Well, what else could they write about?
(...)
Dystopian novels crowd the shelves this spring. From Dave Eggers comes The Parade (Hamish Hamilton), in which two men known only as Four and Nine are tasked with building a great road connecting the two halves of a nation recovering from a nameless but dreadful conflict. Debut novelist Ben Smith enters the scene with Doggerland (Fourth Estate), a haunting story set on a huge wind farm in some unspecified time after climate disaster has rendered most of what was once the landscape uninhabitable and survivors are in thrall to an organisation known only as the Company. John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall (Faber & Faber) marries climate catastrophe to paranoia about being overrun by foreigners.
Two very different novels weave dystopia with hints of the spirit world: in Last Ones Left Alive (Tinder Press) the Irish writer Sarah Davis-Goff, co-founder of the fine independent publisher Tramp Press, imagines a post-apocalyptic Ireland stalked by a zombie-like menace, the skrake. Her heroine, Orpen, must fight to survive. Ben Okri’s The Freedom Artist (Head of Zeus) is a quest novel: in a world similar to but not the same as our own, a young woman disappears after asking a question; her lover goes in search of her, seeking justice but finding none. Later this year will come The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. That novel, first published in 1985, has, courtesy of the television adaptation, found a whole new audience in the era of Trump, #MeToo and Islamic State.
It’s tempting to try to sort these novels thematically. There are political dystopias, climate dystopias, digital dystopias...
