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Book Reviewed by:The best-selling author of The Debt to Pleasure and Capital returns with a chilling fable for our time.
Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall - an enormous concrete barrier around its entire coastline. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and are a constant threat. Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself. Beset by cold, loneliness, and fear, Kavanagh tries to fulfill his duties to his demanding Captain and Sergeant, even as he grows closer to his fellow Defenders. A dark part of him wonders whether it would be interesting if something did happen, if they came, if he had to fight for his life…
John Lanchester - acclaimed as "an elegant and wonderfully witty writer" (New York Times) and "a writer of rare intelligence" (Los Angeles Times) - has written a taut, hypnotic novel of a broken world and what might be found when all is lost. The Wall blends the most compelling issues of our time - rising waters, rising fear, rising political division - into a suspenseful story of love, trust, and survival.
While The Wall might not provide any deep introspective examination of its subject matter, that simply doesn't seem to have been the goal. Instead, Lanchester offers an action-heavy excursion in an extreme environment with a protagonist that is brave, but also flawed and relatable. There's a lot to be said for a novel that is just plain fun to read...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
In John Lanchester's The Wall, protagonist Joseph Kavanagh is conscripted into military service to defend the titular wall against a breach by the "Others." The Others are not an invading army, however, but individuals displaced from their homes by some unnamed climate disaster. In the real world, as the effects of climate change become increasingly apparent and irreversible, it is not difficult to imagine a similar scenario in which areas of the Earth become virtually uninhabitable.
2017 was notably high in disasters that can be linked to climate change, including six hurricanes in the Atlantic, massive wildfires in the western U.S., and deadly record-breaking temperatures. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre cites a figure of ...
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Adelle Waldman
Like Kazuo Ishiguro's dystopian love story Never Let Me Go, The Wall is intelligent, emotionally layered, and suspenseful, a pleasure to read in spite of the bleak future in which it is set. I only wish that this richly imagined future didn't feel quite as plausible as it does at the moment.
