THE WALL

by John Lanchester

Published in hardback by Faber & Faber, £17.99 (ebook £12.99)

John Lanchester is probably best known for his novels Mr Phillips and Capital, which addresses in fictional form some of the fallout from the banking crisis. With The Wall, he’s written a grimly absorbing dystopian novel set in a very near and recognisable future, where the threats of global warming and anti-immigrant nationalism have been pushed to bleakly credible extremes. We understand that an environmental crisis – known as The Change – has devastated the planet, making refugees of much of the global population and causing surviving territories like Britain to barricade themselves against intrusion. Our narrator Kavanagh is a young man doing his compulsory two-year tour of duty on The Wall, a forbidding fortified rampart that runs the length of the British coast in order to keep out the homeless of the world. Lanchester vividly details the privations of life on the Wall, where the forbidding cold and the stretches of arid waiting can be interrupted at any moment by an attack from The Others, who have some basic weapons and know they are not welcome. As well as Them and Us, there is a divide between Young and Old, since Kavanagh’s generation holds their parents’ generation responsible for unleashing cataclysm on the world through their selfishness and irresponsibility. It’s a boldly simple idea, executed with great single-minded purpose and economy. The ending is one which will have some readers pondering for a while, but that’s no criticism of a book that will stay with you long after you’ve finished it.

RATING: 8/10