The Wall: A Novel Paperback – March 17, 2020

NO SPOILER REVIEW:Characters were bland. Dialogue was very amateur and robotic at times. The story itself seemed interesting until it got repetitive. By page 5. Paragraph after paragraph describing the same idea. And then revisiting it again on the next page. This book could have been 100 pages shorter. The exciting "Oh ****" moment happens almost identically at least 4 times throughout the book. The background events to the story were never explained well and the story abruptly ends with no conclusion. I couldn't have been more disappointed.

I'm a great fan of John Lanchester's nonfiction (especially his essays in The New Yorker and the LRB). He's a master stylist with a gift for explaining seemingly dull or abstruse subjects in lively prose. Until now I've been less impressed by Lanchester's fiction, but The Wall is a sturdy and disquieting dystopian novel that deserves a wide readership. It's an unpreachy parable and a post-apocalyptic coming-of-age story that gradually picks up speed and significance as it moves away from the wall.

The novel hitting stores in 2019 has a promising start, and is appropriately appropriate given our socio-eco-political environment dominated by Boris Trump - Brexit and the US Mexican wall.I listened rather than read. The fact that I found the narrator to have a rather annoying voice - slightly whiny with not much variation in pitch influenced my view of the novel.Monotonously monotone.Parts 1 and 2 were good and held my attention. Part 1 is about life on a wall that surrounds Britain to keep the rising water and the wannabe refugees (“The Others”) out.At times I was reminded of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians” though this level rises nowhere near the heights and subtleties of Coetzee’s novel.The main character is a “Defender” working on The Wall to watch for breaches by The Others.It’s a horrible life but he gets through it till Part 2 when trouble breaks out.Forced to leave Britain (I can’t tell more without giving the plot away) Part 3 is about life at sea in the post-apocalyptic world.The novel ends unconvincingly with the main character and his lover managing to survive.The main problems I found was the narrator’s boring voice and the lack of a supporting cast of characters. There are some, but their depictions are shallow and we don’t get to know them at all.Good to read if you aren’t yet sick of dystopian novels and want to be lulled to sleep by the narrator - and prose.Yes it’s boring on The Wall.

Three components charge this story: North Korean styled justice, Western neurosis, and generational divide.The allegory unfolds in a gripping way, so it's best not to divulge details in a review. The quality of the author's writing is truly superlative. It might be the only work of (amazing) fiction that for me did not require a pause and rereading of some sentence. Part of this is the avoidance of any pronouns without a clear antecedent, a most aggravating flaw in most writing and familiar speech in our language. The result is the most graceful dystopian story perhaps ever done.

Read this in one 24-hour period, despite lukewarm reviews here. Interesting how many readers responded to this book so negatively...! It’s also interesting to me that climate change is somehow characterized as a political (liberal) position by many in our society. There are no political ideas espoused in this book. It’s posited on the idea that a cataclysm of some kind caused sea levels to rise, not by a few inches, but by many feet. I’m willing to accept this as a premise, not least because I also happened to be reading The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, so I was in a climate change kind of mindset. I don’t really need an explanation of how the cataclysm happened, and the “why” is pretty apparent. And that’s a different book—-there are loads of books explaining the why of climate change, if you can take absorbing incredibly terrifying ideas. This book starts with a set of premises that the reader is asked to accept, kind of like Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, and many other speculative fiction books. The story is told without undue extra information, focuses on one person’s story. The narrative highlights the emotions of despair and loss, focusing on the extreme conditions—-life without fire, exposed to the elements, and with food and water a constant concern could be MUCH more uncomfortable than most of uS, reading in our comfortable heated living rooms with electric lights and leftovers in the refrigerator and no armed pirates trying to steal our food and water, want to acknowledge. The reality of climate change has always seemed too big to get my mind around, too hopeless for one person to be able even imagine how to respond. Recycling seems kind of pointless. But this dramatization of how we might end up helped me imagine one possible scenario, and not even a worst case scenario. In the worst case, life on earth is reduced by 90 some percent, as has occurred five times in the past. After reading these two books, one scientific nonfiction and this book, the story of one human being reduced to primitive circumstances and struggling to survive, I feel like it’s time to join whatever forces out there are fighting climate change. For that reason alone, I’m glad I read it. Docked one star because it ends too soon, and unsatisfactorily.

This is an excellent read in what I understand is now called "cli fi" - a genre of books about climate change. It is a dystopian book, but not one without hope. The main character is a very ordinary young man in a future Britain that has been walled up to keep out the rising sea and the 'others'. The character develops and becomes politicised by his circumstances and this interchange with his fellow citizens in this limited world. While the theme may sound familiar it is a well-written book and one which generated a good deal of discussion at our book club.

This is one of those books that are so absorbing that you realise all other tasks are going to have to be set aside until your get to the end of it. I could not put this book down and was totally engrossed in the story of a dystopian world where there appeared to have been some sort of global environmental disaster which left the few habitable areas available being resolutely guarded to prevent invasion by a population stranded and abandoned to a life on the oceans. In the British Isles, this has been achieved by the construction of a concrete wall around the length of the coast which is guarded by Defenders who are conscripted to carry out a two year tour of duty. The novel deals with once such Defender called Kavanagh and chronicles the monotony of his first day through to his ultimate encounter with the "Others" - the would be immigrants. = A large part of the reason why this book is so successful is that the prose is lean and there is a lack of detail which makes the premise difficult to challenge. I think the banality of Kavanagh's life and the mundane nature of much of what he witnesses makes this novel seem hugely credible. Comparisons have justly been made with Orwell's "1984" but I also felt that there were just as many parallels with Eric Maria Remarque's "All quiet on the Western Front." The accounts of life on various stretches of the wall remained the most compelling element of the story and the landscape described is redolent of many of the concrete structures hastily assembled in the advent of World War Two. If you like, this is version of the British Isles which is totally alien with it's absence of beaches but also familiar in many other respects. Ultimately, Kavanagh's circumstances start to change and the politics the concern the governance of the country see his fortunes fluctuate as his dreams are undermined by an unlikely source. Some of the reviews have suggested that the book is ultimately let down by it's ending but I felt that the circumstances were such that the conclusion was the only satisfying ending that would have maintained the credibility. I held my attention through to the last page.It waits to be seen whether this book has the longevity of Orwell's "1984" which has the benefit of being able to be considered through the lens of whatever generation is reading it. If you like, it contains universal truths which will always be relevant. "The Wall" is very much a topical piece of writing and certainly "on message" for our times. As long as we fail to address the effects of climate change, I think John Lanchester's book will remain relevant. I thoroughly recommend this book.

A quick read. Written from the key character's point of view giving insight in his and the world at that time. Spoiler alert: Irony of the "outsider" being an "insider". And, the very structure - an ocean oil rig - that symbolizes the root of the downturn and the salvation for the two characters.

Disappointed.. language is very slow

I am not a novel reader and yet when l started this l knew there was a long and twisting road ahead which would keep me glued to the text. I was shattered by the last lines as we know “they survived “ but how? That’s when your imagination will take over.

Empathy essentially means understanding the feelings of another. In 'The Wall' main characters are forced to understand the feelings of the Others, as they have to become an Other. Firstly, Lanchester forces the reader to empathise with defenders on the walls of Europe (what right do they have to come there?), and secondly with refugees (what right do they have to keep them out?). In creating his dystopian world, Lanchester strengthens empathy for refugees, and addresses the dialogue concerning global warming and immigration in Europe, but most importantly the discourse of the United Kingdom.