AT THE start of John Lanchester’s new novel, we find ourselves on a wall amid freezing temperatures. This barrier has been built to repel a terrifying foe.
For many, the first thing this will bring to mind is the Night’s Watch, the guards who patrol the great ice wall in HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones.
In fact, we are in a future Britain, at a time when it is ringed by 10,000 kilometres of concrete. This structure marks the country’s new coastline, reshaped by the great floods that came with The Change. Welcome, then, to another dystopian future (as if the present wasn’t bad enough).
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Kavanagh, the narrator, is a young man conscripted to do his mandatory two years keeping the coastline secure. The Wall, officially designated the National Coastal Defence Structure, has been built not so much to keep the ocean out, as to repel climate migrants who are trying to enter the country. The migrants are known only by the dehumanising label The Others.
If this sounds like a satire of Brexit and nationalism – or Trump’s border wall – it is more than that. It offers a richer take on the world, one that evokes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or even George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“The idea that the young should respect the old has forever been destroyed”
In Lanchester’s story, The Change has brought catastrophe to the world. The conveyor of Atlantic currents that bring warm Gulf Stream waters and milder weather to parts of the northern hemisphere has broken down as a result of climate change. Britain now experiences bitter, Arctic winters. But farther south, the world has been rendered uninhabitable by heat or flood, and thousands of migrants risk their lives to escape north. This isn’t an implausible future. As we know, with carbon dioxide levels having breached 410 parts per million and time running out to stop catastrophic climate change, it seems possible.
In Kavanagh’s Britain, all legal residents are electronically tagged so any migrant who does make it over The Wall is quickly rounded up, and, basically, enslaved. They become Help: unpaid workers who serve the legal residents.
Old people in this country – those who remember the world before The Change – are despised, ignored and reviled. They have no say in anything and the idea that the young should respect the old has forever been destroyed. Think 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg at Davos, Switzerland, only a lot blunter.
“Want to put me straight about what I’m doing wrong in my life, Grandad?” Kavanagh exclaims. “Why don’t you travel back in time and unfuckup the world and then travel back here and maybe we can talk.”
Nothing much happens to Kavanagh for a while. Not that it matters, because Lanchester writes so engagingly. But we know The Others are out there and gradually we encounter them.
Then the novel kicks into an episodic and suspense-filled adventure. Books are often described as “filmic”, but this felt more ready-for-Netflix/HBO-compatible than anything I have read for a while. Read, enjoy – and try not to become one of The Olds so despised by the young.
Faber & Faber
