Dystopian fiction

Review: What We Can Know

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Cover image of "What We Can Know" by Ian McEwan

What We Can Know, Ian McEwan. Albert A. Knopf (ISBN: 9780593804728) 2025.

Summary: A researcher in 2119 seeks a lost poem read at a famous dinner in 2014, reconstructing the circumstances of the dinner.

In 2014, famous poet Francis Blundy hosted a dinner in honor of his wife’s birthday. During the dinner, he read a poem written for Vivien in the form of a corona. A corona is a “crown of sonnets” consisting of fifteen sonnets, often addressed to one person. The last line of each sonnet is repeated in the first line of the next. Finally, the fifteenth sonnet consists of the last lines of the first fourteen, and makes sense! Blundy wrote it out on vellum and, after the reading, presented it to Vivian, After the dinner, its whereabouts became unknown. The dinner became known as the Second Immortals Dinner. The first was in 1817, with Wordsworth, Keats, and Charles Lamb among the guests of painter Ben Haydon.

In the 2030’s, cataclysmic events occurred. Climate change resulted in wars over resources, including the limited use of nuclear weapons. One of these, intended for the United States landed in the mid-Atlantic, creating a giant tsunami inundating the low lying areas of the Americas and Europe and western Africa. Paradoxically, these bombs resulted in a cooling of the planet. The period was called the Derangement and by the following century, the Earth’s population was down to four billion.

McEwan envisions a world in 2119 that suffered both the loss of much and retained the vestiges of advanced civilization. Regions of the United States are at war. Nigeria controls the internet. But there are still universities in what is left of the United Kingdom. Among the researchers, Thomas Metcalfe studies the years prior to the Derangement. His interest has focused in on the dinner and the lost poem. Instead of the coup of discovery, all he can know are the circumstances surrounding the dinner. Particularly, this included the lives and loves of the guests.

He knows of the tragic first marriage of Vivien Blundy to Percy. This big bear of a man built beautiful musical instruments, including working on a replica of a Guarnieri violin. That is, until early onset Alzheimer’s struck. He knows of the dalliances with Blundy’s brother-in-law Harry, and the meeting pf Francis and Vivien. All this took place prior to Percy’s death from a fall. Vivien subsequently married Francis, setting up in her own studio near the main building called the Barn.

But Metcalfe’s career and life seem stalled. He’s in an off again/on again relationship with Rose, a fellow lecturer on the period. They even teach classes together. Research trips to the Blundy archives turn up lots of trivia about the Blundy’s but nothing on the poem. That is, until an archivist passes along a slip of paper. On it are scratched numbers that Thomas figures out are map coordinates.

When students, no longer interested in how writers dealt with or avoided the impending Derangement, walk out of Thomas and Rose’s class, they conclude it’s time to seek out the coordinates. It turns out they are on the site of the home where Vivien lived after Francis’ death. Could this be the poem’s hiding place? Thomas and Rose embark on a boat trip to an isolated island, hike through overgrowth, find the site and dig up a sealed container.

This is all in the first part of the novel. The second part tells us what they found, and will answer the question of what happened to the poem. It reveals how much they did not know. McEwan leaves the impact of discovery to our imagination.

McEwan foregrounds the quest for a lost poem and what a scholar can know of its past, and that of its author. But part of the work he and Rose do is study the literature leading up to the Derangement. The unspoken question is why so many knew and did so much yet failed to do what was needed. McEwan also creates a situation in which civilization doesn’t end in a cataclysm but withers by degree. It is telling that Rose and Thomas’s students take no interest in what they can know of the past but think they can create a future on a blank slate. They take no interest in knowing the folly of forebears who refused to face and act on what they knew.

It leaves one wondering what historians a century from now, if such still exist, will write about our time. And I can’t help wondering if they will write about what we knew and failed to act upon. Will they wonder about our grand projects and petty squabbles while our own Derangement loomed? I wonder.

Review: Gliff

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Cover image of "Gliff by Ali Smith

Gliff, Ali Smith. Pantheon (ISBN: 9780593701560) 2025

Summary: Two “Unverifiable” children meet up with a horse slated for rendering in a courageous attempt to find their way in a dystopian world.

Two “Unverifiable” children are in flight. They have to leave their home which has been outlined in red for destruction. There mother has been called away in an emergency. Leif, her partner, piles them and their essential belongings into his campervan…until it is also circled in red after an overnight in a parking lot. A train ride takes them to a new town. Leif finds them an abandoned house, stocks them with food and some cash and leaves for a week. They see neither Leif nor their mother again.

The two are Rose and Bri whose gender is ambiguous. Bri is the narrator. Rose and Bri’s mother has avoided smartphones and other elements of the surveillance society as much as possible, so they are used to living off the grid.

As Rose explores their surroundings, she discovers a neighboring farm with a field of used-up horses feeding. She later learns it is part of a rendering operation. These horses are as much on the margins as Rose and Bri. Rose befriends one, who she names Griff, a Scottish word meaning “transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse.”

For a time, they shelter in an abandoned school with others who are “off the grid.” Oona, an older woman, becomes a kind of mentor and protector until the school is slated for demolition. The children flee on the horse. But eventually Bri is captured by the authorities,

Bri is subjected to processing and re-educated. During this, they are classified as a male. Bri becomes a manager of a factory in which child workers often suffer horrendous injuries. Bri enjoys a modicum of success and safety until someone from the past turns up. Someone who knows about Rose.

Ali Smith portrays an ugly, banal world in a dystopian totalitarianism. Everyone is surveilled, and all their information resides in vast servers. The accounts of Rose and Bri and Gliff represent a remnant of color, of personhood in this depersonalized world where people are reduced to production quotas and horses are fit only for rendering.

This is a brave new world (a motif in the second part of the book) where everything distinctive, beautiful, ambiguous, and colorful is reduced to bland functionality. It’s a world of prosperous oligarchs and a faceless society serving them. There are hints that people are eking out an existence in a climate-scorched world. It’s an uncomfortably possible future and faces us with the challenges of finding one’s personhood and meaning in a world trying to erase all of that.

Review: Prophet Song

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Prophet Song, Paul Lynch. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023.

Summary: A mother tries to hold her family and life together as Ireland descends into authoritarian rule.

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize is a tough read in two respects. One is seeing the unraveling of a democratic society through the disbelieving eyes of Eilish stack, an educated, middle class mother who works for a biotech company. It is disturbing becausew of how close to home it strikes.

The other respect is the text, written without paragraphs with dialogue without quotation marks. Yet this running text reflects increasingly unsettled and anxious perceptions of Eilish, fusing dialogue, emotions, and interior thought. We sense her movement back and forth from disbelief to concern, from hollow assurances that even her children don’t believe to rising fear, from clinging to the hope that her “disappeared” will come home to the realization that no one taken by the government comes home, from the illusion that she can preserve her home and way of life and that their only hope is flight. It’s the increasingly frantic and instinctive thought of one who loses husband, two sons, her job, her respect as “traiter” is spray-painted on her car and home, as her neighborhood becomes a battleground between the regime and the resistance, and finally her flight with her daughter and infant son, having to pay “fees” at numerous checkpoints as she they try to flee. The running text takes us inside her mind and we live the growing terror with Eilish.

It all begins when the National Alliance Party takes over the Republic of Ireland, declares emergency powers and suspends the constitution including writs of habeas corpus. The reality comes home when her husband Larry, a leader in a teacher’s union, goes out to a protest–and never returns. Her eldest son Mark has to go into hiding to avoid the drafting of 17 year-olds. He joins the resistance. After infrequent communications on burner phones, Eilish hears no more, but persists in hoping he will come home. Then, after a list of draft-dodgers, including her son, is published, she learns her services are no longer required. Meanwhile, her father, across town, is descending into dementia. Yet, in his occasional lucid moments, he tells her she must take the children and leave.

Subsequently, her neighborhood becomes front lines in the battle between the Party and the resistance. Power and water are intermittent and the gone. Buildings around suffer bombardment. Yet she uses all her resources, including money from her sister for her to get out of the country to survive. She can’t let go of hope that her husband and son will come home. Only when another son goes missing does she realize that she must save the two who remain–if she can.

The story takes us into the powerful disbelief that democracy really can’t unravel and how rapidly a society can consume itself when it does. We also see how powerful the urge is to try to hold onto home, onto some shred of normalcy. We glimpse how bad things must get for someone to flee from home and become a refugee. When Eilish’s neighborhood becomes a warzone, her running narrative gives the reader of what lived reality must be like in Gaza and other warzones.

Paul Lynch takes us to a place those of us in the West resist going. We join Eilish in denial that it can happen here–that our institutions, the rule of law, our education, jobs, and suburbs will protect us. He forces us to look into the dark abyss through the eyes of Eilish to recognize the vulnerability of all of this when we embrace unfettered power rather than the less “efficient” processes of the rule of law and democratic legislative processes. His book reminds us that the possibility of effective resistance after the fact is far more perilous than resisting beforehand, as inconvenient as that may be. Is this book a “Prophet Song” for us?

Review: The Deluge

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The Deluge, Stephen Markley. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Summary: A novel imagining the interaction of accelerating impacts of climate change and the unraveling of societies.

I should say at the outset that there are a number of reasons not to read this book:

  • It’s long–880 pages
  • It’s scary, because it reads like our news feeds on steroids–both in accounts of extreme weather and other climate change impacts and societal unraveling.
  • It involves movement back and forth in narrating the lives and actions of a disparate set of characters, all a part of a growing crisis intermixed with collages of news articles, fictional op-ed columns, and magazine articles. It’s not always easy to keep track of it all.
  • It’s raw with graphic descriptions of violence, of various iterations of sex, and adult language.

Yet, despite all this, I could not put it down and I can’t stop thinking about it and talking about it. The lead character in this book is really our planet–its ice sheets, its oceans, its atmosphere, and its weather. Markley portrays in vivid detail the extreme weather events we already are seeing–in even greater extremes. Unprecedented snow storms. An atmospheric river flooding California (certainly written before the recent actual weather events). Monstrous hurricanes with 250 mph winds. Fires that destroy Los Angeles. Sea levels inundating coastal cities. Midwest flooding. Triple digit heat domes a routine summer event. Melting permafrost and ocean floors releasing methane, leading to cascading increases in global warming.

The novel moves between the stories of a collection of characters. A passionate environmentalist, Kate Morris, founds a creative movement, Fierce Blue Fire, starting both local community development groups and a national lobbying effort to pass environmental legislation, ultimately gutted by carbon interests. Her story is told mostly through the eyes of Matt, her partner in an “open” relationship–the terms dictated by Kate. Tony Pietrus, is a scientist who discovers and models what happens when underwater methane is released through oceanic warming. Then there is the Pastor, a has-been actor who undergoes a conversion and becomes a religious alt-right charismatic figure who eventually runs for president as a tool of the carbon lobby. Jackie is a savvy ad exec, who crafts the media strategy that guts the climate legislation Kate had fought so hard for who goes on to join her partner, Fred, in building a global investment fund leveraging the changing energy and social situation to make lots of money for investors at the expense of the world’s poor–until she regains a conscience. There is a group of climate radicals, 6Degrees, committed to using violent means to stop big coal and corporate America that through compartmented protocols and infiltration of computer networks, evades detection while staging a series of increasingly violent bombings. Keeper, an ex-addict trying to put his life back together with the help of an immigrant pastor in a small town community and gets swept up in 6 Degrees activity. And there is Ashir, who writes memoranda to a congressperson that are really personal narratives. He is a brilliant analyst and mathematician whose predictive algorithm ends up being exploited by everything from sports betting to the investment fund Jackie and her partner, Fred, manage.

All of these characters’ stories unfold against the backdrop of an unraveling country. States seceding, An irreconcilably divided political environment controlled by powerful lobbies. A tanking economy. Food and power shortages. Increasingly violent and aggressive militias. And a similarly unraveling international situation. A series of “martyrdoms” lead to what seems an awakening and embrace of the actions needed to stabilize an ever-warming world, but one requiring generations of brave effort to do so.

While one might find faults with the book, its length, structure, and character development, I thought it all worked in the end. I found myself actually caring about many of the people. As I said, I couldn’t put it down. And it made me ask the question–could all this really happen? I find myself very troubled by the fact that I have no good argument to say, “it can’t happen here?” A society that threatens public health and political officials over wearing a piddly little face mask during a highly infectious pandemic strikes me as ill-prepared or disposed to enact radical and long term societal-wide changes to reduce global warming. Despite all we know and all the talk about energy-saving and renewables our U.S. carbon emissions went UP 1.3 percent in the last year.

Can fiction speak to what all our white papers and models have not? What Markley does is take a holistic look at what happens to a society when increasingly extreme weather disrupts the fabric of our lives on an increasingly pervasive scale. The picture isn’t pretty. He bids us to look into the abyss. While some act with nobility and courage, for many others, the worst nature dishes out brings out the worst in humans. He raises profound questions about whether our democratic republic can survive these stresses. There are indications that he hangs on to hope even while portraying how challenging the world will be for our children and grand-children. And perhaps that is where we need to be–both clear-eyed, and passionately hopeful. Lord have mercy!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Our Missing Hearts

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Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng. New York: Penguin Press, 2022.

Summary: Bird Gardner and his father spend life trying not to be noticed, even as Bird wonders about his mother, the stories she told, why she left them, and where she has gone in a country that turned against her poetry even as one phrase became a rallying cry for all those separated from their children.

This is a haunting work because one sees all the elements except for a PACT act. Economic crisis. Anti-Asian prejudice and violence. The use of blaming foreign powers and actors for our problems. The use of state power to separate children from their parents. The removal of books from schools and libraries. The surveillance state we have lived in since 9/11.

All of this comes together around a twelve year old boy, Bird Gardner, living with his father, who works in an academic library, who loves words, and desperately is working to avoid anything to raise suspicion that could result in Bird being taken away from him. Bird’s mother Margaret left them when he was nine. A book of poems she wrote when she was carrying him, and one poem in particular with the line “our missing hearts” became associated with the rallying cry and symbol of a resistance movement to the forced removal of children from their homes for the least suspicion of violating the PACT Act (Preserving American Culture and Traditions).

Although his father has taught Bird that they must disavow her and have no communication with her, he both misses her and wonders why she would leave them and what she is doing now. Sadie, a school friend, and one of the removed children, thinks his mother is part of the resistance movement that, out of nowhere puts up protest installations of hearts or other symbols of the missing children.

But Bird doesn’t learn the true story until a series of clues that begins with a letter without return address covered with cat drawings leads to looking in a closet in their former home (still owned but closed up while they live in a dorm apartment), where Bird finds an address in New York City.

With the help of a librarian, who is part of an underground network of librarians who are collecting a database of parents and missing children, Bird figures out how to get to New York where he reconnects with his mother through a rich mutual friend, Dutchess (Domi) who lives at the address he’d found. Over several days in a derelict house, his mother tells the story of her life–how she and Domi survived the Crisis which led to the passage of the PACT act, how she met Bird’s father, wrote a book of poetry with paltry sales until the death of one protestor carrying the words “our missing hearts” was captured in a photograph at the moment she was fatally shot. The book was found among her effects, sold like crazy until the authorities shut it down, and vilified the author, who’d never meant to spawn a resistance.

She tells of the decision to leave to save Bird from being parted from both parents, and her awakening as she learned of what had happened to so many children that she had avoided knowing. She tells the story as she makes bottle cap devices with wires and transistors and “seeds” these throughout the city for her own act of resistance.

I have not heard the audio version of this but the voice I hear is one of quiet, but insistent wondering, both of Bird, and then of Margaret. Each is trying to unravel a story, Bird of his mother, Margaret of all the lost children, beginning with the young woman who died in protest. Both are engaged in a quiet resistance rooted in the pursuit of truth–unwilling to accept any longer the “comply and keep your head down” ethic fostered by PACT. Even Bird’s decision at the very end reflects that quiet, resistant pursuit of truth.

The haunting thing about this book is the awareness that the dystopian state Ng portrays is not that far removed from our present day reality. As I mentioned in the beginning, nearly all of the pieces are there. I suspect most of us are, like Margaret, among those who do not want to see, who think, this cannot happen here. The author of Little Fires Everywhere could have called this Little Resistances Everywhere. Ng portrays what a resistance of truth that will not bow to power might look like. And in doing so, this book feels like it is Ng’s own quiet act of resistance.

Review: Parable of the Talents

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Parable of the Talents (Earthseed #2), Octavia E. Butler. New York: Open Road Media, 2012 (first published in 1998).

Summary: The growth and heartbreaking destruction of Acorn, the Earthseed community founded by Lauren Olamina, and how Earthseed rose from the ashes.

In Parable of the Sower (review) Octavia Butler creates a leader, Lauren Olamina, of a new religious movement in a dystopian America, and describes how she gathers a band of refugees into Acorn, a community formed around the principles of Earthseed. This work continues that story through the narration of Lauren’s daughter, who eventually, with the help of her uncle found her mother’s religious writings and journals, after being abducted as an infant by the extremist wing of a Christian nationalist group.

The chapters of the book begin with an Earthseed verse, then a section in bold print by daughter Asha Vere (born Larkin) followed by journal entries of Lauren that tell the story of the growth and heart-breaking destruction of Acorn, and what followed. Acorn was the place where Lauren and her husband Bankole built a community of refugees on his land and formulated the teachings of Earthseed, gradually drawing convinced adherents. Everyone worked and contributed, children were taught, and products of quality were sold in neighboring towns. She began to think about how they could send people out to teach Earthseed elsewhere. Amid this, the child they hoped for so long was born, who they named Larkin.

Meanwhile, Christian America, a church-based nationalist movement with political aspirations gained increasing sway in a country that wasn’t working. They brought order, housed the homeless, and their leader, Jarrett, became president on a platform of restoring American greatness by cleansing the country of all “heathen” beliefs. Her half-brother Marcos, rescued from slavers, refuses to join Earthseed, drawn by Christian America and his desire to preach. Bankole sees what is happening and wants to take Lauren and Larkin to a quiet town. Lauren refuses, convinced of the truth of Earthseed and the potential of a movement that would eventually take the human race to the stars.

Until, that is, the Crusaders, a radical arm of Christian America come, seize Acorn, imprisoning the men and women separately, and taking all the children away, placing them with adoptive parents, including Larkin. The adults were all “collared” with electronic collars. Bankole dies during the attack as does Olamina’s close childhood friend Zahra. They are supposedly being “re-educated” but no one succeeds in being released. Women are assaulted by their Christian captors and expected to be submissive.

How they escaped, overcoming their captors, and how Earthseed arose out of the ashes occupies the later part of the book. It comes down to Lauren’s “talents,” her abilities to lead and persuade people to follow, not blindly, but willingly. It also has to do with her “magnificent obsession” that she pursues, even when her brother won’t follow, or face the evils Christian America had perpetrated. Likewise, she seeks her daughter for years, but ironically, it is Marcos who finds her, misleads her about her mother and educates her, showing her love her adoptive family never did and her mother never could.

There is so much here. Butler presciently anticipates the Christian nationalism and demagoguery of our own day and its appeal, as well as the xenophobia of anything that is “other” and the subjugation of women. That is chilling. Equally interesting is her exploration of what it means to be a founder of a religious group, to know to the core of one’s being that a revelation is true, and how one cannot do other than pursue what one knows in one’s being is true. Persecution, the loss of family, and arduous work are all part of it, but also the forming of a community of the convinced.

Butler is a compelling but uneasy read. There are brutal and heartbreaking passages, but also much to provoke thought. In a sense, these books might also be parables that might come with the words of the greatest parable-teller, “Let the one who has ears, hear.”

Review: Ready Player One

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Ready Player One, Ernest Cline. New York: Broadway Press, 2012.

Summary: A virtual world quest created as the last act of a gaming programmer in which a real prize of $240 billion is at stake pits Wade Watts and a rag tag group of “gunters” against a ruthless corporation.

I might be one of the last people to come to this ten year old story since made into a motion picture. I have to admit, dystopian novels with a gaming theme are not my thing. If it weren’t for the fact that the author was born in Ohio, I may not have given it a second thought. But as a lifelong Buckeye, Ohio authors, whether they still live here or not, are my thing. So here goes.

It’s 2044. Climate change and the attendant breakdown of civil society has rendered much of the planet, and much of the United States a dangerous wasteland. Wade Watts lives in a ghetto in Oklahoma, consisting of trailers “stacked” on scaffolding. While he lives with his aunt, he spends most of his time in a secret hideaway in which he has connected his computer rig and “haptic” gear, in a virtual world called OASIS, created by perhaps the greatest of all game programmers, James Halliday. He attends virtual school here, and when not in school pursues a quest that not everyone thinks is real. He is a “gunter,” a serious gamer looking for the “egg” Halliday left behind as his last bequest five years ago. The prize? $240 billion in real world currency. The quest involves obtaining finding three keys, entering three gates, and successfully competing three contests. No one has even found the first key.

Wade, whose avatar is Parzifal, has spent the past five years immersing himself in everything he can learn about Halliday, all the games he created and played, the movies he loved, the places he lived, the music he listened to, to try to even find a clue to where the first key is located. The ‘Bible’ of the gunters is The Almanac. Wade discovers the first clue by noticing 112 notched letters that give him the information he needs to find the first key. And that leads to him being the first to complete the first challenge, beating a formidable foe, at an ancient arcade game. But he wasn’t the first to find the key. Another avatar, a female, Art3mis, was there first, but Wade won first. And in the informal code of gamers, he gives her a clue that helps her win and be the second to have collected the first key and pass through the first gate.

He’s not the only one in the small group of rivals. There is his best online friend “Aech” (pronounced “H”), and later Daito and Shoto, who become the fourth and fifth to pass the first gate after Parzifal, Art3mis, and Aech. Each is working on their own to win. Yet each will come to depend more and more on the others. And Wade as Parzifal and Art3mis (“Samantha” in the real world) develop an interest in each other–at least as they get to know one another through their avatars.

Parzifal becomes instantly famous in the gunter world. The treasures he wins afford him the chance to “level” up and acquire even more. The endorsements he acquires gives him real world funds. He will need them. The gunters aren’t the only ones after the Egg. So is a group called Innovative Online Industries who not only want to win the Egg, but gain control of the OASIS. They are known as the “sixers” for the six digit employee numbers that identify them. The chief of these is Nolan Sorrento, who tries to lure Parzifal to work with them. When lures fail, he resorts to threats to blow up Wade’s stack and kill him. Wade considers it a bluff, and were it not for his hideaway, he would have been. The stack where his aunt lives is bombed. It’s not a game anymore, and more people will die before it is over.

Wade uses his endorsement money to move from Oklahoma to Columbus, Ohio to be near where the main OASIS servers are and creates a state of the art setup to pursue the quest. The remainder of the book describes the pursuit of the second and third keys and gates, the tension between rivalry and friendship with his small circle of “gunters” who have to outwit the massive resources of the sixers.

The book is full of gamers lore, from Dungeons and Dragons and some of the earliest computer games to the highest tech in a virtual reality world. A non-gamer like me could have done with a bit less. But the plot is twisty enough to keep it interesting, with moments where it looks like all was lost, and then other surprises we would not have anticipated, and of course, the resourcefulness of Parzifal and the other gunters.

The backdrop to this plot is interesting as well. The immersive experience of this virtual world becomes the place where everyone spends time, because of OASIS, which facilitates education and commerce as well as massive multi-player online role playing games. It is a world with its own politics as well as actors who want to dominate the environment for their own profit. It sounds eerily like what Facebook’s re-branding as Meta would like to do.

As Cline’s plot unfolds, his characters begin to face the question of whether there might be more to the relationships they have and maybe the life they live in the “real” world, as dystopian as it is, than they have considered so far. Yet the irony is that all of these are formed online in a far more attractive world. Real neighboring in the stacks, except for passing conversations, is dead. If the eco-disasters and breakdowns in public order that some foresee come to pass, the book raises the interesting question of whether the resilience will be left to resist and try to restore or preserve the best of our culture or whether most will opt for escape to some virtual “oasis.”

Review: Balcony of Fog

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Balcony of Fog, Rick Shapero. Half Moon Bay, CA: TooFar Media, 2020.

Summary: In a post-nuclear world, a laborer and a fugitive from a vengeful lover inhabiting a thunderhead meet up, transform to cloud-beings and eventually engage in a climactic battle.

Arden is a toiler in a post-nuclear war of toilers and overlords. He builds and repairs sluices channeling the water from ever present storms. He dreams of more, sailing away on the Mariod, named after a woman who sacrificed herself for him. After a beating from an overlord, he slips away to his boat and encounters a woman who seems to descend out of the sky. Estra is escaping an angry thunderhead driven by her former lover Ingis.

Of course they instantly fall into love and into the sack. Then when their escape plan is frustrated, Estra leads Arden into a transformation allowing him to ascend to the clouds. Arden finds himself transformed into a cloudlike figure capable of riding the clouds. For a while, it seems an idyllic life of incredible beauty. They immerse each other in Vats, cleansing them of bad memories and traumas, Spindles that draw out their wishes, and a pond of which they write their most private thoughts, which are transformed into cranes. Then there is love, where they merge their “motes,” their whole being into each other.

Of course it can’t last. Ingishead driven by a jealous and powerful lover relentlessly pursues them. At one point, Ingishead abducts Estra, with Arden relentlessly pursuing and ultimately rescuing her back. But Arden knows that any victory is temporary until Ingishead is defeated. Even as Arden builds Ardenhead, consuming lesser clouds and learning to wield lightning, there is also an inner conflict. What is Ingis to Estra? Why did she become his lover in the first place? How much of her heart did he still hold?

On one level, the story is about the lead-up to a climactic battle. It is also a study of the corrupting effects of power, which we see at work on Ingis. But will power and jealousy win over love with Arden? Will he become another Ingis.

Meanwhile, the structures of power on earth continue. A vengeful strike at one point seems emotionally cathartic but systemically unsatisfying. The Vats, The Spindles, and the cranes are interesting devices for the emotional healing and self-healing these abused characters need, yet self-revelation carries its own dangers.

There is some interesting world-building and ideas about self-knowledge mixed with what seem to me adolescent fantasy and pettishness. I think a gifted writer could have created a story of greater subtlety. As it stands, it is just OK. I can’t help but wonder if the immersive component of this project, pairing an app with this book, led to writing that does not stand on its own but is driven by the companion technology. Whatever is the case, I’d pass on this one.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Road

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The Road, Cormac McCarthy. New York: Vintage Books, 2007.

Summary: A dystopian story of a father and son helping each other survive in a post-nuclear America, scavenging for food and avoiding murderous mobs.

The man. The boy. The road. One’s life in backpacks and a grocery cart.

Using an old map to walk back roads to the South and warmth when there is no heat.

Evading murderous gangs who kill and eat their victims.

Searching every dwelling for any scrap of food. A fallout shelter unused stocked richly. Can’t stay long for the risk of being discovered.

A lone boy. He has someone, he can’t go with us. He’ll be OK. Really? Really.

Ash everywhere. Rains smell of ash. Snow is gray. A gray, sullen landscape under gray skies. Nothing alive.

Nights under tarps, shivering in each other’s grasp, trying to stay warm, yet hidden.

A cough. Worsening. Spitting up blood. Must protect the boy.

We carry the fire.

This is The Road. Not a happy story. One to give anyone who thinks a nuclear holocaust survivable. This strikes me a good rendition of what “survival” would be like.

It reveals the heart of darkness that emerges when the structures of civilization fail. Yet it also reveals the bond of a father and son, the eternal flame of hope, or will against all despair to live captured in the words, “we carry the fire.” It recognizes a goodness that will not die (“we are the good guys”) even if this means that you will only kill and not eat the enemy who threatens you. Yet it is a world where you are wary of any human beings, the few who remain. Are there any other “good guys?”

It makes one think of what we have seen during the pandemic, when a virus and a polarizing president have threatened the social fabric–violent mobs in the streets, and roving the Capitol. Plots to seize and kill health officials and governors and even vice presidents. Elevated gun violence. Car jackings. Neighbor fighting neighbor over the refusal to don a mask. What do we need to see that the fabric of society is more fragile than we imagined? The Road may not be so far off as we think.

Review: The Handmaid’s Tale

/ rtrube54 / 2 Comments

The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1986.

Summary: One woman’s account of life as a “handmaid” in the dystopian society of the Republic of Gilead, an authoritarian religious society organized around the urgent problem of declining birthrates.

Many of you already know the story, either from reading the novel or the TV series or both. In a dystopian future brought on by an eco-disaster or series of disasters, the Republic of Gilead has taken the place of the United States (or at least part of it, at war with other “sects”). It is a world of steeply declining birth rates organized into a religious tyranny centered around the production of children, especially among the power elite. Commanders whose Wives ceased to reproduce were assigned Handmaids whose name became Of+Commander’s first name. This is the story of Offred. She has been trained for this sacred role by the Aunts, a severe group of women who indoctrinated them into the sacred task of child-bearing.

Offred was separated from her husband Luke after their attempt to escape this tyranny. She doesn’t know whether Luke is dead or alive or where her daughter is. Her daughter is the reason she is a Handmaid. She is fertile. Most of her life is lived in her room, or on strictly regulated shopping trips, birth celebrations, and “salvagings” where transgressors are hanged. Once a month is the Celebration, when she lays between the knees of the Wife, (following Genesis 30:1-3), while the Commander has very impersonal intercourse with her in the hope of inseminating her.

Much of the narrative hinges on transgressions, many of which become necessities either because the rigid life, or because the rigidities just don’t work–a house of prostitution where the elite men covertly go, which has become the refuge of Moira, Offred’s rebellious friend who is a survivor, doctors who offer to have sex when the Commanders fail, Wives who arrange surrogates, a Commander who wants to have a real relationship with his Handmaid, and an underground “Mayday” movement helping people escape. Atwood’s narrative explores what happens when tyrannous purity cultures bump up against human nature.

Of course the tyrannous culture has to be maintained, and it does so by “salvagings” that turn lynching into a religious ceremony, not unlike what happened in many parts of the Jim Crow south, with a system of informers, Eyes, as well as any of the people around one. The narrative develops around the choices Offred must make when presented with the demands of the transgressive system, risking life to choose survival for herself, and possibly for her daughter, along with answering to her own longings for intimacy.

As you can see, Atwood raises all kinds of questions for us. Is it possible to employ religion (or a quasi-religion) in the service of a tyranny and its aims? In this narrative, women are both close companions and the arch enemies of other women. What do we make of that? And can this dystopia happen here?

The events of the past year are too close for comfort. We have been threatened with the dissolution of our political and social order. Religion has been coopted for political ends. We are in a country of declining birth rates. We face the possibility of a global eco-disaster that many consider posing an existential threat that warrants drastic action, while others vehemently deny and defy.

Most of all, it seems to me that this is a work of resistance. Some see an illusion in the title to The Canterbury Tales. Many see in these stories subtle resistance to the existing religious and political order, even while on religious pilgrimage. Offred’s tale, a series of daytime narratives punctuated by nights, mostly given to reflection, seems also a tale of resistance, a way of fighting to maintain her identity when her life, indeed her body, is employed against her will to sustain the world order. What I see her is a cautionary tale for us all.