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Dull, pedestrian dystopia

I’m not really sure who the target readership is for The Wall , John Lanchester’s Booker-longlisted novel about a post climate change future. As a work of genre fiction �� a cli-fi dystopia �� it is derivative and stale. It’s also unsatisfying as literary fiction, with flat prose, undeveloped themes and cardboard characters. The callow young narrator and a tendency to over-explain the obvious might tip it towards the YA category, but YA readers are likely to find it plodding and dull.

The plot ambles aimlessly, then rushes to a deeply unsatisfying conclusion. Atmosphere and world-building are lacklustre, while character development is scant. We are introduced to a couple of duplicitous, potentially interesting individuals, but those stories end up going nowhere.

The expository set-up takes up the first quarter of the book. That’s a lot of info-dumping to foist on a reader before the plot fires up but even so, the world-building is thin, full of hoary clichés and bland terminology: Defenders, Others, Breeders, the Change, the Wall. Tedious details are numerous (the dimensions of the Wall, the Defenders�� daily routine, etc) while important ones are omitted (why does an island nation need to gird itself with a 10,000km solid wall against leaky refugee boats? Where’s the Navy? Why hasn’t their economy totally collapsed? Did they close off all the ports too? Why are traitors put out to sea on a small, well-provisioned boat instead of just executing them?)

Perhaps in keeping with the laxity of world-building, The Wall pays little heed to causal effects of the Change, thus torpedoing its worth as a credible climate change novel. Sea levels have risen so much that ‘there are no beaches left in the world�� but the characters catch a train to a seemingly unaltered London �� surely the Thames would swallow half the city. Elsewhere, an unnamed river “still looks more or less the same�� as before the Change; this is handwaved away as ‘accidents of topography��. Supplies of comestibles like tea, chocolate, and beef are apparently unaffected by a worldwide climate catastrophe. But the most implausible aspects of the book are too spoiler-y to mention.

These critiques could be brushed aside if this narrative worked as a fable, social comment, allegory or cautionary tale, but I thought it was equally facile in that respect. The book fumbles with issues of nativism and xenophobia, but fails to properly interrogate this theme or offer any insights. A really good dystopian novel can pose existential questions, hold a mirror to society, reframe the human experience, or skewer preconceptions. The Wall offers nothing so sophisticated and relies on the reader to extrapolate meaning from its malleable premise.

For me, The Wall was about as nuanced as a giant slab of grey concrete, and just as interesting. 1.5 stars.