It is a bleak, Borgesian conceit and, though it is tempting to read the novel figuratively — as an allegory about global warming, or nativist isolationism, or Brexit — really, as Kavanagh himself is at pains to stress, the Wall should be understood literally ... quite different from anything [Lancaster] has written before and it is, I think, his best novel — though it has none of the sentence-by-sentence virtuosity of his earlier works. The story is told in flat, affectless prose, like that of JG Ballard in his pomp, but the overwhelming influence is the Kafka of The Trial and In the Penal Colony ... As with Kafka, though, it is hard to say what in the end it all might mean. The Wall could be about many things, but its real power stems from the fact that it never collapses into straightforward metaphorical equivalence. It asks only to be read on its own terms: as an unsettling, compulsive and brilliant portrait of powerlessness.
... if the novel succeeds only intermittently as a parable, it’s gripping as a story, especially when it leaves the Wall. As Lanchester puts distance between himself and his gigantic symbol, the plot grows less constrained, and the last hundred pages are full of tense action and sudden reversals that are mercifully unburdened by any allegorical significance. The result marks a step forward for Lanchester, a formidably intelligent author who has sometimes stumbled over his undeniable gifts ... For a certain type of realistic novelist, a shift to speculative fiction — which allows the writer to invent as well as observe — can be liberating. The Wall revels in this opportunity, but it occasionally falters under Lanchester’s decision ... The novel gathers momentum as it goes, and few readers will stop until they reach its final page.
As a parable, [the direction of the novel] is all highly relevant. As a novel, it’s fairly dull. Boredom is a hard state to portray effectively without succumbing to it. And Lanchester doesn’t have the chilling style of, say, Cormac McCarthy or the wry satire of Margaret Atwood, which could have charged this apocalyptic vision ... There are moments of excitement — incursions from those mysterious Others — but what the story really needs is a richer sense of this complex society ... Floating somewhere between realism and fabulism, The Wall doesn’t fully harness the benefits of either mode.
The Wall is a powerful thought experiment ... But a thought experiment is one thing, a novel quite another. Strangely for a storyteller of such poise and intelligence, Lanchester often seems unclear about exactly what kind of book he is writing. Is it a spare dystopian fable...or a work of full-fledged realism with a futuristic (or alternate-present) setting ... There is, on the one hand, a palpable excitement at having hit upon a scenario that so potently distills the existential threat facing humanity ... On the other hand, Lanchester appears to be of two minds about how much reality he ought to bestow on this fictional world, as though a surfeit of descriptive detail might smother the mythic force of his conceit ... The problem is that Lanchester never makes a decision. He is unwilling either to pare his book down into something more haunting and elliptical or to work it up into a narrative of convincing heft and complexity. The result is a sappy humanism conveyed in pale, prefab prose ... Lanchester may be on to something here, but a novel that merely confirms its readers’ progressive social values, however imperative they may be in a time of grotesque inequality and recrudescent chauvinism, is going to test the patience of all but the most ideologically immaculate.
Despite Lanchester’s affectless style, it is not tedious. As in making darkness visible, there is a skill in making the dull vivid ... a cracking adventure and an astute political fable ... Lancaster is a versatile writer ... The transparency of the book’s themes and style suggests that it is quite possible that he has deliberately chosen in The Wall to write a young adult novel rather than a complex literary fiction. This, anyway, is what he has done, and it is a very good one. Every secondary school library in the country needs to order a copy.
... an environmental fable that manages to be both disquieting and quite good fun at the same time ... It’s a clever, clairvoyant concept. Lanchester reveals with slow, steady control the cruelties of his strange new world and then socks you with their philosophical implications ... So why, then, is The Wall a little unsatisfying? One problem is that it’s not nearly strange enough – the ambient unease rarely trickles down to a human level ... The Wall suffers from some of the same flaws [as Lanchester’s last novel, Capital]: underdeveloped characters, particularly the women, a lack of convincing detail and an overly schematic plot.
Lanchester deploys a brisk, minimal version of the conventions for establishing dystopian worlds ... If it doesn’t quite form a satisfactory whole, maybe it’s because the characters and the prose are numb and functional, which is in keeping with their world, but rather prevents the story coming to life. The novel becomes an adventure that is too grown-up to give the reader conventional narrative thrills, but not quite original enough to offer something more nourishing: at its weakest, it is like reading a disappointingly flat version of the trashy Kevin Costner film Waterworld. Even so, Lanchester’s fictional world is intelligently conceived and dourly impressive ... The Wall certainly sticks in the mind: it is a resonant addition, from out of left field, to the growing body of Brexit literature.
The cataclysms that have dominated our shared experiences over the past year—be they political, epidemiologic, or environmental—bring near-future fiction so much closer to daily experience. That should improve our reception of the bevy of literature that braids political, science, and climate futures together, the niche to which novelist and essayist John Lanchester’s The Wall belongs ... The narration and dialogue are smooth, from the lexicon of life on the Wall ... The Wall is a book squarely for our time: set a few minutes after a hypertrophied Brexit with an industrial dose of the nativism that is more familiar to American readers. The dystopian conceit is a zero say-do gap where policy is manifest in the most literal and stark proportions. It’s not a new trick, but in Lanchester’s hands, The Wall shows how calamity cannot cleave politics from environmentalism. They are fused as much for Kavanaugh as for anyone mired in a global pandemic that started as a viral spillover from other species. This novel is necessary reading for citizens of the new normal—because, as much as we may wish otherwise, we’re all in the same boat.
As the novel segues into a survivalist sea story that never quite lives up to the promise of the first two-thirds, it hits you that Lanchester has more or less inverted the premise of last year’s Booker-shortlisted Exit West, Mohsin Hamid’s speculative fantasy about borderless migration, in which black portals mysteriously open up around the globe. The Wall is the bleaker book, yet it’s infinitely less solemn, in part because of its chatty, pithy voice, recognisable from Lanchester’s journalism ... to whom exactly is Kavanagh explaining how his world works? It’s a question that recurs as the novel progresses. Lanchester provides a solution, folded into an elegant sign-off, but it feels a bit of a cop-out in view of the grim future he’s outlined. Then again, if The Wall is even half right, maybe artistic quandaries are going to be the only type we can reasonably expect novelists to solve.
Like The Time Machine or Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Wall packs its punch by extrapolating a terrifying future from present trends ... 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 ... [the] novel is so unsettling precisely because it goes so effectively with the grain of contemporary fears...
Lanchester sometimes makes his points too obviously, and, oddly, as the goriness quotient increases, the dramatic tension sometimes flags. But The Wall is nonetheless a chilling reminder of the ease with which myopia can turn to dystopia.
The Wall, in its way, is impeccably crafted. Its prose is spare. Its plot is unadorned. Its dystopian atmospheric touches are effective. It moves along at a good pace, and its set pieces — nighttime battles, uneasy encounters between active military personnel and ordinary citizens — feel movie-script ready. At the same time, the book is too abstract to deliver the full-fledged cautionary nightmare Lanchester seems to have intended ... Compared to the panoramic splendor of [Lanchester's] recent masterpiece, Capital... The Wall feels like thin stuff. Readable stuff, even page-turning stuff — but not fully satisfying ... The Wall succeeds as a novel about military camaraderie and the pain of betrayal when it occurs. It vividly evokes the all-in-the-same-boat spirit that develops when young men and women are stuck in the middle of nowhere with tedium as big a problem as an invisible threat ... [The book] has action. It has surprises. But it doesn’t dive as fully into its speculative world as one might wish.
The conceit of The Wall is simple, and the rules are straightforward. Yet Lanchester spends a lot of time discussing the daily minutiae of life there...By contrast, the main characters’ inner lives receive less attention, leaving readers with little insight into their pasts, their hopes, or their impulses. For this reason, The Wall is best read as an exploration of the immediate consequences and logical implications of a punitive border machine ... Lanchester is at his best when he examines this dystopia through the lens of class and privilege ... While The Wall is a work of dystopian fiction, it contains all the ingredients of his intensively researched nonfiction ... Lanchester deserves praise for telling a story of climate change and migration in the speculative mode at a time when reality itself can seem like a dystopia.
Apparently, Lanchester has succumbed to passivity too. He assigns to Kavanaugh such a low-key narrative voice that the man seems little more interesting than the barren expanse he daily surveys — concrete wall, sky and sea. The author evokes boredom so well that the reader has to slap himself to avoid nodding off ... The woman who becomes Kavanaugh’s lover is a faceless cipher, a character without defining characteristics. So, too, is the nation in which the story takes place ... If only the author were more committed to creating vibrant characters than scolding his readers. And we know he can do that.
... The Wall offers a distinctly bureaucratic, but no less terrifying, vision of a future Britain after environmental catastrophe ... It would be easy to dismiss The Wall as a sort of post-apocalyptic thought experiment, a “what-if” that is unlikely ever to happen. But some of its elements sidle awfully close to arguments and apprehensions that already characterize our present-day discourse ... Chilling reminders... about all that’s at stake in the face of climate change are, in the end, just as horrifying as the scenes of bloody conflict that punctuate the book—and they are what make The Wall essential reading for anyone who cares about the planet’s future.
Lanchester’s view is unblinking, his prose assured, a matter of 'if' and 'then' This is what happens when the sea rises, this is what happens when an outsider lands in a place where life has little meaning and the only certain things are the Wall, the cold, the water, and death ... Dystopian fiction done just right, with a scenario that’s all too real.
