Category: Review (Fiction)

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Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir, Ballantine Books. 2021.

Ebook: ISBN 9780593135211

David Longman, 30/4/26

Andẏ Weir’s science fiction novels have been outstanding successes. The Martian was the first, offering a fresh, contemporary science-oriented realism about survival on Mars. It was subsequently filmed and a commercial success. Then came Artemis set on a near future mining and tourist destination on the Moon, threatened by corporate skullduggery (not filmed but in the works). Now comes Project Hail Mary, a saving-the-Earth-from-extinction story that has also become a major success in its filmed version.

Andy Weir is – was – a software engineer, with a passion for for physics and all things to do with space, a “lifelong space nerd” as he describes himself. His stories are well constructed using accurate but speculative scientific and technological details to create realistic scenarios with good doses of jeopardy to activate his characters. These details are certainly one of the appealing features of his books, so much so that perhaps they could be seen as less science-fiction than science-faction.

Project Hail Mary (hereafter PHM) fits this mould well but, although it is quite fascinating for its sci-tech details, I cannot help but find it a rather silly story, charming but overstretching the science, the Panspermic threat (‘Astrophages’ consuming our Sun’s energy), the technology (including a 12 light-year journey in record time) and, in a major lapse of realism, a spontaneous and unified global response to the threat of extinction. All overseen by one all-powerful commander-in-chief – a strong woman of course. It’s also not a surprise to find that the Americans lead this global show while Russians and Chinese along with everybody else falls into line. Oh yes, and there’s that what-are-the-chances meeting with an amazingly clever creature from another planet in the distant star system (Tau Ceti) where the story takes us to find the solution to our Earthly woes (and here ‘realism’ lurches into fantasy.)

Naturally, the reader can only sigh and think, “… but isn’t this very like Earth’s situation right now (the threat part anyway, a threat based on much better science) yet – and here’s the reality check – instead of global political unity we have …chaotic indifference…”. That’s putting it mildly. I guess the point here is only that, as with almost all science fiction, reality will check in, if you let it, no matter how detailed the pretence of ‘scientific realism’, for all science fiction is but a dreamscape. PHM is no exception; the real and present threats to the survival of our human community, with time-lines measured in one or two generations, have generated no unified, let alone global response.

Andy Weir may have lent himself to his story as the heroic nerd. When we first meet the protagonist of the novel, Ryland Grace, he is a teacher, an excellent one by all accounts, full of deep and inspiring lessons to put before his classes. Why is he a teacher? Because he simply could not get on with the demanding world of academia. But he knows his stuff, he is brilliant (American of course) and finds himself enrolled in the project to save the Earth from a cold, cold death.

He is not your usual hero. He is a self-proclaimed chicken and when the predictable moment arrives (he is the only one left who can crew the starship ‘Hail Mary’) he baulks, stamps his foot and self-identifies as a coward. However, he can’t avoid it and we follow him into nerd heaven (I note that the film emphasises his nerdiness by dressing him up with owlish spectacles). Like all heroes he pays the ‘ultimate price’ eventually (but in the nicest way given the circumstances).

After the early chapters where there is some genuine fictional science (apologies for the oxymoron), the nerd finally prevails as an emblem of one of our most relished human traits, the unpretentious but brilliant, generous and selfless individual, a welcome contrast to the real world we inhabit in which too many dangerously sociopathic human beings strive to control the destiny of billions of both people and dollars. He also makes a friend too, that alien from another planet, but you have to read the book to find out about that. There’s some clever details here about how evolution might unfold in different planetary environments but the physical complexities of this particular relationship do require some imagination!

However, the book is not a waste of the reader’s effort (and, from what has been written about it, the film requires even less effort, emphasising its spectacular and inter-species qualities). There is much to enjoy here but across all three books, and with the passage of time, the speculative science and technology becomes less convincing. The unresolved risks of travelling to Mars and the challenge of even a short survivalist jaunt (Elon Musk – our home grown Martian) – notwithstanding) seems ever more daunting and, although the Moon may seem more accessible than ever, it is the political perils that will undermine any lofty, earthly ambitions given that unified global governance remains our ultimate fantasy.

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Time and Again

Time and Again, by Jack Finney. Simon and Schuster, 1970

David Longman, 08-04-26

“…the late Jack Finney, […] was one of America’s great fantasists and storytellers. Besides The Body Snatchers, he wrote Time and Again, which is, in this writer’s humble opinion, the great time-travel story.”
(Stephen King. (2011). 11.22.63: A Novel. Simon and Schuster)

Stephen King’s own time travel novel 11.22.63 itself is a quiet masterpiece of the time travel genre. However, his recommendation could not be resisted so I got around to reading an ebooķ copy of Time and Again (1970). Straight off that’s a kind of time travel trope made concrete. You know you are in a ‘science fiction’ world when books artefacts that, historically, are made up of many artisan skills such as paper making, type setting, printing and binding, are routinely published and reproduced the immaterial form of digital media – i.e. data not paper – where the reader necessarily chooses a book not so much by physical features as by ‘file format’, (e.g. ePub, AZW3, Mobi, etc.) along with the attributes of particular e-reader brands.

Of course, tangible, physical versions are still published (e.g. see Amazon) or easily found on many second-hand book sites (e.g. https://abebooks.co.uk). It’s just that these days, and out of preference, my personal habit has changed so that I read ebooks wherever possible. Although It will be many years before paper-based book production will disappear (and perhaps never, for paper offers affordances that may endure) it is hard to escape, sometimes, the feeling that we are now living inside the imagined futures that were conceived by science fiction writers from pre-ebook days.

Anyway, having enjoyed King’s book and his own ingenious approach to the tricky idea of time travel, I could not ignore his praise for Finney’s story. It’s not a recent book but that’s no reason to ignore it. At first, having read it, my initial draft of this review began with the sentence “I read this book so you don’t have to!”. On reflection that was too negative but it was built on my first impression that the story, clever and ingenious, seemed to me to be weighed down by long and detailed descriptions of old New York in the 1880s, descriptions that slowed the pace of its intriguing and surprising plot.

Clearly Finney has a passion for New York but at first you might think that he simply cannot leave out any deep and detailed research that he (and his assistants, acknowledged in his book) carried out in order to create a tangible, realistic representation of the long ‘dead’ world of New York in the 1880s. It is an impressive exercise, documentary in its style and innovative in its presentation and includes many pictures of New York and its people copied from old magazines, newspapers and art works (poorly reproduced in ebook form, a feature yet to match printed copy).

All this is woven into the protagonist’s narration of his walks and rides through New York’s streets and passing sights. Finney’s clearly aims to build a rich and weighty authenticity for the conception of time travel on which he builds the story, as if he is trying to get the reader to travel in time with him and his central character, Si Morley, and to bring the reader along with him into the past. What at first felt like a limitation, a clutter of prose, it is an example of literary artistry in which the detailed descriptions exemplify the concept of time travel that Finney constructs. Some book editors might have sought to fillet the text in order to avoid drowning what is basically a very good story.1 But the literary rationale for these lengthy prose parades of old New York is justified and clever, as if Finney is enacting his conception of time travel using the device of rich description.

So, avoiding spoilers, how does Finney manage the perennial but tricky problem of representing time travel?2 HG Wells perhaps first popularised the idea in his best selling novel The Time Machine (1895) although there are a number of precedents. Wells does not explain how his time machine works (it’s just too complicated!) but simply presents the reader with a sled-like machine that while static somehow moves through time transporting the anonymous inventor far into the future to the end of the world and back again. Twentieth century science fiction writing has produced many stories and novels depicting many devices and methods (e.g. the ‘flux-capacitor’ in ‘Back to the Future’, the TARDIS of Dr Who,or Bill & Ted’s Phone Booth, to name a few recent examples).

None offer a convincing notion of how time travel works in physical terms – but how could they! The very possibility remains speculative. The nearest we can get realistically, if partially, is the established consequence of Einsteinian physics namely time dilation as a function of velocity (Wikipedia) and is very much a one way ticket! We can only ponder the imagined effects – the shock of the unexpected or, as in Si Morley’s case, the surprise and delight in the rediscovered reality of the past. There are more disturbing possibilities arising from idea that the present, the foundation of the time traveller’s very existence, may be all too unpredictably altered by even the smallest alterations of the established time-line (e.g. ‘The Butterfly Effect‘ by Ray Bradbury is a classic short story of the genre, and Isaac Asimov explored the consequences of the ‘Grandfather Paradox’ in great detail in his novel ‘The End of Eternity‘, 1955). Stephen King’s own time travel novel 11.22.63 merely offers an all-but-magical portal that exists, inexplicably but covertly, in the back room of a local diner from where his protagonist sets out to alter the past with disturbing but survivable consequences.

Finney’s novel opens at pace with a quick sketch of the central character, Si Morley, a talented graphic artist working in an advertising studio but, at 28 years old, a little disappointed, feeling his talent has not yet brought the fulfilment of his aspirations. In the first few pages an unexpected visitor arrives and tells him about a secret government funded project for which, the visitor tells him, he is well suited. The visitor is reluctant to provide details only that it is potentially ground breaking but that Si seems like an ideal candidate. Eventually and, inevitably without too much persuasion, Si agrees to join in and meet the project team even though as yet he knows almost nothing. We also meet his girl friend, Kate Mancuso who proves to be a key element in the story.

He finds his way to a warehouse, disguised as a storage and removals business and meets several key figures in the unfolding story. For example Danziger, the theoretical physicist who began the project and explains its methods and aims. Si takes a guided tour of a huge space inside the warehouse where a complicated array of steel walkways high in the roof allows a view of various constructions below – somewhat like film sets – some are buildings, some are landscapes. These turn out to be detailed replicas of well known locations in the United States and in France. Their purpose remains unclear but there are people apparently spending time in these replicas acting out simple everyday routines.

Later he meets with Danziger again further intriguing conversations about Einstein’s discoveries about light and time. Einstein, he tells Si, said we are mistaken about time – the past, the present and the future all exist but the present is all that we can see:

“He said we’re like people in a boat without oars drifting along a winding river. Around us we see only the present. We can’t see the past, back in the bends and curves behind us. But it’s there. …he meant precisely what he said about time: that the past, back there around the curves and bends, really exists. It is actually there.”3

Danziger goes on to explain that he has developed a method for revisiting the past “… that a man ought somehow to be able to step out of that boat onto the shore. And walk back to one of the bends behind us.” 4

The present, then, is the sum of many changes, small and large, and in our own present the evidence of that past is all around us, sometimes very clear such as old buildings or unaltered landscapes, and sometimes more subtle. All are survivors, caught in those bends in the river of time, so to speak. When these locations can be found the project takes them over for an agreed amount of time and transforms them by ‘retrofitting’ them into as a close a replication of their original form as possible, to literally reconstitute them as they were in the past (the locations are ambitious, e.g. Notre Dame, Vimy Ridge, Winfield – a small and remote mid-Western American farming town, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay and the Dakota Building in New York).

Danziger and his project colleagues explain that with the right stimulus the mind is able to reconstitute the entirety of the reality embodied in those ‘gateway’ locations and to fully live in that time and space – for or course it still exists. The process is helped by the use of self-hypnosis, opening the mind to suggestion (a special form of daydreaming?). Being in the ‘gateway’ location and allowing the mind to move into this auto-hypnotic state is what allows the past to reappear, not merely to the mind but in actuality.

Naturally Si, our main character, turns out to be good at auto-hypnosis (conveniently so too is Kate who plays a pivotal role in the story. Following intensive cramming about the New York past that he is about to visit Si moves in to the Dakota Building apartment that the project has found and reconfigured (incidentally the same building where John and Yoko were living when he was assassinated in 1980). As the novel progresses Si become an adept, able at will to slip upstream to the past and downstream back to the present by performing little more than what looks like a form of meditation.

They key to the drama is provided by Kate who reveals that she is an orphan; after her parents were killed she was adopted by family friends, Ira and Belle Carmody. Ira’s father, Andrew Carmody, (an advisor to President Cleveland) had shot himself in the 1890s while Ira was still a very young child. It was an inexplicable suicide.

All that was found by at the scene by Andrew Carmody’s wife was a letter (which Kate has in inherited) postmarked “New York Post Office, 23 January 1882”, but dated a few years before the suicide. She had of course heard the shot and rushed to the room to see that Andrew was dead, found the letter on his desk, read it and then tried to burn it but, for an unknown reason, had almost immediately extinguished it. Nevertheless the letter was damaged and its importance or relevance was hard to understand because some phrases had been burned away. Kate really wanted to know what were the missing parts of the letter and if it helped to illuminate why Andrew had killed himself.

In what appeared to be unseemly haste to some, Ira’s mother did not let an undertaker or a doctor near the body and undertook all the funeral arrangements overseeing the burial and the headstone with as little interference as she could manage. Meanwhile Ira, Kate’s father, was left to grow up with the scandalised aftermath and the mystery of surrounding his own father’s suicide. It had worried him all his life and died never knowing anything more. and Kate is keen to find out. This story helped Si see that something useful and good could come from travelling in time to the 1880s and he made up his mind to try. He would help Kate discover who posted the letter to her grandfather back in 1882 and, hopefully, what it meant.

There is inevitable, and maybe controversial, interference with the time line (both benign and charming), although there are consequences that unravel in the sequel to the book. It is tempting to offer a spoiler but no, you must read the book! Suffice to say that Si gets constructive help in 1882. It is quite a story and in spite of what I thought to be too much sightseeing of 19th century New York it is an an intriguing mystery story. (The sequel, From Time to Time (1995) builds on the events of this novel.)

As I wrote earlier some readers (like myself!) should be patient with the extensive descriptions of urban New York and, perhaps, excuse the somewhat out-of-date focus on the bodily beauty or dress styles of the women that Si Morley meets and greets. Finney obviously likes women, they are positive characters although largely incidental, but and he can’t help himself! However, as with all such stories, just suspend your disbelief, It is, as Stephen King tells us, one of the great time travel stories.

I agree.

1 Mind you, Stephen King’s book is also long at over 700 pages! – and might equally be critiqued for prolixity. Finney’s book is a mere 470 pages.

2 Finney died in October 1995, aged 84, shortly after the publication of his sequel “From Time to Time” in the same year. 1995. When writing about an author’s work, which by definition happened in the past, I find the use of the historical present tense an odd thing. Reading Finney’s book as the author he is strangely present because of this verbal convention, almost as if he is ‘writing’ the book as you you read it. Surely, that is time travel!

3 As far as I am aware Einstein only put this idea in writing in 1955 when he wrote a letter of condolence to the grieving family of a close friend and colleague. In that letter he describes the distinction between past, present and future as a “stubbornly persistent illusion” (though physicists know better!). This formulation certainly seems to underpin Finney’s conception of time travel.

4 Naturally, Heraclitus’ river comes to mind – “you can’t step into the same river twice”. I can’t argue about this here – let’s just say it’s not a contradiction of the Einsteinian idea, more an enrichment

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Dublined in Dublin

Prophet Song
by
Paul Lynch

Oneworld Publications
August. 2023
(Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023)

A Review of ‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch

Reviewed by: David Longman, November 2023

Paul Lynch’s novel ‘Prophet Song’ is an alarming story. It is also disturbing if we think only in terms of refugees as ‘incomers’ and do not acknowledge the dislocation that stalks us all. Those of us who live in relatively well-off Western Europe free from tanks, bombs and rampant armies would do well to heed the warning in this story. In Lynch’s telling the dark reality of totalitarianism lies just the other side of a knock at our own front door. If, or perhaps more likely when, that knock comes it may announce our own chaotic transformation into refugees who, losing everything and everyone to political insanity and violence, are forced helplessly to the sea or to some border in search of a less dangerous safety.

Prophet Song cannot be read merely as a literary dystopia for that label makes fictions out of truths, insulating them in an imagined world as satire or commentary. Set in the contemporary Republic of Ireland, a striking scenario but one that has relevant history, the novel relies on well crafted, dramatically paced writing that draws the reader relentlessly to a finale without closure. This is a dystopia of the real. This is no Oceania but Dublin, or London, or Cardiff, or Edinburgh and as this is written it is surely Gaza, Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh or one of many flash points of inhuman militarised political strategy. It is relevant to all of us who, like this reviewer, is only hesitantly confident that tomorrow will be much like today, free from the pernicious consequences of now fashionable norms of dysfunctional government. 

Lynch does not waste our time investigating what brings the reader to the unhappy brutality of an unnamed dictatorship that sweeps Ireland. There is no need. The reader is ready. We know how it happens, how the decline of democratic principles leave us little more than a few parliamentary votes from chaos (Democracy in deline…) All that matters, and all that Lynch’s characters know, is that there is a newly enacted ‘Emergency Powers Act’ and a new ruling party, an ominously named National Alliance now armed with sweeping powers of arrest, warrantless detention and teh cancellation of habeas corpus. A tipping point has been reached and it takes but a few pages to sweep away any lingering sense that this can’t happen here!

Lynch begins his story without preamble. There comes that knock on the door setting off the deepening trauma of Eilish Stack and her family of four children, including a one year old baby, and her trades union husband Larry, a senior official of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland who, as the story opens, is engaged in organising national action. Eilish faces two detectives from the Garda National Security Bureau, a new hard-arse unit remodelled out of its predecessor. They want to see Larry ‘just for a conversation’. He is out. He should call them.

Working to exhaustion Larry is confident of his legal rights even as Eilish’s anxiety slowly grows and with her the reader’s own sense that this is not looking good.  (Something vaguely similar, a prequel perhaps, is already at work in England where the DfE monitors and manipulates social media discussions between education professionals). Larry is remains sanguine not yet alarmed by the rapid changes thwarting the established rules of democratic reason. Thus he goes to a meeting and endures a sinister conversation. Sedition is implied. 

Soon after, barely twenty pages in and as the political pressure on the trade union mounts, Larry disappears along with other Union officials. He  simply does not come home one day and is never seen again. Throughout, Eilish never relinquishes her hope for his return but as time passes her memories of him become more fragmentary, less defined, but the passion and the hurt bite deeply. She struggles too with the guilt that she must lie to her frightened children in order to convince them that he will return and that ‘things’ will return to normal.

Hearsay has it that Larry has been interned along with hundreds of others but later we learn that this was always a fiction. They have all disappeared and no lawyer can help, themselves becoming targets of abduction. Eilish’s desperation and increasingly fruitless hope intensify taking as she struggles to maintain family life, to ensure her children get to school fed and watered, protected them from the impact of increasing oppression and threat, while nursing her new baby and caring for her widowed father living across the city, slipping irritably into dementia.

The tragic trajectory of Eilish’s family life becomes increasingly steep and rapid. Writing consistently and resolutely from her point of view Lynch delves in to the psychology of hope. Essentially this is an internal monologue but the reader is seeing what Eilish sees, sharing her endurance, without becoming metaphysical or seeking deeper motivations. This is daily life driven by events and Eilish’s reactions and adaptations to them. Her father’s obvious dementia counterpoints her own frustrations with the increasing disorder in what was a busy, sometimes challenging, family life and the reader is forced to watch as the memory of her life as it was is drowned squalls of survival while still struggles to negotiate the awkward, sometimes angry, exchanges with her children and the necessities of a new baby. The shift from a habitual family life to one lived under dictatorship is convincing, made more ghastly because it erupts in a supposedly peaceful and democratic society, like mine or like yours.

Although before these events they had planned a family holiday in Canada to stay with Eilish’s sister the family’s passports cannot now be renewed. Her application is denied because she too is now deemed a security risk. Now trapped with no legal means to leave the country, she soon loses her job because the biotech company she works for is taken over by Party appointees. She is not the only one to be fired. Her eldest son, Mark, about to leave school and embark on the career path to become a doctor, is conscripted into the NAP defence force. He escapes and joins the rebel army. He too is never seen again and although his survival is more ambiguous than Larry’s there have already school protests against conscription that resulted in the detention of four young students and their subsequent state sanctioned murder.

The tension and the pace of the story telling increases. Eilish’s car is smashed by hooded thugs and the sly slogan ‘Traiter’ [sic] is daubed on the body work. Civil war breaks out and Dublin is under siege. Now the motifs of political war multiply in a louder screeching key: the street fighting is familiar to Irish history while the barrel bombs dropped over Eilish’s neighbourhood an innovation of the Assad terror in Syria, and the long distance murder-by-sniping of civilians trying to find food an echo of the siege on Sarajevo.

Even this life of ours with all all its distractions, irritations and its injustices may seem to be a haven of opportunity and relative freedom but Lynch shatters that complacency. The reader is challenged not to weep when Elish’s second born son, twelve years old, injured in a bomb blast but still heroically digging aid entombed victims disappears after she single-mindedly drives him to the nearest hospital that is now several miles across a city of rubble and checkpoints and he is taken off to a surgical ward. The next day, after hours of agonised search she is directed to a morgue where she finds his body, without fingernails and a bullet in his knee.

There is little more to say. This story, to use a well-worn cliché, is visceral. It is recounted in a realist, almost documentary style with filmic elements – the narrative frequently cuts to new scenes with no visual markers. A contemporary audience reared on television and podcasts will have no difficulty with this. Some might quibble as to how it is possible amidst such destruction and chaos to make more or less routine use of mobile phones but eventually all such contemporary normalities as phones and cars are abandoned to the destruction. There are, too, some interesting if somewhat unusual linguistic flourishes – for example characters don’t just put their coats on, they ‘sleeve’ them – which might jar with more pedantic grammarians. 

None of this diminishes the linguistic drive that thrusts this story forward although it never really ends. How can it? It reminds us that no matter how secure, how safe we might feel today we are all, potentially, refugees, living not in an imaginary dystopia but in an all too real world of psychotic politics. A final irony perhaps is that the setting of this novel in Dublin is also the namesake of a key EU regulation within the Common European Asylum System known as the Dublin Regulation that governs EU State responsibilities. Refugee status under this has become known as ‘being Dublined‘.

Take heed.

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The Wall

The Wall

The Wall by John Lanchester

(Longlisted Booker 2019)

This synopsis contains minor spoilers.

One long metaphor, a dystopia for our times with no get out clause. While the main characters find safety at the end it is temporary, a momentary pause in a continuing struggle. This book won’t cheer you up! A well-written story and well put together although I am slightly surprised it has been longlisted for the 2019 Booker. Do not look too deep. The metaphor does not bear much analysis for it works on the level it presents, an oblique, symbolic look at our contemporary world.

Perhaps not so much a metaphor as a pastiche of that residual cultural memory of war-time Britain, so beloved of our British establishment yet a time experienced by relatively few alive today. It is a psychic memory that perversely fuels the mad fervency of our present jingoistic perception of Britain as a moated nation under siege. A recognisable Britain but one that smells of tea, trains and rations.

The story opens on the Ifracombe stretch of the Wall at some indeterminate time in the near future when catastrophic sea level rise has flooded low-lying and coastal areas of the world. The Wall is a vast infrastructure of concrete and bulk, of loneliness and boredom, dwarfing anything yet built, surrounding Britain. Guarded by Defenders against the Others who, fleeing their own unviable lands, come from the sea to climb the Wall into the security of what remains of a surviving society.

There is no longer a coastline as we know it – no beaches, no sunny coves, only the great cliff formed by the Wall that, as thoroughly as it can be, is built up to the sea’s edge. Coastal villages and towns. once next to the beach, now reside in its shadow. The Wall has replaced the tidal edge a bulwark against the rising sea and the threat from Others. The sea can only be seen from inland, from higher ground. It is a drowned world.

Britain is a nation under siege from desperate others coming from places we know little about but which cannot be endured. No-one really wants to know or cares who they are. They are simply Others and must be repelled. In their turn they are ruthless. The Defenders are a conscripted, armed force, compelled to monotonous, arduous duty guarding the Wall on its ramparts. They live a hard life, living in spare comfort with few diversions faced with an unforgiving duty cycle. The technology is not sophisticated – there are no lasers here just bullets, grenades and bayonets.

Discipline is severe and the consequences of failure grim. If Others succeed in getting over the Wall, breaching the Defenders and entering Britain then the same number of Defenders, those deemed responsible for the defensive failure, are themselves cast out to sea in an open boat with minimal provisions. Their punishment is to become, in their turn, Others. No justice, no mitigation, just a simple tit-for-tat. If twenty Others make it then twenty Defenders must be banished and if there aren’t twenty Defenders left to be banished (battles can be severed and mortal) then the numbers are made up from next-in-line officers and officials.

Banishment entails the painful removal of the embedded identity chips that every citizen carries inside them. Without it, a person becomes an Other, a nothing. It is what illicit Others aim for if they get over the Wall. to acquire a forged chip to enable a new life inside the Wall. British life is bleak and grey resembling perhaps old movies of war-time life – crowded trains, wary civilians, unhappy homes. The scenario seems clear. This is Britain today (2019) – under siege, threatened by insidious invasion and paranoid about internal conspiracies to aid the Others. It is bleak. The only options seem to be to somehow join the ‘elite’ (they fly high in the sky in planes back and forth between who knows where), to become a Breeder to make more children to join the ranks of the Defenders, or to make a living as a member of the Help class, a form of indentured labour only one step from slavery.

Spoiler alert: The protagonist and narrator of the story, Kavanagh, suffers the fate of banishment, having begun the journey towards Breeder status in his bleak ambition to lift his status . His banishment is the result of a real conspiracy-from-within led by a respected officer, himself once an Other, and which enables more Others to climb over the Wall and enter Britain. Banished to the open sea with a group of other exiles there are great dangers – pirates, and a lack of navigation – and forlorn hope – the raft colony they come upon is reminiscent of Kevin Costner’s movie Waterworld) but it is soon destroyed. Eventually the Kavanagh Breeder partner find some safety but it is inconclusive, a respite, temporary at best. They are doomed to continued exile.

Note: Walls are a fairly common literary image. Some examples are here: A Brief Review of Walls in Literature by Tom Mitchell – “Fear of invasion … is a more powerful form of control than bricks and mortar.” and more recently, Game of Thrones features a defensive Wall of ice.

Note: 12 May 2020

Well, well! This article asks: “As sea levels rise, are we ready to live behind giant walls?“