An empire has collapsed from boredom and loss of faith in itself. In the Emergency that follows, youth rebellions of urban Burghers and rural Yeomen embrace radical new ideas of humanity. Doctor Hugo Rustin, chief surgeon at the Imperial College Hospital, is increasingly estranged from his city and his family. When an incident at the hospital leads to Rustin's disgrace, he seeks redemption in a quixotic and dangerous journey into the countryside, with Selva as his companion, just as the conflict between Burghers and Yeomen is reaching a crisis.
The novelistic world-building that sets up Packer’s empire is never especially vivid, but the system’s demise makes for some gruesomely absorbing stretches ... Packer undermines his novel of ideas by veering into too many disparate literary modes ... To a novel that starts out quite promisingly, the mash-up of literary modes eventually brings not range but entropy. There is a strong intelligence behind The Emergency, but Packer would have done well to take a further cue from Orwell by restricting his book to the atmospheric unity of Animal Farm or 1984. Over-the-top features — like the catapult that flings massive amounts of human excrement into the Burgher realm — only undermine his laudable intentions.
Every once in a while, a good dystopian novel strikes the perfect balance ... The Emergency is one of these novels. What Packer is trying to tell us about our world is neither too obvious nor too ambiguous. Despite the occasionally inhumane behavior portrayed in the novel, Packer usually approaches all of his characters with empathy, showing readers where we can do better ... It is a well-wrought, colorful and interesting story which asks us urgently to spend time with these questions and figure them out for ourselves — before it’s too late.
The first thing to say about The Emergency is that it is boring. It is not so much poorly written as indifferently written ... Ironically given the title, the novel lacks urgency; it is there to teach you something, entertainment be damned ... Everything in The Emergency has an obvious analogue to our own reality ... Indeed, if anything defines The Emergency, it is these ham-handed references ... Packer claims that he wrote The Emergency because he believes fables are a useful means to illuminate present politics. And The Emergency is useful, albeit not in the way Packer intended ... The Emergency is thus less of a novel than it is a confession: that liberalism has nothing useful left to say.
