John Lanchester

"The Wall" is a grimly plausible, deftly told, brilliantly narrated tale of what happens when we lock the rest of the world out to protect ourselves from climate change.

John Lanchester's"The Wall" is an extended metaphor for the direction Britain seems to be heading in. In a not too distant future, when the oceans have risen, beaches are a thing of the past and much of the world's population is homeless and or starving, Britain has built a massive wall around the island to lock out "The show more Others" who are desperate to make a life in Britain. The idea is grimly plausible and as hard to look away from as the scene of a car wreck.

When I bought "The Wall", I wondered whether the extended metaphor thing would work as a novel or whether it would feel too much like a didactic tool or a Cassandra-like warning. The warning is definitely there but most of my attention was on Joseph Kavanagh, a young man telling the story of his time as a Defender on The Wall and the things that happened to him afterwards.

In this society, every young person serves two years on the Wall as a Defender. Well, except for the Elite who are suspected of finding a way around such things. Defenders keep The Others out. Others who make it through the Wall, become Help, indentured servants whose children will be born as citizens. When If Others make it over the Wall, Defenders equal in number to the Others who made it through, are put out to sea in an open boat and banished.

Kavanagh is bright, observant, has a vague ambition to work his way up to the Elite, tends towards introspection and sometimes, even poetry. He describes the experience of the Wall as "Concrete. Sea. Sky". He educates us on the different kinds of cold you feel on the wall and how to survive a twelve-hour shift by learning to let time pass through you rather than trying to pass through time.

As he works his way through his two-year tour of duty on the Wall, he becomes a Defender. His fellow Defenders are his family. They share a bond that only ex-Defenders recognise.

Like his comrades, Kavanagh spends his time in the cold on the wall thinking about food and sex and what he'll do after the Wall. His routine is broken only by trips home to parents he can't communicate with. Parents who've never been on the Wall. Parents who are part of the generation whose choices caused the Change that raised the oceans and created the wall.

Kavanagh tells his story plainly in a way that is intimate and honest and also laden with a sense of doom and foreknowledge of regret. Even when he is describing combat, he is calm and untheatrical. This makes him easy to like and to identify with and gives what happens to him and the people around him an emotional impact stronger than the words he uses.

"The Wall" will make you think. It will also make you cry. I recommend it to you if you want a fresh, clear voice to help you explore a possible future as a warning to our present.

The audiobook version is narrated by Will Poulter, who gets the pacing and the tone exactly right and adds power to the text. show less

The irony! That Wall-demanding-America's parent -- settled by refugees from flooded Doggerland, and invaded, and invaded again, and again, and again, and again in prehistory, and again and again and again in historic times -- finally gets the idea to build a wall t0 keep out invading refugees. And what's walled-in is not worth protecting.

The genius of Lanchester's novel, as readers of The Debt to Pleasure or Mr. Phillips will expect, is how the story plays out through the perception of his show more narrator. In this case a not-too-bright conscript guarding the wall. His thoughts, absent the really extraordinary drama that does eventually come to him, don't run much deeper than the basest physicality: cold, hunger, avoiding punishment. For him, it's a bleak, grim world that he's pledged to save from unknowable "Others".

The Wall is a fine, atmospheric coming-of-age tale. Save it for summer reading at the beach. For the irony. show less

A first novel by a literary journalist, which looks suspiciously as though it was written in response to a drunken challenge to incorporate the essential elements of as many stereotypical British bestsellers as possible into a single story. Cookery with recipes and menus, middle-class English people in rural France, artists, romance, servants, boarding-school, cottages in Norfolk, social snobbery, food snobbery, and — oh yes, I nearly forgot — a body-count that would put Midsomer to show more shame. All ruthlessly sent up via an appalling, unreliable narrator, very clever and often wickedly funny. The only thing Lanchester seems to have forgotten is that a novel like this should have a clergyman in it somewhere. Purists might also be disappointed to find that there's only one small scene of canine interest.

I'm not much of a foodie, so I suspect I missed some of the more subtle jokes, but this is obviously meant as a parody of those novels where you get a recipe in every chapter: our helpful narrator Tarquin never quite gets all the way through the essential details of a recipe before being distracted into telling us about something else, and you would probably get into a terrible mess if you were so silly as to try to reproduce any of his menus.

When it first appeared, this would have been an ideal Christmas present for those pretentious friends or relatives who are always going on about their cottage in France and the little restaurants they have "discovered" there. By now they've probably read it already, unfortunately, and they are more worried about Brexit and their 90 days than about aubergines or cheeses, but it's still good fun for a couple of hours. show less

Kate and Jack have a happy middle class life and marriage until the day that Jack dies. Coming from the depths of grief Kate becomes aware of a popular Netflix show and is horrified to find that details of her marriage are portrayed in it. Phoebe is the writer of the show, relishing her success but worried about a follow-up. There is a link between them and it goes back many years but will Phoebe get the last laugh?
How fabulous a read is this? It starts as a portrait of a marriage, the smug show more middle-aged and middle class, then descends into a lovely description of grief and than blows up. Very cleverly plotted with a lovely twist at the end, I just felt that there was a real victim here and it wasn't either of the two protagonists. It's deliciously dark and very pointed. show less