A few years ago, marking essays for a class I taught on the city in literature, I was struck by the fact that most students wrote their final papers on post-apocalyptic cityscapes. I took to Facebook to vent my surprise: “What is going on with the youth?” I asked. A friend replied: “Dystopia is realism these days?”
Patrick Langley’s debut is this kind of book. A distinctly post-Brexit novel, it is set in an unnamed city that both is and isn’t London, thick with the atmosphere of the riots of 2011, and the stricken, devastated aura of the days after the Grenfell fire. It is oblique, and bleak: it is never quite clear what has happened or is happening, what is it about our world that has finally broken or overflowed. There is an army, people are being arrested, council blocks have fallen into disrepair. But why, and how? All we learn is this:
It happened slowly at first. The evenings grew eerily quiet. Fewer lights in the windows. Letters slid under doors. Court cases between tenants and landlords fizzled out in defeat for the former. Protests were quietly ignored. Families vanished, there one evening, gone the next. Men in hardhats and hi-vis waistcoats materialised, sealing the doors of freshly vacated flats with sheets of perforated metal. They cling-filmed the windows and poured concrete down the toilets. […] The word ‘decanting’ started floating around. The brothers came to believe that this was a gruesome form of industrialised murder.
But there is always a flutter of hope in the dark, and in Arkady it dwells in the unshakeable brotherly love between the novel’s two heroes, Jackson and Frank. Their relationship is so beautifully etched that it doesn’t matter that the world around them is roughly sketched. We encounter the brothers at various moments in their lives, beginning when they are young enough that Frank can’t yet walk and Jackson trundles him around in a duffel bag on wheels; their parents have just disappeared (their mother inexplicably, their father into police custody). They are brought to the city and left to fend for themselves, staying first with a man called Leonard, later in bedsits, and then eventually on an abandoned barge.
Frank likes to draw; Jackson likes to map, a psychogeographer on a bicycle riding through the edgelands and musing on the difference between “maps of ownership, maps of property, maps of power”, and the “other territories and signals [that] appear” to those who are paying attention: “an infinity of codes that dictate how the city is moved through, immaterial borders that constantly rise and fall and flux”. These unofficial maps might gesture at a route to freedom; at one point, during the lessons he gives his younger brother, Jackson asks Frank to draw a map of a place that doesn’t exist. On the wall of the barge’s cabin hangs a map of the canal waterways of the country, like a plan of all the possibilities of escape. The barge allows them to make their way north to another unnamed city, where a group of revolutionaries called the Red Citadel are organising protests and fighting the state. Jackson and Frank become associated with the cause, but feel a certain ambivalence about committing, as if the group were a slightly corrupt product of the corruption it’s meant to be fighting.
The barge, which they name the Arkady, is the motor of the book, heavy with symbolism and associations. Arkady refers to a man whom Frank “repeatedly draws, in notebooks and on corridor walls: a looming figure with a blank, faceless head”. The man is real, Frank says, and he comes to him in his dreams, “a strange protector or a vengeful foe”. Arkady: an imaginary or maybe real man who stands for a utopian place, Arcadia, the Eden of their family from which they have been thrown out, the green and pleasant land to which it seems this not-England will never return. Arkady is all at once father, place of origin, peace and impossible place.
“‘A boat is a floating piece of space’,” Jackson tells Frank, reading Foucault off his phone, “‘a place without a place, that exists by itself”. He’s reading Foucault’s essay on heterotopias. If the utopia is a non-place, an impossible place, the heterotopia is a counter-site, a place where all the places that can be found within the culture are “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted,” a kind of mirror of society in general.
The boat becomes a symbol of escape, but also of the burden that comes with freedom and choice. The final decision they must make on board is a reflection of what this kind of regime does to the people who live in it – there are no good choices, just bad ones and worse ones. In the end, the barge confirms itself to be a tool rather than a destination. The brothers can’t dwell in Arcadia; people need to be placed. Dystopia is dispelled wherever people insist on their organic connection to the land. The psychogeographers will inherit the Earth. Arkady suggests that we’ll build our own arcadias out of the dreams that haunt us, both threatening and protective.
• Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is published by Vintage. Arkady is published by Fitzcarraldo (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
