“It’s cold on the Wall.” What kind of story might be signalled by such an opening sentence? An adventure set in Roman Britain, perhaps – something by Rudyard Kipling or Rosemary Sutcliff, complete with centurions and mists over northern crags. Or a fable of the sort that Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino might have written: a sombre meditation on the correlation between civilisation and frontier systems, composed in the voice of a Confucian scholar exiled to the steppes, plangent with echoes of Chinese poetry. Most obviously, in 2019 any mention of a chilly wall with a capital W is bound to conjure up images of George RR Martin’s Night’s Watch, standing guard amid the snows of northernmost Westeros. Historical fiction, fable, fantasy: the wall is an image potent enough to serve the needs of an entire range of genres.
John Lanchester, in the first pages of his new novel, makes knowing play with this. It is not immediately clear where his wall is, nor why it should be so cold. A mention of trains and lorries is soon a signpost that we are not on Hadrian’s Wall, but beyond that the setting remains opaque. There are Captains, there are Sergeants, there are Corporals. Our narrator, it gradually emerges, is a man called Kavanagh, sent to the Wall for an obligatory two-year term of service. As a Defender, his duty is to stare out to sea, and keep watch for people referred to only as Others. Much hangs on his ability to spot them: for every Other who makes it across the Wall, a Defender will be expelled from the country, put out to sea on a boat. The ominous sense of jeopardy that this establishes hangs like a shadow over the entire book.
At this point in my review, however, I should issue a caveat. Even to write what I have written risks dissipating for readers the sense of dislocation that I – not having read any pre-publicity – felt as it gradually dawned on me what the setting for the novel actually was. Those who would like to share in the experience are strongly advised to look away now. Or perhaps, in the wake of a new year when the home secretary proclaimed a state of crisis after a few Iranians had tried to cross the Channel in dinghies, readers will already have guessed. Kavanagh, Lanchester lets slip, is serving on a stretch of the Wall called “Ilfracombe 4”. Clearly, he has been posted to Devon. Later, he is transferred to Scotland. The Wall, it turns out, is a great mass of concrete that girds the entire coastline of Great Britain.
This, as the clock ticks busily down to Brexit, might seem a pointed and timely satire. Lanchester, however, is not writing as a satirist; his ambitions are altogether more dystopian. Like The Time Machine or Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Wall packs its punch by extrapolating a terrifying future from present trends. As HG Wells did in The Time Machine, Lanchester portrays a world divided into two classes of people: those who still enjoy a modicum of civilisation, and those who have been excluded from it. As George Orwell did in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he portrays a Britain in which rights and liberties have been sacrificed for reasons that seem all too chillingly plausible. Lanchester’s horizons, though, are not merely British. No country – not even one immured behind concrete – is an island entire of itself. If The Wall is only incidentally a satire on Britain’s current political crisis, then that is because, viewed through the prism of Lanchester’s dystopian vision, Brexit itself is bound to appear incidental.
Kavanagh, gazing out to sea on the north Devon coast, knows perfectly well why he has to serve his time as a Defender. “Occasionally there would be some big-picture news about crops failing or countries breaking down or coordination between rich countries, or some other emerging detail of the new world we were occupying since the Change.” What has happened is evident from the besetting cold and the fact that Britain appears to have lost 2,000 miles of its coastline. The ice caps have melted; the Gulf Stream has switched; sitting on sandy beaches has become a thing of the past.
While in Britain much has been preserved from the ruin – there is still public transport, pubs are still open, people still go on holiday to the Lake District – elsewhere the effects of the “Change” have been more devastating. The whole world is on the move. “The Others are coming”: so a government official, visiting a training camp, warns Kavanagh and his fellow Defenders. “We have had years of relative peace and calm, but that time is now over. You will be busy.”
The Wall, then – for all its obvious echoes of Donald Trump and his own wall, of Viktor Orbán and his barbed wire fences, of Matteo Salvini and his refusal to allow ships carrying migrants into Italian ports – is ultimately no more focused on immigration than it is on Brexit. Both are cast as symptoms of its ultimate theme: climate change.
As an attempt to dramatise an existential threat that seems impossible for humanity properly to conceptualise, The Wall is a signal achievement. Lanchester’s talents as a novelist – his judicious blending of realism and metaphor, his remarkable ability to render tedium gripping, and his mastery of narrative tension – have been put to estimable use. The result is a novel that ranks alongside Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and the oeuvre of Kim Stanley Robinson as a fictional meditation on what climate change may mean for the planet. Even if its value as a work of prophecy is as yet unknowable, it will certainly provide future generations with a mirror held up to the anxieties and forebodings of the early 21st century.
For all that, though, The Wall also bears witness to something else: how difficult it is for even the most talented novelist to imagine the future in an original way. Echoes of other dystopias are everywhere. Humans, although not rendered sterile by the Change, have lost the will to breed: and so, as in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or PD James’s The Children of Men, are haunted by the dread of a terminal demographic collapse. Equally, those huddled behind their concrete fortifications live in fear of the opposite; anxiety about the teeming fertility of migrants has been a constant in apocalyptic fiction. Long before Jean Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints (1973), a novel about mass immigration to western Europe, Victorian novelists were imagining a time when population growth in Asia and Africa would, as Raspail put it, require Europeans to unleash “a rain of awful death to every breathing thing, a rain that exterminates the hopeless race”.
The Wall is, of course, no paean to racist or eugenicist fantasies – indeed, it is just the opposite – but it is sobering to reflect that the terms of dystopia should seem barely to have altered in a century and a half. This is not to criticise Lanchester, whose novel is so unsettling precisely because it goes so effectively with the grain of contemporary fears; but it is certainly to regret that our fears should seem so impossible to ease.
• Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind will be published later this year. The Wall is published by Faber. To order a copy for £9.99 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
