magic of childhood, deep fears, obsession, staying alive, the end of the world, all tied up with the enduring power of childhood fairy stories, and their dark symbolism

The book takes place over a 9 year time period. It opens in Highgate, London, in 1985. Peggy is 17. She has returned to her family home after a 9 year absence, disturbed and traumatised after being inexplicably missing, kidnapped by her father, when she was 8.

Back in 1976 Peggy was the beloved only daughter of a wealthy, apparently happily married couple, though both, in their own way, were rather self-obsessed. German mother Ute was an internationally lauded classical pianist, who has rather slipped into domesticity following her cradle snatching marriage to James. At 17, James was 8 years Ute’s junior.

Liszt’s Campanella plays its part in the story……

Despite the hazy gloss which the returned Peggy remembers, of the summer of 1976, there were definite cracks and oddities in her parents’ marriage. James had become a member of a group of Retreaters, survivalists preparing for a some-time imminent end of the world, `after the bomb falls’, by retreating far from civilisation, finding remote pockets in the countryside, learning again how to fish, hunt, gather. The group is led by a mysterious American.

Peggy, who is obsessed by the book The Railway Children, is nicknamed Punzel (as in Rapunzel) by her father. And, yes, all the symbolism and allegories are there a-waiting.

In the summer of 1976 Ute departs for a concert tour. Left in the care of James, father and daughter appear to have a kind of idyllic summer (in the child’s imagination) as they begin to act out the end of the world retreat in the jungly back garden of their Highgate mansion, which merges in the undergrowth, with the cemetery. They live under canvas, don’t wash, and eat squirrels and rabbits which James traps.

This, to Peggy/Punzel is all an enormous adventure, much more exciting than school and the discipline her mother imposes. And then the adventure gets even more exciting and wilder. James and Peggy leave the country, en route to Die Hutte, a mysterious hut deep in the probably Bavarian forest:

`A magical, secret place in the forest’ my father said with a catch in his voice. `Our very own little cabin, with wooden walls, and wooden floors, and wooden shutters at the windows.’

His voice was deep and smooth; it lulled me.

`Outside we can pick sweet berries all year round; chanterelles spread like yellow rugs under the trees; and in the bottom of a valley a Fluss overflows with silvery fish, so when we’re hungry and need supper, we can just dip our hands in and pull three out’.

The Hutte is a real place, marked on a map, and Peggy is excited, as she expects they will meet Ute there.

However, excitement and strangeness soon turn very dark indeed, as once far from civilisation, James tells Peggy that the world has indeed ended, and the two of them are the only survivors.

Except, clearly, it hasn’t, and they aren’t. None of this is a spoiler, as we know, from the opening chapter, that Peggy is now 17 and has only returned from that hut in the forest two months ago. Peggy is forced to be an unreliable narrator because her father, who has created this narrative for her to inhabit for her endless numbered 9 years of days, has made a lie the reality by which the two have lived

An eight year old, and her father, in a dark, Grimm’s fairy tale forest, the only beings left alive, somehow having to survive the freezing winters. What happens to a child with no other human contact except one other being – no other world view except her own, as told to her by the other human?

A forest, too can be as inaccessible a prison as a tower. Not to mention the roles of various forests in other fairy tales.

Fuller’s dark, frightening book employs nothing of the supernatural – there are no tricks of external fantasy, but certainly the reader will be aware of the dark psychological undercurrents which the fairy tale is constructed to explain.

It’s a dark and twisted tale, but also has a strange beauty. There’s a kind of seductive dream in the Walden-like idea of that life in the forest, a kind of honest simplicity of living within the landscape, learning its ways. Though nothing in this book is simple, and its whole premise is fashioned on a lie a father has created for his child.

And thanks to fellow blogger, FleurInHerWorld, whose intriguing review of this excellent book alerted me to its existence

Our Endless Numbered Days Amazon UK
Our Endless Numbered Days Amazon USA

Emily St. John Mandel – Station Eleven

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Book Review, Canadian writer, Emily St. John Mandel, Post-Apocalypse, Station Eleven

A perfect apocalypse

Station Eleven is a wonderful book

Arthur Leander, theatre and film star, a much marrying actor, suffers a heart attack whilst performing in an avant-garde production of King Lear in Toronto

A member of the audience, a paramedic in training, attempts unsuccessfully to keep him from dying.

A small girl, part of that avant-garde production, looks on.

Later that evening, the unstoppable, virulent pandemic waiting to happen, which may end it for us all, in these days of endless global travel, makes its presence felt, and everything is forever changed

By twenty years after the event, life in a depopulated world is reduced to small collections of people on the margins.

The major focus of the novel concerns a small group of artists, the Travelling Symphony – actors and musicians, travelling in horse drawn vehicles, performing classical music and Shakespeare, because “Survival is Insufficient”

King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream figure, but so too, almost as an undercurrent, does The Tempest – a sense of, at the end ‘O brave new world that has such people in’t’. Not to mention the creator of Station Eleven itself.

There is also a mysterious prophet, running a millennial cult, ruling by peddling lies of special redemption for the chosen men, and taking young girls as his ‘brides’, in the way that such cults, and their leaders, have often done

There is a beautifully drawn handcrafted comic ‘Station Eleven’ whose limited volumes feature a station in the vastness of space, the world having suffered an apocalypse. Dr Eleven looks majestically into the end times.

Comic panels and Book Cover artwork by Nathan Burton, nathanburtondesign.com

Out of this is woven the most beautiful narrative, full of hope as well as grief and despair.

This is not (just) the normal gritty realism of how-we-will-return-to-savagery-and-the-rule-of-brute-force when the end days come, and the world as we know it is out of the things we take for granted which make it run. It’s a more delicate, subtle, thing, and chooses also to focus upon that kindness and compassion which is as much a part of our nature as the self-will.

It’s a great and compulsive page turner, and the way in which Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel weaves together lives, artefacts, connected and pivotal moments is dizzyingly apt, and without any feeling of contrivance

And to my utter delight, there were no chain saw massacres, no gratuitous excuses for impossible x rated violence, no zombies, no werewolves, no vampires. Nothing that happens stretches plausibility at all. The magic of the book is the magic of ordinary. Ordinary people, ordinary extraordinary lives and events

I received this as an digital review copy via NetGalley. There were some formatting blips, and I assume these are limited to the review, rather than the finally available digital download

And thank you to WanderRaven whose review of this one initially made me scurry for it as fast as I could go to say my pretty pleases to NetGalley

Station Eleven Amazon UK
Station Eleven Amazon USA

David Mitchell – The Bone Clocks

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Book Review, David Mitchell, Epic, Post-Apocalypse, The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell, flawed, is still a far finer writer than many writing at the top of their form

David Mitchell is a curious writer – he has the ability to effortlessly inhabit many different kinds of voices, of differing character, and believably writes first person narrative from a male or female perspective, from young and old, from different cultures, places and indeed from different times. (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas)

He can also plagiarise himself, mock himself, and write concertedly in a single voice (Black Swan Green)

He is an author who is always best read with focus and attention, as even when he is being most flashy, most showing off his writerly ‘bling’ the reader will suddenly be dropped into playfulness with words, juggling voices and genres, pastiche, and – when you think you have this man’s measure as a sleight of hand merchant, a music-hall master only of illusion and cleverness which needs admiration (and might evoke a little envy) , he drops you down into darkness, suffering, existential terror and pain, despair, cruelty, soulfulness and all the unbearable truths that make the glitter and legerdemain necessary as a foil to the depth.

The man is almost TOO clever, and I sometimes wonder if his refusal to be pigeon-holed creates a certain distrust of him, from certain quarters. He is an unpredictable writer – except that he is always an excellent one.

Here, he is back to the voices of several narrators, with the linking devices of major and minor figures from previous sections of this book (or previous books) turning up as major or minor characters in later stories.

As in Ghostwritten ‘interconnection’ is a major thread. And so is writing itself – Mitchell’s ‘cleverness’ asks you to look at the illusions art creates – he pulls you into the story, and pushes you out, effectively saying ‘this is illusion’ The deliberate Alienation Effect’

Rameses Temple, ‘Ozymandias’ Photographer Steve F.E. Cameron. Wiki, Commons

The central image which floated, always, through for me, was the image of a poem by Shelley, Ozymandias’. Death stalks, ‘look on my works, ye mighty, and despair’ Ozymandias builds a monument meant to give him a legacy through the ages, and that is the inscription. Time, and entropy, has caused the monument to crumble, and the inscription is what remains. Ozymandias is the mighty who despairs, in the end. And this is a theme, the desire to avoid aging, the helpless, hopeless desire to avoid that end, to live for now, as glitteringly as we can

So, this major theme – cheating ageing and death, the desire for immortality, – for us as individuals, or collectively as a species, is explored severally.

Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark……as last year’s song hurtles into next year’s song and the year after that, and the dancers’ hairstyles frost, wither and fall in irradiated tufts…DNA frays like wool, and down we tumble; a fall on the stairs, a heart-attack, a stroke; not dancing but twitching. This is Club Walpurgis. They knew it in the Middle Ages. Life is a terminal illness

The central, linking character who starts off the journey in 1984 is Holly Sykes, a 15 year old from Gravesend (Hah! Mitchell slyly peppers his novel with reminders, obvious and subliminal, of his themes) She is stroppy, tremblingly in first love, and full of attitude. Holly also has a younger brother aged 6, strange and wise beyond his years. At this point, Holly’s voice is pretty well normal for a 15 year old lovelorn girl with some lip and feist to her nature. BUT, there are strange incursions from a mysterious set of people who could almost have strolled in from the hinterland between the two incarnations of Mr Banks – that is Iain, and Iain M.

Love is fusion in the sun’s core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death

And these incursions do re-occur, throughout the book. Yet, it is in no way ‘magic realism’. The real is very real….and yet, reality is not quite solid, not quite fixed. Neither does this sit as science fiction, nor fantasy. Mitchell resolutely eschews the neat pigeon hole of genre. Yet he picks and weaves in genre stock in trade as he chooses. And, for my money, he does this consciously, precisely, and largely, well.

The second section, 1991, in which Holly also makes an appearance (as indeed does another character from that first section) follows the journey of a sharp, amoral, upwardly very mobile young man, Hugo Lamb, and stands as a critique of early 90’s Thatcherite inheritance – ‘there is no such thing as society’ Hugo fits right in. Yet there is more, and underneath the razzamatazz and the fierce partying he has a clarity about this ‘Ozymandias’ legacy, of all comes to dust – there is a wonderful section on this where Mitchell dazzles, as he so often does, as a sleight of hand, magician of words, and the reader (well this one) enjoyed hugely the demonstration of linguistic delight and playfulness

The third section, into 2004 sees us back in ‘the Holly fold’ and she and her family, 20 years older, are gathered for a family wedding. The narrator of this section is someone we have met before, now an acclaimed war reporter, embedded in Iraq, and back briefly to attend that wedding. The reporter is deep in the here and now of events at the wedding party, but is having also another internal dialogue (as we do, since often most of us are both in our here and now AND either reliving memory or imagining future memories) That other dialogue concerns war torn Iraq, and there are many arising conversations and thoughts which demonstrate Mitchell’s ability to get underneath and inside black and white viewpoints into nuance. He is, as ever, much more than merely a clever writer. He is a writer with emotional subtlety. Empathy, compassion and tenderness, as well as intelligent analysis and a display of dazzling skill in working with words, all guide his writing

The fourth section brings us to now, and to a little ahead of now. And our central narrator here (oh dangerous, Mitchell, this game, but how WELL you walk the tightrope) is a dark and bitter version of the writer you might have been – one passed over several times for a thinly disguised version of the Booker (as Mitchell has of course been, several times, and again most recently) and moreover a version of the Booker now bankrolled by a thinly disguised Sir Alan Sugar. There are vengeful little cracks made by our narrator (part of the peripheral circle from section 2) about the incestuous world of publishing, writing, literary fashion. In many ways Mitchell is setting himself up as his own fall-guy in this section. But it’s lovely, audacious stuff

Again we meet Holly, and, again there is a sustained influx of what some might call ‘fantasy supernatural elements’ Except – Mitchell reminds us that there are other cultures who take some of this quite seriously. There is a section set in Australia where Holly taps in to Aboriginal myths, Aboriginal ways of interpreting the world. This feels quite important – Mitchell himself has been castigated from some quarters for his usage of ‘fantasy’ when he is a serious literary writer. And yet….IF he had been a writer from some cultures, I have no doubt the ‘mythic culture he is writing from, would not have been dismissed. It is as if a serious twenty-first century literary writer, not a genre writer, who is British, should NOT BE DOING THIS.

I riff on notions of the soul as a karmic report card; as a spiritual memory-stick in search of a corporeal hard-drive; and as a placebo we generate to cure our dread of mortality.

The fifth section, set in 2025, is the one where the ‘fantasy elements’ really bite hard, with some psychic battles between the forces of good (Horologists) and bad (Anchorites) are played out, with Holly Sykes again, now in her 50s, with a grown up daughter, being played for, or being played with. Here is the section where I believe Mitchell’s risk-taking does not really quite work. Elemental battles between the forces of dark and light have of course been part of many great pieces of classical literature, but also have a tendency to reek of Komik Kuts, and I don’t think Mitchell makes a completely clean escape from the latter.

At this point, I was veering towards a 4 star. Until:

The final section, Sheep’s Head, is set in 2045. Holly is in her seventies, living in rural Ireland. We are in the period of the Endarkenment, heading towards the end of days – not through any supernatural agencies, only through our own neglect, greed and wastefulness, our ‘live now and let future generations pay later’ mindset. Climate change has, as the warning voices insistently tell us, created many changes, much of the earth is uninhabitable. Elderly nuclear reactors have sprung leaks, political instability and the emergence of new power bases, the collapse of the global economy, the rise of militia, the end of taken-for-granted-endless-supplies of fossil fuels, gas and oil, and thence electricity has ended everything we take for granted. The technological advances of recent decades are gone. Mitchell presents as brilliant, bleak, and heart-breaking a future, with small lights bravely attempting to keep the kindness of humanity, still flickering, as I have ever read.

People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burnt our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing – while denying – that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.

For sure, this is not by any means a faultless book. But flawed Mitchell is a far more rewarding read, to my mind, than many writers at the absolute top of their form.

Finishing this book, puts me back in the same place as every previous one of his books – other reads, will for a while feel curiously empty and lacking.

I’ve probably made this given the graphics, seem far too gloomy whereas Mitchell as ever marries vitality, lushness and a celebration of livingness in his writing, a vigour, a dizzying delight, with that darker undercurrent of what happens when life itself, in all its teeming forms, is held cheap

The Bone Clocks Amazon UK
The Bone Clocks Amazon USA

Marlen Haushofer – The Wall

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Austrian writer, Book Review, Marlen Haushofer, Post-Apocalypse, The Wall

And if it was only you left alive, would you forget what it meant, to be a human?

Someone (I can’t remember who you were, but possibly a reviewer who may have mentioned this in passing) sent me to search out and get The Wall, a 1968 book by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer, which has been reprinted, thanks no doubt to the 2013 German film Die Wand, which, by all accounts is as sensitive, thought provoking and disturbing as Haushofer’s original book. Unknown reviewer, whoever you were, thank you.

There seem to be several translations into English, the initial one around the time of first publication was by Amanda Prantera, an interesting novelist herself, and the current UK one I have, which i was not aware of as ‘a translation’ (a good sign, i think, is by Shaun Whiteside. There is a different translator of the USA released version, which has a different dust jacket. I think the book, and its strangeness is not well served by the dustjackets from either side of the pond, though the UK one feels particularly crass, showing a young girl/woman against glass streaked with rain, looking winsome and in mourning for the prince who went away. Winsome this book is absolutely not, and the central character has long grown up daughters, probably rather older than the woman on this dustjacket! So, please DON’T judge a book by etc. (I show the American cover here as a little less inappropriate)

I may or may not gravitate to the film, but oh, the book

It is difficult to know where to start with this unsettling, reflective, heart-breaking, philosophical book, which quietly unpicks just what is it, at the end, to be a human animal.

A simple premise, in many ways – and one which may be familiar to Stephen King’s readers, as apparently the basic premise formed the substance of his 2009 book Under The Dome.

A cataclysmic event seals off survivors from the rest of the world, trapping them in a kind of prison. That, I understand is King’s book which devotes a lot of time to the wheres and whyfores of The Dome, and of course the survivors.

Haushofer’s is completely different. Having almost immediately established The Wall, she (and she is the only survivor) accepts it as a given, and is not much interested in the why and how did it happen. It is quickly, and very practically, accepted for what it is. Something created by technology, by warfare between nations, by a weapon and experiment which clearly was more aggressive and destructive than its inventors ever imagined.

The unnamed narrator is a middle aged woman, a widow, going away for a few days with a cousin and her husband to their hunting lodge deep in the Austrian Alps. The couple go to the nearest village for an evening drink, but never return. In the morning, the narrator finds the mysterious transparent wall has appeared, and every living thing on the other side of the wall, which appears to extend to the limits of vision, has been petrified.

So begins the book, a journal kept, looking back from a two year vantage point, by the never named narrator. Do you need a name if you are the only survivor, and there will never be anyone to need to name you, to distinguish you from anyone else, ever again?

The journal, which she writes in certainty that it will never be read, never be found, is written because – well – isn’t this what we do – we find some way to note and record and mark our being, some way of saying ‘I was here’ some way of marking time, space, and our own needs as reflective creatures who exist in time and know a past, inhabit a present and imagine a future.

The isolated, Alpine setting also provides our narrator with the means of survival – there are forests, deer (it’s a hunting lodge, remember, where people come in hunting season, with stocks to take them through) She has a dog, borrowed for the weekend visit, and luckily, a cow which also had strayed to this side of the wall, before ‘the event’ Later, a half feral cat appears from the forest.

It’s like another kind of Ark, except hardly two by two. Bereft of human companionship, relationships develop between the animals and the narrator. But please don’t think twee, these are fierce relationships about survival, connection, the animal need for comfort which not only humans feel.

I discovered that at one point, the book had sometimes been praised and marketed as an ‘eco-feminist utopian book’ Really???!! Sure, the book is about the preciousness of other living creatures, about the need for respect for the landscape, it’s a FOR the cherishing of life and AGAINST the destruction and war which leads to/led to ‘the event’. And the one who survives is a female, and she has to fend for herself, learn how to survive, remember the skills she once learned as a young woman with a rural background and somehow find, with difficulty, new skills. But, apart from the fact she IS female, so yes there is a lot of thought given to the nature of animal companions which comes from their femaleness (the cow) or their maleness (the dog) it is more about being human itself, than female or male.

Most peculiarly – Utopia? Really? To know that all you loved have died, and that all you now love and care for (the animals) may or will or do die before you, and that if YOU are the one to die before them, you will leave them alone, and maybe, suffering – as you will suffer if they go before you. Some utopia!

The structure of the book is very skilful – because the narrator is writing this looking back over her time she always knows where she will end up. So, we are told, over and over, all through the book, about pains and losses which will come, so we are always reading the immediacy and at times the sweetness of a moment, and the awfulness which awaits.

This is unlikely to appeal if you are someone who likes the drive of the book to be in one ‘what happens next’ direction. To be honest ‘the action’ in narrative terms, is little, the action is generally very practically rooted – how do you harvest and ration the matches, the dried beans, the potatoes, the shoes, the bullets for your hunting rifle that will keep you alive, before, in time, death must come from accident or want. And what, all humankind gone, might it be that keeps you here. Why bother?

All I can say is that I found this a most unusual, most thoughtful, most despairing-and-most-appreciative-of-the-little NOW sort of book. In the end, it is a book about Stoicism, and about acceptance, at a deep level. Its also, given the deep and vital surrender to the business of staying alive by being within the moment of your living, alert to that quality of yourself within the external world, a book which has some parallels with instructions about ‘living mindfully’

This is quite unlike anything else. On many levels, a short (just over 200 pages) read, an easy read, but I lingered and lingered, not wanting to get to where the narrator had told me we were going, time and again, in this journey.

An extraordinary book.

Then I would sit down on the bench and wait. The meadow slowly went to sleep, the stars came out, and later the moon rose high and bathed the meadow in its cold light. I waited for those hours all day, filled with secret impatience. They were the only hours in which I was capable of thinking quite without illusions, completely clearly. I was no longer in search of a meaning to make my life more bearable. That kind of desire struck me as being almost presumptuous. Human beings had played their own games, and in almost every case they had ended badly. And how could I complain? I was one of them and couldn’t judge them, because I understood them so well. It was better not to think about human beings. The great game of the sun, moon and stars seemed to be working out, and that hadn’t been invented by humans. But it wasn’t completed yet, and might bear the seeds of failure within it.

The Wall Amazon UK
The Wall Amazon USA

This is of course a fiction, literary fiction book, but because of the depth of its considering, I have also categorised it in one of my non-fiction sections – ethics, reflection – it is a deeply philosophical book, and possibly made me consider and debate as much as any formal non-fiction book about ‘what it means to be human’

Alastair Bruce – Wall of Days

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Alastair Bruce, Book Review, Post-Apocalypse, Wall of Days

Post-Apocalyptic Crusoe

Wall of Days is a rather remarkable first novel by Alastair Bruce. It combines several important themes – solitude, our need for, and at times fear of, community; how far do ends justify means; what are the compromises and sacrifices which individuals and society have to make with each other; how do we deal with collective and individual guilt and suffering; the nature of sacrifice; the impossibility of escape from the past; the cyclical lessons of history. It belongs both in the line of novels which are dystopian – although very different, writers such as Atwood and Ursula K Le Guin sprang to mind, as similarly exploring a moral and philosophical territory. Another theme, the sense of the individual who inhabits a nightmare world where he is dislocated from his society, and no longer understands the unstated rules by which that society is operating, points towards Kafka.

However, I was most closely drawn to find the links with Robinson Crusoe (Wordsworth Classics) as a study of isolation, and how to survive, both physically and emotionally when you are the only inhabitant, and the change in dynamics and the nature of relationship when a mysterious ‘other’ enters the stage. Stylistically, the very spareness of Bruce’s writing, plus the strange, misty almost dream-like terrain links him with another South African born writer, Damon Galgut, most particularly In a Strange Room

The central thrust of the story concerns a ‘ruler’ of a community, set in some time and place after society has come to the brink through lack of resources. Post wars, where a peaceful settlement has been made with the major enemy, but the terms of the treaty cast long shadows, and the precise way in which that peace is come to, contains ethical ambiguity. All we know at the start is that this ruler is in exile, alone on his island, banished for life, carefully eking out survival as some sort of punishment. And the unfolding of story – and the hidden narrative which is always occurring in all events, their ‘meaning’, carefully plays out.

I did think, despite the fairly modest length of the book. (237 pages) that there were quite a lot of repetitions in terms of ‘what are we, as readers, learning here?’; the narrative could have been pared back further – part of the real strength of this book IS its spareness so the extraneous is more obvious than it would be with a less well-written book.

I will certainly look forward to seeing how Bruce develops as a writer, from this assured and deep beginning

I originally received this as an ARC as part of the Amazon Vine UK programme

Wall of Days Amazon UK
Wall Of Days Amazon USA