Review 2433: Prophet Song

When I’m reading books for my projects, I don’t really look to see what they’re about, I just find them and read them. Prophet Song was for my Booker project, and I was dismayed when I realized it is a dystopian novel, since that is not my thing and I had recently read another one.

However, I soon realized I had read another novel by Lynch, Grace, a historical novel about the Irish famine, and I had forgotten how much I liked it. When you think of it, the famine was dystopian in its own way.

This novel rings lots of bells. It makes you think not only of Nazi Germany, but of Putin’s Russia, the Ukraine, and our own refugee crisis. Actually, refugee crises around the world.

The novel starts with a knock on the door. Ireland has recently voted in an ultra-right party, and the government has declared a sort of martial law, against what, it is not clear. A newly formed department, the GSNB, has sent officers to investigate a complaint about Larry Stack’s role as a union representative for the Irish Teacher’s Union. Larry answers that there is nothing wrong with him helping the union bargain for better pay and conditions, but it’s clear they’re trying to head off a planned strike with threats.

When Larry attends the strike, he doesn’t return. Nor can his wife Eilish find out what happened to him. Nor can the union solicitor. Normal rights have been suspended.

Eilish is left to care for her father, who is slowly succumbing to dementia, and her four children—Mark 16, Molly 15, Bailey 13, and Ben, a baby. Eilish goes on planning her Easter visit to her sister Áine in Canada, hoping that Larry will be free by then, but then Mark and Ben are denied passports.

Things go from bad to worse: Larry’s name is published in a list of subversives in the paper, and their house and car are vandalized. Mark receives a call-up to the military on his 17th birthday. Eilish’s sister keeps urging her to leave, but she won’t leave Larry and Mark, after Mark disappears to join the rebels.

This is an absolutely gripping story that keeps building and building. It is written in Lynch’s poetic prose, with long paragraphs that pull you along and create a sense of urgency.

Dystopian or not, this novel is excellent.

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Review 2342: The Memory of Animals

The Memory of Animals is Claire Fuller’s apocalyptic pandemic novel, so I usually would not have read it. But then again, it’s Claire Fuller.

Neffy has volunteered for a drug trial, an unusual one where a vaccine is to be tested for the first time by humans. The virus is already wreaking havoc, so the subjects will be vaccinated and then given the disease. Neffy, we learn later, has recently experienced a series of difficult events and has joined the trial for money after losing her job. Before she even starts the trial, she hears of a variant of the virus that is even worse.

After Neffy is given the virus, she becomes very sick. She is aware of being locked in her room and deserted. When she recovers, she finds the clinic is empty except for four other study participants—Leon, Yahiko, Rachel, and Piper. They tell her that the medical staff abandoned them and all the rest of the participants left—that only Neffy and a few others were given the virus before the trial shut down.

Outside is an apocalyptic world where the occasional person or two, looking ill, stumble by outside the clinic, and stores are looted. The remaining participants are hiding in the clinic, living off the food they’ve scavenged from the trial and the staff’s lockers.

The narration goes in different directions, as Neffy addresses letters to an octopus she cared for in her job. She also is introduced to a device brought by Leon that allows her to revisit scenes from her past. With little to do in the clinic, she begins revisiting so that she can see her parents and her stepbrother/lover Justin.

This novel is moody and contemplative rather than eventful. It explores such issues as the treatment of animals in labs and zoos, our responsibilities to other people and animals, the dangers of freedom vs. the comfort of restriction.

Sometimes this novel flagged a little for me. I was less interested in the present-time story than in the revisits. I also came to understand how someone could love an octopus.

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Review 2220: Our Missing Hearts

After reading two pretty good domestic dramas by Celeste Ng, I wasn’t really prepared for a dystopian novel. Although I occasionally read dystopian fiction, it’s not really my thing. And this one gave me more trouble than most.

Bird is an 11-year-old biracial boy whose Chinese mother, a poet, disappeared from the lives of himself and his father years ago. They are living in difficult times because of PACT, a law that requires everyone to watch others for un-American activities and codifies racism against Asians, particularly those of Chinese ancestry. The historical record for many periods has been blacked out, and lots of books are banned. Bird’s mother Margaret’s poem has become a rallying cry for those against this system, especially against the removal of children from the care of parents deemed unsuitable. Bird doesn’t see that his father—demoted from a linguistic professor to a library book shelver presumably because of his marriage—has been trying to protect him by teaching him not to stand out.

After his best friend’s disappearance, Bird receives a message from his mother. He begins trying to remember her and eventually to find her.

My biggest problem with this book is its dual nature. Young adult novels, except really great ones, tend to have a certain style, and the first part of this novel is so much in that style, written from Bird’s point of view, that I finally googled it to see what genre it fell into. Then Bird finds his mother, and the next section is supposed to be Margaret telling Bird about her life. It is not written as dialogue, and there is a lot of information there that a mother would not tell her 11-year-old son. Okay, I get it—it’s her memories, but the novel keeps repeating that she’s continuing her story. And it’s way too long with too much extraneous information that’s inappropriate for this purpose. About her wild days? Her lovers? The bite marks she made on his father’s neck? Come on.

I was about 2/3 through the novel, but it lost me there. This was a DNF for me.

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Review 2193: A Children’s Bible

The children are a group of mostly young teenagers, but they are aged from nine to seventeen. They have been brought along by their parents on a reunion vacation to a mansion on a lake by the seashore, but they are mostly let alone while their parents drink, do drugs, and generally misbehave. Evie, the narrator, does her best to take care of her brother Jack, a sensitive nine-year-old.

The children, who have never met before, disdain their parents, and they have a game going in which the winner is the last child to be matched with a parent. The kids all sleep together in an attic and at first their vacation is idyllic because they can do what they want.

Things begin to go wrong, though, when a huge storm rolls in that wreaks a lot of damage and disrupts services. The story begins to move away from reality after the house is partially destroyed and the parents insist that they can’t leave because they signed a lease. The kids do leave, though. Burl, the caretaker for the property, is worried about possible disease from the mosquitos on the now unsanitary property, so he takes them to a compound that has clearly been prepared for Armageddon.

From here, the novel slides in dystopia, fantasy, and even fable as civilization begins to break down.

This novel is fast moving and well written. Although I certainly found it interesting, it ultimately evolved into something that was not quite my thing, especially the religious overtones injected when one of the parents gives Jack a book of Bible stories, which he, having no religious upbringing at all, struggles to understand.

I read this book for my James Tait Black Prize project.

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Review 2095: We

I am pretty well up on the 19th century Russian novelists, so when I was making my Classics Club list, I asked my husband to recommend someone more recent. He mentioned We.

The introduction calls Zamyatin an inconvenient citizen of both the czarist and Communist regimes, because he believed in complete freedom for the individual. His novel We is the granddaddy of dystopian novels and an inspiration to Orwell.

D-50 is a good citizen of the OneWorld, where everyone eats, sleeps, and works in unison. He is also the creator of INTEGRAL, which is going to be shot off into space to make the entire universe uniformly happy. He is writing a record to explain to the citizens of the universe why they should want to be uniform.

He thinks he is happy with O-90, whom he periodically requests for sex (the one time when they’re allowed to close the blinds of their glass apartments) until he meets I-330. There’s something mocking about her, and he thinks she’s up to something. Then she begins dragging him into situations that he should report her for to the Guardians. But he doesn’t, and soon he is madly in love with her and behaving strangely.

This novel is both dystopian fiction and a satire of some of the beliefs of Communism. At times, it is quite fevered in tone, and I wasn’t always sure what was going on. Characterization doesn’t even make sense in such a novel, so Zamyatin picks out weird facial features to identify people. Not my genre, but interesting.

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Review 2056: Bewilderment

Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist whose job is to search for life on other worlds. He is also a bereft widower and the father of Robin, a troubled nine-year-old boy. Robin is kind and super-intelligent, very concerned about animals, but he is also hyper-anxious and prone to horrible fits of rage. He has received conflicting diagnoses, and Theo doesn’t want to subject his growing brain to psychotropic drugs.

After a few incidents at school, Theo is aware that he soon may be butting heads with social services. So, when Stryker, a scientist at the university where Theo works, offers Robin a place in his experimental but noninvasive treatment studies, Theo accepts. The treatments seem to work magically well, but at the same time Theo fears that Robin is becoming a different person.

Theo and his environmental activist wife have brought Robin up to appreciate the abundance and beauty of natural life, so some of the most beautiful moments in this novel come during their camp-outs. Theo also entertains Robin with bedtime stories about the kinds of life that may be on other planets.

Powers has created an absolutely convincing story about the inner life of a fragile boy and his father, who is trying very hard but who himself is unusual and slightly off-kilter. He has set it in a slightly dystopian time with a Trump-like president and a background of social and environmental disintegration. The references in the beginning to the novel Flowers for Algernon set the tone for where the novel is going and despite a few smiles, there is no doubt that it is going there. Here is another troubling novel from Powers, very sad and powerful.

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Review 1826: The New Wilderness

Dystopian novels are coming out of the woodwork these days, and they are not really my thing, but I read The New Wilderness for my Booker Prize project. That being said, I have read some excellent dystopian novels, the Maddaddam trilogy being one of them.

All of the land has been put under production to support the population of the City except the Wilderness State and possibly the rumored Private Lands. The City has become dangerous, though, with such polluted air that Bea’s little daughter Agnes was dying. So, Bea and her scientist partner Glen proposed an experiment—to go with a small group of people to live in the wilderness without making their imprint.

At the beginning of the novel, the Community has lived in the Wilderness State for several years. They started as a group of 20, but several have died. They are living under strict conditions. They’re not allowed to settle anywhere or build structures. The Rangers appear periodically to tell them to move to another Post.

The group has been making decisions by consensus, but it’s clear that Carl and his partner Val would like to be in charge. Glen seems to have little control over his own experiment.

A lot of the novel is devoted to the relationship between Bea and her daughter, who is growing up a bit feral. Eventually, Agnes becomes the main character, which was unfortunate, as I didn’t find her very interesting. In fact, the characters are mostly just used as emblems. They aren’t very dimensional.

Life in the Wilderness State is so brutal that I couldn’t imagine the City being worse. I can understand the comparisons to The Hunger Games that I saw repeatedly on Goodreads, even though no one is trying to kill anyone. I see more of a legacy of Lord of the Flies in Community politics.

I found that my interest in the novel came and went, mostly with Bea. She is not in the book, however, for large portions of it. For me, this novel was mildly interesting at times, but I wasn’t sure I believed very much in how Cook makes her characters behave. Right at the beginning, for example, a couple of characters die and the reaction of the rest is sort of, oh well, these things happen. An explanation that when you’re so close to death, you get inured to it eventually emerges, but I think Cook gets that wrong. Maybe that happens in war, but I think that a hunter-gatherer group would feel the losses as much, if not more, than anyone else, because the group is so small. This struck me as wrong from the start.

One more comment—a quote from Publishers Weekly calls the novel “darkly humorous.” On the contrary, I didn’t think that the novel showed any humor at all or even tried to.

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Review 1812: The Sunlight Pilgrims

Dylan MacRae has had a tough few months. Both his mother and grandmother have died, and he has been unable to save the family business, a small art cinema in London. That’s not all, because the melting of the polar icecaps is causing a new Ice Age, and the upcoming winter is forecast to be brutal.

Dylan has discovered that his mother purchased a small caravan in Scotland off the books before she died, so that he would have a place to live. On the eve before the cinema and his flat above it are repossessed, Dylan packs a suitcase containing a few things as well as the ashes of his mother and grandmother and takes a bus to the Clachen Fells in the Highlands of Scotland.

Upon his arrival, Dylan falls in love at first sight with Constance, another resident of the caravan park. She is an independent survivalist with a teenage trans daughter named Stella and two lovers. Temperatures continue to fall.

Dystopian novels aren’t usually my thing, but I became so involved in the lives of Dylan, Constance, and Stella that I enjoyed this novel of life doing its best to prevail in brutal conditions. Fagan has a talent for creating appealing characters. This is another winner from the author of The Panopticon.

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Review 1795: American War

In 2074, Sarat Chestnut is only six when her father is killed by a terrorist bomb while trying to get a permit for his family to move into the north and safety. The Chestnuts live in a United States divided by civil war with its coastlines eroded far back from global warming. As residents of Louisiana, they reside in a purple state, a state that while it belongs to the North (blue states) has many Southern sympathizers (reds).

After Benjamin Chestnut’s death, Martina, Sarat’s mother, is told that the fighting in East Texas is coming nearer and she should retreat to the refugee camp at Camp Patience in Mississippi. As a resident of Camp Patience, Sarat grows up witnessing terrible events and is slowly groomed by Mr. Gaines to be a terrorist.

In between the chapters about Sarat, El Akkad includes documents about the war leading readers to realize that even more horrific events are ahead and, to me at least, telegraphing Sarat’s fate.

Like most good dystopian novels, this one puts our world troubles into perspective and holds a warning for us. Although dystopia is not really my genre, I found this novel riveting. I read it for my James Tait Black project.

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Review 1664: Greenwood

Best of Ten!

Greenwood starts with an image of the cross-section of a tree trunk, this showing the novel’s structure. The novel begins in 2038, the outer ring of the tree, and visits four different years in the past, the center being 1908. Then it returns through each of those years to 2038.

In 2038, Jake Greenwood is an overqualified scientist working as a forest ranger in one of the few forests left on earth after the Great Wilt. She is glad to have the job in a world of excessively rich people and have-nots. Greenwood Island is a sort of private park that entertains the very wealthy by touring them through the forest.

Jake doesn’t think her family has a connection with the Greenwoods of the island, once owned by the fabulously wealthy lumber baron Harris Greenwood, but a lawyer arrives saying that she may have a claim to the island.

The novel returns back in time to visit Jake’s ancestors at important events in their lives. In 2008, Jake’s father Liam’s girlfriend leaves him and then lets him know she is pregnant. Later, doing a carpentry job, he has a serious accident.

In 1974, Liam’s mother Willow, an environmental activist, lives with Liam in her van and travels around sabotaging logging equipment.

In 1934, Everett, who makes a little money tapping and selling maple syrup, finds a baby hanging on a tree outside his cabin. Although he at first tries to give her away, he begins to think she’s in danger.

In 1908, two nine-year-old boys are the only survivors of a massive train wreck. When no one claims them, the town puts them in a cabin and provides the bare minimum of their needs, the boys growing up almost feral. The boys cannot remember their names, so the town calls them Harris and Everett Greenwood.

The novel is beautifully written and like The Overstory is concerned with trees and their impact on the world. Its descriptions of forests are lyrical. The plot itself is at times so involving as to read almost like a thriller. This is an unusual and absorbing novel.

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