In this taut, dystopian tale, an island nation ravaged by the Change has built an enormous concrete barrier around its coastline–the Wall. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls trapped amid the rising seas outside. A blend of the most compelling issues of our time–climate change, increasing fear, widening … divisions–The Wall is a suspenseful story of love, trust, and survival.
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An utterly persuasive story set in a dystopic future. Unputdownable. It’s 1984 for our times.
John Lanchester’s previous novels have all been memorable evocations of the world we’re familiar with, but The Wall is something new: almost an allegory, almost a dystopian-future warning, partly an elegant study of the nature of storytelling itself.
Great story, unexpected. I have spent many hours trying to configure this wall around England, or Germany or even the US.
An extraordinary book. The wall of the title is a wall that has been built around Britain’s coast to keep out ‘the others.’ Written in the first person, we follow the experience of new recruit Kavanagh who has just begun a tour of duty guarding the wall. Th ebook draws you right in as Lanchester skilfully allows the reader to experience the physical discomfort, boredom and apprehension Kavanagh experiences. We gradually learn more about the environment and political changes that have happened to bring about Fortress Britain. I’m reluctant to reveal more of the plot but there is certainly peril ahead for Kavanagh. The Wall is a great book and a timely warning to all of us.
This is the story of a soldier named Joseph Kavanagh who is working on the wall on his first tour of duty. The wall was put in place during “The Change” – rising sea levels are causing havoc. The wall was put in place to protect coastal England from “The Others” who threaten the land. If the soliders fail to defend the wall, they risk being put to sea as a punishment. (one Other in means one Soldier out).
For the most part, nothing happens – he spends his long days sitting in the cold, watching the sea. But the constant threat of The Others breaching the wall is there, and the elite have warned the soldiers that a big threat is coming. Everyone needs to be ready.
This book was terrible. Utterly terrible. First of all – the person that read it, read it like he was reading a mechanics manual. No inflection of voice – low, monotone reading. Just dull. Second of all – the story when no where. Truly nowhere. Nothing happened for 3/4 of this book. The story was ridiculously slow. No explanation or back story on how they got there, what caused the wall to finally go in place, who the Others truly are. I mean – they could have been zombies for all we knew, because they were not explained.
Some reviews said that this was a plus because it left the whole vision up to the readers imagination. I guess I can appreciate that to a point. But really to me it just seemed like a cop-out idea. Like “here is this Wall, here are these Others- I am not going to tell you anything about either – good luck”.
Don’t bother with this one. I should have quit it. Even the ending did not save the story, as I was hoping. I kept thinking that it was going to go somewhere. When in reality – it was just dull.
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.
A dystopian distillation of our troubled times and an allegorical glimpse at a still-grimmer future, The Wall reminds us that even as politics corrupts and destroys, the soul erupts in surprising places to act as counterpoint and resistance. This patient, direct, suspenseful novel is one such eruption, and a civilizing comfort amid the simmering bloodlust.
In The Wall, John Lanchester takes our current political climate to its terrible and logical extreme. A harrowing, brilliant, and troublingly plausible vision of the future.
A writer as funny as he is humane, John Lanchester has made a specialty of chronicling our contemporary descent into hell in the most charming possible way. This novel of life in the aftermath of climate change apocalypse is no exception. It is the scariest and most entertaining book I have read in a long time.
Book by book, John Lanchester proves himself one of our necessary writers, equal in wit, good nature, and fundamental sanity to whatever insane thing the new century throws at us. Like some lost work by George Orwell, The Wall reveals what’s in front of all our noses.
With The Wall, John Lanchester follows his mind-boggling financial essays and his great realist novel Capital with a bold science fiction fable, a vivid, swift, chilling, and ultimately beautiful human story.