We have a flat affect narration of a guard who’s serving on wall duty in a future version of England, now enclosed by a high, wide coastal wall (it made me think of the walls I’d build for Age of Empires). He’s on a two year duty of two weeks on, two weeks off civil service. The wall must be protected from the Others, anyone not already part of the UK, and any others who are able to get over all the wall, must be balanced out by an equal number of guards and officers who should have kept them out. This book is about the fear, the tedium, the alienation, the dehumination of the experience.
I think it book would be hit and miss for a lot of people. Some reviews I read thought it was dry boring dystopia, and while it has dystopian elements, I didn’t really think about it as dystopian. Instead, I thought it was a modern version of a much smaller sub-genre of modernist text: the waiting on the wall books.
Here’s the list I thought of, and I am sure there are more out there, but these are the ones I’ve read: Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee, The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzatti, The Dead General’s Army by Ismail Kadare, The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric, and The Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq.
These are the books that make more sense to me as connections to this one than any dystopian book. This is less about a what if about the future or a failure of society, but more so about a failure of humanity and human connection. I also think it’s more a working metaphor for having any kind of capitalistic job, but I haven’t though through that one as well.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Novel-John-Lanchester/dp/1324001631/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1FZHKS4MF042L&keywords=the+wall+john+lanchester&qid=1574372436&sprefix=the+wall+john+%2Caps%2C128&sr=8-1)