Dystopian fiction

Review: I Cheerfully Refuse

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Cover image of "I Cheerfully Refuse" by Leif Enger

I Cheerfully Refuse

I Cheerfully Refuse, Leif Enger. Grove Press (ISBN: 9780802165190) 2025.

Summary: In a dystopian America, Rainy and Lark carve out a joyful life until tragedy sends Rainy on a Lake Superior odyssey.

I don’t typically select books this way. Looking at a table of new works at my local store, the cover art of this book caught my eye. The description sounded like a modern day odyssey. And the author was from Minnesota. Having had a good experience with another Minnesota author, William Kent Krueger, I thought I’d give Leif Enger a try. I’m so glad I did, though amid the goodness, truth and beauty of the story was heartbreak and terrible darkness.

The setting is Lake Superior in a not-too-distant future America. Societal order, the economy, and the climate have collapsed. The country is controlled by sixteen multi-billionaire “astronauts.” Some semblance of societal order is maintained by pharmaceuticals developed aboard “ships of horror.” Children are rated on a “feral scale” and medicated. And if it all becomes intolerable, a little slip of paper with a drug called “Willow” will help you end it all. And some are having “Willow” parties. Libraries have closed and books are becoming an increasingly scarce commodity.

Rainy and Lark have somehow carved out a joyful life together. He’s a big bear of a man who paints houses, plays bass guitar, often with a local band, but sometimes just to comfort his friends. Lark is a former librarian with a big heart and a passion for books. She runs a second-hand bookstore in a bakery, scouring estate sales for book collections. Lark taught Rainy to sail, going to a place called “The Slates,” where they had a somewhat mystical encounter they believed was with Molly Thorn, thought to be dead. Consequently, they buy and re-hab an old sailboat.

Lark, in her open-heartedness brings home a fugitive, Kellen. He has run away from one of the pharmaceutical ships. Perhaps the fact that he had in his possession an unpublished work of Molly Thorn’s, I Cheerfully Refuse, sufficiently seals the deal and he stays with the couple. But tragedy strikes the night of Lark’s birthday. Kellen has disappeared. After a futile hunt, he returns home to find his home destroyed, and Lark brutally murdered. A stranger, an older gentleman, who he later learns is Werryck, ran the ship Kellen had fled, and has been around the town, and through the book, has traced Kellen to their house. That’s why Kellen has gone.

Not only that, Werryck is after Rainy. Whatever they tore up the house looking for is still missing. So, Rainy takes to his boat. The only destination he can think of is “The Slates,” hoping perhaps he will find Lark there. Along the way, he is joined by Sol, a young girl he rescues from an abuser, buying her with his bass. Together they endure Superior’s terrible storms, scrape together an existence, outsmart a corrupt bridge operator, and search for an old relative who once cared for her.

The novel asks the question what kind of people will we become and what kind of communities will we form when the societal order fails? Along the way, amid the corruption, Rainy and Sol will find outposts of goodness. But what kind of person will Rainy, who has lived by goodness, supporting his friends, become? He faces his greatest test when he becomes Werryck’s captive.

Rainy’s sailing journey on Lake Superior strikes me as a modern-day Odyssey. Will he, in the end, find home? And how will the journey have changed him? Also, not unlike Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Enger confronts us with a very possible dystopia, asking us what kind of people we would be in such times. He does all this in a compellingly beautiful story.

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!

____________________

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.