Margaret Atwood – Blood and Porridge

February 28, 2024March 1, 2024

The magnificent Seven Moons

© Sort Of Books

I’ve just realised that over the past year or so I’ve coincidentally read five novels that were winners of Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize. The first four I read are as follows, ranked in descending order of greatness:

Very good: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which won the Booker in 2020. Inevitably, being about alcoholism, betrayal and homophobia in economically-ravaged, 1980s Glasgow, it’s a tough read. One thing I found oddly depressing about it is how it reminded me of a time, not so long ago, when everyone from 15 years upwards seemed to have dentures.

Good: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, joint-winner in 2019. Atwood is always decent value, but this follow-up to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite have the same punch. Partly this is because, as a sequel, it’s less ideas-driven than the original. Partly it’s because The Testaments dares to have a happy ending. But it’s certainly interesting to see Aunt Lydia get a redemptive arc.

Okay: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner in 2013. Parts of this 19^th-century, New Zealand-set murder mystery were engrossing, but with 832 pages and what felt like a cast of thousands – well, dozens – my interest was inevitably going to flag in places. Still, kudos to Catton for constructing a novel that’s positively Dickensian in its size and ambition.

Tedious bollocks: The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis, winner in 1986. Geriatric, right-wing Welsh windbags make fools of themselves in a gentrified version of 1980s Wales that I suspect only ever existed in Kingsley Amis’s imagination.

But for me the best of the lot was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka, which netted the Booker in 2022 and which I finished reading the other day. No doubt I’m biased and have an advantage when it comes to this novel. It’s set in Colombo and I lived in that city for eight years myself, which makes me familiar with much of the book’s geography, cultural references and historical context, to say nothing of the cynical and self-deprecating Sri Lankan humour that pervades its pages. That sense of humour, by the way, is one of the things I now miss most about the place.

But even if you’re not acquainted with Sri Lanka when you open the book, I suspect you’ll be impressed by Seven Moons – at least, if you give it a chance to draw you in. Karunatilaka’s work veers from the exuberantly fantastical to the grimly realistic, from the hilarious to the horrific, from the vauntingly highbrow to the cheerfully lowbrow, from the sublime to the ridiculous, sometimes within the space of one page.

The novel takes place in the late 1980s and begins with titular character Maali Almeida experiencing the end of his physical existence, as a human, and the start of his ephemeral existence, as a ghost. He finds himself in a weird, netherworld version of Colombo, where he can see, but not interact with, the living, but where ghosts and other supernatural beings mill about too – the more adept of them have mastered the neat trick of travelling around on the winds. The spectral bureaucracy that processes the newly deceased urges him to continue onto the proper afterlife, which is only open to him for the next seven nights, or seven moons, of his passing.

But Maali is more concerned with hanging around and finding out the details of his death. Suffering from a sort of Post-Death Stress Disorder, he can’t remember how it happened. As he was a war photographer when he was alive – 1980s Sri Lanka being in the throes of civil war – it’s likely he was murdered. And the reason for his murder was likely some sensitive photographs he took that could have serious consequences for one of the country’s top politicians.

Half-murder-mystery, half-phantasmagorical-adventure, the story rattles along with Maali trying to overcome his limitations as a ghost and find a way of communicating with the two people he was closest to when he was alive, his ‘official’ girlfriend Jaki and his ‘unofficial’ boyfriend DD – Maali was a gay man in a time and place where it was probably safer to stay closeted – with the ultimate aim of solving the mystery of his death and securing the important photographs.

Along the way, he encounters all manner of eccentrics, misfits and miscreants. In the living world, there are crooked politicians, crooked policemen, dodgy NGO workers, dodgy journalists, arms dealers, torturers, ‘garbage collectors’ (the goons who dispose of the bodies of those eliminated during the government’s dirty war against real and imagined dissent) and an unhelpful clairvoyant called the Crow Man. In the ethereal world, there are ghosts, ghouls and yakas (demons from Sri Lankan mythology), including one embittered spirit, a murdered Marxist called Sena, who’s assembling an army of the dead whilst trying to figure out a way, intangible though he is, of violently striking back at his still-living tormentors and executioners.

From wikipedia.org / © Deshan Tennekoon

Seven Moons‘s allegory about the victim of a senseless war trying to make sense of it on the other side, as a ghost, could come across as heavy-handed. But Karunatilaka invests the fantastical elements of his narrative with the exactly the right amounts of absurdity and bemusement. It’s no surprise that he lists Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut in the book’s acknowledgements. Again, the humour has a distinctly local flavour. For example, the celestial sorting office where Maali, deceased, finds himself at the beginning is conceptually like something from Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger’s classic movie A Matter of Life and Death (1945), but its chaotic nature feels pretty Sri Lankan. Anyone who’s ever tried to get their EPF (Employees’ Provident Fund) from the Department of Labour off Kirula Road will understand.

Meanwhile, a famous quote by legendary science-fiction author and long-term Sri Lankan resident Arthur C. Clarke could be the blueprint for Karunatilaka’s vision of Colombo, overrun with the souls of the dead: “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” In the midst of the spectral mayhem, Maali refers to Clarke’s quote and adds, “You look around you and fear the great man’s estimate might have been conservative.”

At the same time, the fantasy in no way diminishes the book’s accounts of the horrors perpetrated during the Sri Lankan Civil War. This was when the government wasn’t locked in a struggle just with the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who wanted a separate Tamil state but were “prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this”, but also with the JVP, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, who wanted “to overthrow the capitalist state” but were “willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.” These organisations and others – including the STF, the Special Task Force, the government’s abduction, torture and execution squad – are listed and described in a passage near the beginning, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with the country back then. It comes with the advice: “Don’t try and look for the good guys ‘cause there ain’t none.”

In one interview, Karunatilaka observed that bleak though things have been in Sri Lanka during its recent economic crisis, brought about by the corrupt and idiotic mismanagement of the Rajapaksa regime, the situation doesn’t come close to how it was in the war-torn 1980s. “I’ve no doubt many novels will be penned against Sri Lanka’s protests, petrol queues and fleeing Presidents. But even though there have been scattered incidents of violence, today’s economic hardship cannot be compared to the terror of 1989 or the horror of the 1983 anti-Tamil pogroms. We all pray it stays that way.”

One other thing I enjoyed about Seven Moons is how it captures the odd, hybrid culture that young people in 1980s Colombo must have inhabited – at least, the more affluent, English-speaking ones, of whom Maali is an example. Mixed in with the Sri Lankan cultural references are the expected ones from America – Elvis Presley is prominent and Maali seems to have a hankering for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Of course, looming over the whole novel is the shadow of that most 1980s-feeling of Hollywood movies, the Demi Moore / Patrick Swayze schmaltz-a-thon Ghost. (Though I’ve just checked and discovered it wasn’t a 1980s movie. It came out in 1990.)

British culture – due no doubt to the colonial connection – gets a look-in too, with mentions of Yorkshire Television’s durable lunchtime legal-drama show Crown Court (1972-84), the BBC’s rickety but impressively downbeat space opera Blake’s Seven (1977-81) and cheesy but popular Welsh retro-rocker Shakin’ Stevens.

But most amusing is Maali’s love of bombastic British rock-pop band Queen and their flamboyant singer, the late Freddie Mercury. I found it hilarious that – watch out, spoilers approaching! – one of the plot’s main MacGuffins turns out to have been concealed inside the sleeve of Queen’s universally derided 1982 album Hot Space. It’s the perfect hiding place. Because no one in their right mind would ever dream of opening the sleeve of Hot Space.

© EMI / Elektra

August 8, 2023August 8, 2023

No fool like an old fool

© Vintage Classics

The death of Martin Amis on May 19^th this year brought forth a glut of media tributes that often included the claim he was the ‘greatest British novelist of his generation’. I have to say that’s not something I agree with. However, it did remind me that one generation before Martin Amis’s heyday, his father, Kingsley Amis, was also commonly feted as a major figure in British letters.

Neither was I greatly impressed by Amis Senior, although that’s no doubt an unfair opinion because, until recently, I’d read only one literary work by him. (I have also read a couple of Kingsley Amis novels that were classified as ‘genre’ fiction, and therefore not worthy of serious consideration by Britain’s snobby literary establishment, but I’ll talk about those later.) That book was his 1954 satire Lucky Jim, which I found awkwardly dated and, for a satire, not very funny. Yes, all literature is of its time, but good literature doesn’t feel dated the way that Lucky Jim did. And most books I’ve read by Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Graham Greene, contemporaries of Amis whom I do admire, don’t feel dated that way either.

That said, I was always keen to read Amis’s 1986 novel The Old Devils. Partly this was because its basic scenario, about a bunch of boozy, cantankerous Welshmen and Welshwomen refusing to grow old gracefully and instead doing so disgracefully, sounded like one I could identify with. Various people have accused me of being boozy and cantankerous and disgraceful in my old age too. Admittedly, I’m not Welsh, but I’m from an Irish-Scottish background, which is surely the next best thing. And in its day, The Old Devils received much praise. It prompted Anthony Burgess, for example, to say of Amis: “There is one old devil who is writing better than he ever did.” And in its year of publication, The Old Devils won the Booker Prize. So it had to be good. Right?

Well I’ve just read the book, and… Wrong.

But first, here’s the plot, such as it is. A small, tight-knit group of married couples live in the town of Dinedor in southwest Wales. There’s the frail, beleaguered literary scholar Malcolm and his wife Gwen; the greatly-overweight retired engineer and one-time lecturer Peter and his wife Muriel; the seriously alcoholic and panic-attack-prone restauranteur Charlie and his wife Sophie; plus a few associates. If I haven’t described the women in detail, there’s a reason for that, as we’ll see. The men spend their time in a snug-room of the local pub, the Bible and Crown. The room’s decorated with memorabilia from the Dinedor Squash Racquets Club, which they’d been members of in their long-ago primes. The women devote themselves to a circuit of get-togethers at each other’s houses where cups of coffee rapidly give way to ‘one-and-a-half-litre bottles of Soave Superiore’ and the air soon fills with a fug of cigarette smoke.

The routineness and predictability of their existence is disrupted by the return of Alun and Rhiannon. They are members of the gang who relocated decades before to London, where Alun has done very well as a TV presenter. In particular, he’s become a ‘professional Welshman’, fronting shows about his home country that paint a mythologised and caricatured picture of it, and also establishing himself as an expert on an influential Welsh poet called Brydan. (Brydan is clearly based on Dylan Thomas, whom Amis once dismissed as “an outstandingly unpleasant man who cheated and stole from his friends and peed on their carpets.”)

Back living in Dinedor, Alun and Rhiannon soon stir the emotional pot. Firstly, Rhiannon has a history with Peter. He ‘wronged’ her while he was a young lecturer and she a student, and he’s still tormented by guilt about it. Also, the meek Malcolm has always secretly carried a torch for her and finds his old feelings bubbling up again. But Alun’s impact is more immediately dramatic. He’s a randy old goat and, before long, his insatiable carnal hunger has him cuckolding his supposed mates left, right and centre.

And that’s about it. The book mostly held my interest for the first 200 or 250 pages – it’s nearly 400 pages long – but eventually I realised how meandering and predictable the plot was. The likely climax would involve one of the male characters popping his clogs, either Malcolm with his general infirmity, Peter with his obesity, or Charlie with his alcoholism and panic attacks. Or indeed Alun, who despite his obvious, continuing virility has been subject to brief but worrying ‘funny turns’. My prediction proved correct, but I won’t say who snuffs it at the end. Meanwhile, the female characters are sketched with a perfunctory sameness – world-weary, gossipy, bitchy, chain-smoking, wine-guzzling – and even late in the book I was having problems telling them apart and remembering which marriages they were in.

The one female character Amis draws distinctly is Rhiannon, since she’s got baggage with Peter and Malcolm, the former regretful about his past treatment of her, the latter still worshipping her. The book’s most heartfelt part is where Malcolm persuades her to go for a drive with him, around some of their old hangouts during their youth, when he was close to her and hopeful of getting closer. Needless to say, and sadly for Malcolm, Rhiannon doesn’t remember them with anything like the same clarity.

It’s here that we get a jolting reminder that these characters, for all their affairs, dissolution and bad behaviour, are actually old. Rhiannon retreats into the ladies’ toilet of a restaurant, where she gets “down to work on her falsies,” i.e., picking tomato seeds from the meal she’s just had out of her dentures: “…she straightened to her full height, shook back her hair and did her best in the way of putting on an important, haughty expression… the idea was to give herself a head start, an improved chance of facing down anyone who might presume to come barging in and find the sudden sight of an old girl with her teeth in her hand somehow remarkable, or embarrassing…”

Mind you, given the time, false teeth might not be a sign of elderliness. I’ve recently finished reading another Booker prize-winner, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, which was published in 2020 but set like The Old Devils in the 1980s. That book’s a reminder of the astonishing fact that not so long ago, in Britain, many people believed it was desirable to get every tooth pulled out of their heads at as early an age as possible.

© From artinfiction.wordpress.com

Anyway, Amis portrays his male characters more vividly. But it’s hard to like them, especially as they’re such a moaning and reactionary shower of old farts. For one thing, they spend a lot of their time whinging about everything has changed for the worse. Now admittedly, the belief that modern life is rubbish seems an inescapable trait of growing old. Well, I should know… But you don’t feel much sympathy for them when they start discussing politics and have “a lovely time seeing who could say the most outrageous thing about the national Labour Party, the local Labour Party, the Labour-controlled county council, the trade unions, the education system, the penal system, the Health Service, the BBC, black people and youth… They varied this with eulogies of Ronald Reagan, Enoch Powell, the South African government, the Israeli hawks and whatever his name was that ran Singapore.”

Elsewhere, we hear how Alun “dreamt that Mrs Thatcher had told him that without him her life would be a mere shell, an empty husk…” That actually sounds like one of Kingsley Amis’s real-life wet dreams, as he once described the dreaded Maggie as “one of the best-looking women I had ever met… The fact that it is not a sensual or sexy beauty does not make it a less sexual beauty…”

In my view, British life did change and take a definite turn for the worse in the 1980s, with Thatcher’s Conservative government abandoning traditional industries and ushering in mass unemployment, squandering oil revenues from the North Sea, and basically marketizing and monetarising everything. The latter policy included selling off publicly-owned infrastructure to the highest bidders, the legacy of which is the terrible transport system, sewage-filled rivers and exorbitant energy bills that bedevil Britain in 2023. From Thatcher onwards, for a party that called themselves Conservatives, they weren’t very good at conserving anything, which makes Amis’s right-wing-Tory characters’ bellyaching about everything going to the dogs sound hollow. Still, Thatcher won the Falklands War in 1982 and emasculated the unions, which I suppose was good enough for them.

That brings me to my other bone of contention with The Od Devils. Its characters spend a lot of time prattling on about being Welsh, but they don’t feel very Welsh. They don’t come across like any Welsh person I’ve ever met, either on a cultural level – for instance, there’s barely a mention of the country’s beloved sport of rugby – or on a political one. Okay, they’re Tories, so you’d expect them to be dismissive of Wales’s main political traditions, exemplified by the likes of Labour’s Aneurin Bevan, Jim Callaghan and Neil Kinnock, the Liberals’ David Lloyd George, and Plaid Cymru’s Gwynfor Evans, and they carp about the ineptitude of local Labour politicians and describe the Welsh nationalists as ‘c*nts’. But you’d expect the trauma of Wales’s 1980s industrial decline – following the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, for instance, 25,000 Welsh miners lost their jobs in pit closures – to register at least a little on their radar. It doesn’t, though.

I knew plenty of Scottish Tories back in the 1980s who, while they thought Thatcher was the bees’ knees and regarded themselves as loyal subjects of Her Majesty and the Union Jack, saw themselves too as Scottish to the core. Maybe some of this was a pose – tartan, whisky, golf, Burns’s poetry – but deep down they seemed to have a genuine love for Scotland’s traditions and fiercely supported the country in its cultural and sporting endeavours. I suspect these dual loyalties had often been forged by military experience during their youth, when they’d proudly served in Scottish regiments whilst also fighting for Britain.

But I didn’t get that feeling with Amis’s characters here. It’s like they’ve been transplanted from the English Home Counties, with Welshness slathered over them like the trappings of some prestigious club-membership they can show off and banter about, but underneath means nothing to them – unless, as with Alun, it can be turned into money. And there’s little or no talk in the book of World War II. Given the book’s setting and the characters’ ages, shouldn’t this have been a big thing for them? Wouldn’t the men have served in the Welsh regiments?

So, The Old Devils neither impressed me as a book nor convinced me as a representation of life in Wales nearly 40 years ago. Indeed, when I look at what else was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 1986, I find it mind-melting that this beat both Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and Margaret Atwood’s prescient The Handmaid’s Tale to the title. And it won’t improve my opinion of Amis as a writer of mainstream literary fiction. However, I’ll qualify that by saying that as a genre writer, I’ve enjoyed his output. I highly rate both his James Bond pastiche Colonel Sun (1968) and his supernatural novel The Green Man (1968). If only old Kingsley had written more spy and ghost stories, and crime, horror and science-fiction ones too…

Meanwhile, as the antics of Alun, Malcolm, Peter and co. increasingly set my teeth on edge, I found myself thinking of something my Dad liked to say: “There’s no fool like an old fool.”

July 12, 2020July 22, 2020

Detours into dystopia

© Polaris Productions / Hawk Films / Warner Bros.

The world is in a dystopian condition at the moment. It’s being ravaged by a deadly virus that’s especially rampant in countries run by authoritarian, anti-science, right-wing clowns like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro (and not forgetting the UK’s own right-wing pipsqueak Boris Johnson). Meanwhile, propelled by manmade climate change, temperatures continue their remorseless rise. Much of Australia was in flames at the start of this year while the recent record-breaking heat in the Arctic Circle indicates that ecological catastrophe could be bearing down on us rather sooner than we’d expected.

I feel glad that I’m a big fan of dystopian fiction. I’ve read so many books set in dystopian futures over the decades that now, when I actually find myself living in the dystopia of 2020, I don’t feel in the least bit surprised. None of this came as a nasty shock for me.

I’ve also been thinking about dystopian fiction recently because I’m currently halfway through Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994), which as its title suggests takes place in an authoritarian society where memory itself is policed. Gradually, everyday items like flowers, perfume and photographs are deleted physically, from people’s everyday existences, and mentally, from their memories. As the world loses its precious details and becomes drabber and greyer, the body enforcing these deletions, the Memory Police of the title, becomes ever-more oppressive. I don’t know if Ogawa will manage to keep this premise interesting for the novel’s full 274 pages, but so far I’ve been impressed.

I’ve thought about it too because of the death last month of French author Jean Raspail, known for his apocalyptic novel The Camp of the Saints (1973). I haven’t read Camp and don’t intend to, because from all accounts it’s the nightmare fantasy of an ultra-right-wing, ultra-Catholic, ultra-privileged white French male and is a bucket of racist slime. Let me quote from its synopsis on Wikipedia. Camp depicts France being swamped by a tidal wave of immigrants from India, who have names like ‘the turd eater’, have ‘monstrously deformed’ children, indulge in public fornication, are ‘filthy’ and ‘brutish’ and ‘flout laws, do not produce and murder French citizens’. They’re aided and abetted in their takeover of France by lefty aid workers, journalists, politicians, ‘charities, rock stars and major churches’. Needless to say, the book is much admired by the likes of Steve Bannon and Marine Le Pen. I only hope that, before he croaked, Raspail took a look at the rankings of the world’s strongest economies. Because he would find that India, source of his racistly sub-human bogeymen in Camp, is now in fifth place, which is two places above his precious France. Maybe one day an Indian author will write a reply to Camp, in which an affluent India is invaded by hordes of starving, third-world Frenchmen.

Anyway, all this has set me thinking. If I had to name my favourite dystopian novels, what would they be?

© Penguin Books

I’d better start by defining my terms. By dystopian fiction I mean a story set in a society that’s gone seriously off the rails, either because of hellish political oppression of some sort, or because of a natural or man-made cataclysm that’s turned life into a scramble for survival. It has to be set at least a little way into the future, not in the present. And there’s the issue of location. The horribleness described in a proper dystopian story, for me, has to be widespread, if not global. Therefore, books like William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954) or J.G. Ballard’s High Rise (1975), where the societal breakdown takes place respectively on an island and in a tower block, don’t qualify because they’re too localised in scale.

I will also disqualify novels where the setting for the story is pretty grim, but that’s all the dystopian element is – a setting, a backdrop against which the plot takes place. We gets glimpses of bad stuff in the background, but we’re more interested in the narrative and in the psychology of the characters. So for that reason I will exclude William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). In a proper dystopian story, the world is in an awful state and that state has to be at the forefront, so vivid that it becomes an important character itself in the story, if not the most important character.

And I will leave out novels where, yes, present-day society has met its nemesis and collapsed, presumably bloodily and destructively, but where the narratives take place so far in the future that they feel like fantasy or fairy stories. The settings are so distant and fantastical that there’s little or no link with our own world, and the reader isn’t disturbed by the thought of what happened to civilisation between now and then. So that means H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (1962) are both out.

I’ve seen lists of dystopian novels that include ones set in alternative universes, like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). But I’m excluding them too because, for me, a properly effective dystopian novel has to take place in a universe that’s recognisably our own one. The thought, “This could happen to me or to my children, grandchildren or descendants” has to be prominent in the reader’s mind.

Finally, I’ve left out Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017) because, although it’s set in a future New York that’s largely underwater thanks to global warming, and although it impressed me with its scale and ambition, I found it a bit too hopeful to qualify. To hit the required nerve, dystopian fiction has to be depressing and pessimistic. There’s no room on my list for nice dystopian fiction. Sorry, Kim.

© Vintage Books

Right. I’ve just disqualified nine or ten commonly cited classics of dystopian fiction. Is there anything left to go on my list? Well, actually, there is. I’d have liked to present an alliteration-friendly number of titles, such as a ‘top ten’ or a ‘dystopian dozen’ or a ‘first fifteen’, but I’ve ended up with sixteen. These are:

Greybeard (1964) by Brian Aldiss.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood.

Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood.

The Drowned World by (1962) J.G. Ballard.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury.

A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess.

The Death of Grass (1956) by John Christopher.

Make Room! Make Room! (1966) by Harry Harrison.

Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley.

Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) by Doris Lessing

The Iron Heel (1907) by Jack London.

I am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson.

The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy.

1984 (1949) by George Orwell.

Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) by Christopher Priest.

Day of the Triffids by (1951) John Wyndham.

A few books that are regarded as classics of dystopian writing aren’t on the list because, simply, I haven’t read them yet. They include P.D. James’s Children of Men (1992), about a near-future world where mass sterility means that no children are being born and society is destabilising as the population ages. A similarly-themed book is on the list, though, Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard, which takes the scenario further and imagines a future England where nobody is under 50, nature is quickly wiping out traces of human civilisation and the oldsters are finding it increasingly hard to distinguish reality from senility-induced fantasy. Actually, the sci-fi writer Adam Roberts, who wrote the introduction to my copy of Greybeard, reckons it’s a better novel than the more acclaimed Children of Men.

Some of my inclusions are predictable – Orwell, Huxley, Burgess, McCarthy. Meanwhile, Margaret Atwood is the only person on the list with two entries, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, so Madge is officially the Queen of Dystopian Literature as far as I’m concerned. I was tempted to include a couple of J.G. Ballard’s other works like The Drought (1964) and The Crystal World (1966), but I opted for The Drowned World because it’s the first and most famous of his surreal, psychological and hallucinogenic novels set during or after a global catastrophe. And irrespective of their individual merits, The Drought and The Crystal World do feel like variations on a Ballardian theme. Whereas with Atwood, the nastily patriarchal and reactionary society envisioned in The Handmaid’s Tale and the ecological disaster zone described in Oryx and Crake are two very different creations.

Many people would argue that Richard Matheson’s I am Legend is actually a horror novel, a vampire one, but the apocalyptic plague Matheson describes is given a scientific rationale; so it could happen, just about. It was also a massive influence on George A. Romero’s zombie movies, which in turn gave rise to the zombie-apocalypse trope that’s now a major sub-genre of dystopian fiction, TV and cinema.

Nowadays it’s fashionable to knock Day of the Triffids because of the middle-class cosiness of its characters. Their personalities manage to remain decent, upstanding and Radio 4-ish even after 99% of the population have been blinded and giant, mobile, flesh-eating plants have invaded the streets. And even some of Wyndham’s admirers might argue that The Chrysalids (1955) and The Kraken Wakes (1953), both of which feature dystopias of their own, are better books. But I think Day of the Triffids deserves its place in the list because of its impact on popular culture. The word ‘triffid’ has entered the English language. I’ve heard it used to describe everything from a noxious-looking weed growing in somebody’s garden to the state of Helena Bonham Carter’s hair.

On the other hand, I’ve picked John Christopher’s The Death of Grass and Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island because they offer an antidote to Wyndham’s cosiness. Both books have characters who start out as respectable middle-class English types whose personalities undergo a breakdown as violent and frightening as the disasters – a plague that destroys cereal crops in Death, a refugee crisis caused by a limited nuclear war in Fugue – rocking the societies around them.

One novel I feel really deserves its place on the list is Harry Harrison’s disturbing meditation on the dangers of human overpopulation, Make Room! Make Room! It just annoys me when people compare Make Room with its 1973 film version, Soylent Green, and pontificate that the book isn’t as good because it doesn’t have the film’s two big gimmicks. These are a euthanasia clinic, to which the character Sol (Edward G. Robinson in the film) goes when he decides that he can’t handle any more of the world’s ghastliness, and the film’s twist ending when it’s revealed that the mysterious foodstuff Soylent Green, a major component of the future human diet, is… people! (You have to shout it in Charlton Heston’s voice.)

However, as Harrison pointed out, and unbeknownst to the filmmakers, euthanasia clinics and suicide machines are a bit of a cliché in science fiction. (Not so long ago, I read Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, published back in 1895, and it had something called a ‘government lethal chamber’ in it.) And Harrison had researched Make Room meticulously to make its apocalypse seem as realistic as possible, so he knew that the idea of humanity relying on industrialised cannibalism to survive wasn’t feasible. Human beings don’t fatten up quickly and require a lot of feeding and looking after, so as a form of livestock to meet the world’s dietary needs, they’re economically a bad idea. And as this study shows, they’re not even that rich in calories.

On the other hand, one novel that nearly didn’t make my list was Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor because it feels rather dated now. The problem is that the feral kids and gangs of violent youths that populate the novel seem a bit, well, hippy-ish. Sorry, Doris, but when I try to imagine a Mad Max-style dystopia I don’t normally see crowds of hippies running at me with chainsaws. Of course, Memoirs was written in the early 1970s when memories of the Summer of Love, Woodstock, flower power, etc., were still fresh. It’s a pity Lessing didn’t write it a couple of years later, after the much more dystopia-friendly punk rockers had appeared. Still, I like the novel for its psychological depth, with the narrator escaping from the claustrophobic confines of her apartment by concentrating on a wall until she’s able to ‘pass through’ it into an imaginary realm. And considering that dystopian novels are frequently dominated by male characters, it’s good to see one where female characters are at the forefront.

Incidentally, my brother, who works in the building industry, once told me that while he was attending a health-and-safety seminar about the dangers of asbestos, the speaker mentioned Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. He said that in 1953, as a publicity gimmick, the publisher Ballantine produced 200 numbered and signed copies of Fahrenheit 451 that were bound in asbestos. The joke was that in a future society where are books had to be burned, these 200 copies of the novel couldn’t be burned. Obviously, at the time, people were unaware of the links between asbestos and lung cancer.

Now that sounds like a truly dystopian book – one that tells a story about a totalitarian future society whilst having the power to induce a dystopian-style breakdown inside the reader’s body.

This is an updated version of an entry that first appeared on this blog in July 2014.